The week’s best longer reads
Welcome your weekly mobile equivalent of the Sunday supplements, all in one place (minus a crossword, next time we’ll put in a crossword).
First on the list this week is a fascinating look at the way we view women who are convicted of a violent crime, written by the woman who represented Myra Hindley.
“Hindley was and remains the embodiment of all that is unnatural in women. Yet, if you ask people under 50 what she actually did, they are uncertain.”
Next, to Serbia 1916, where a British soldier lay injured. Six months later Private Sandes rejoined the Serbian army at the front line, and was awarded Serbia’s highest military honour. She was a woman. Here is the story about how a British woman ended up fighting with the Serbian army.
Private Sandes’s first name was Flora. She was the only British woman to serve in uniform, in combat, as an enlisted soldier in World War One.
She wore a dress made of meat and ‘hatched’ from a giant egg at the Grammy awards, but now Lady Gaga’s latest reincarnation is Ally, the unassuming lead in a remake of the 1937 film, A Star Is Born. It’s the singer’s first leading role in a feature film. She talks to the New York Times.
Instead, she just smiled enigmatically. “Oh,” she sighed. “I’m just shape-shifting again.”
In a week that members of Russia’s GRU military intelligence were accused of an attempt to hack into a chemical weapons facility, this next long read seems particularly pertinent. Here, a biographer of a notorious Cold War double agent, Oleg Gordievsky, takes a reporter on a tour of London’s spying history — including a very important piece of chewing gum.
Gordievsky left the money concealed in a hollow brick inside a plastic bag near the children’s playground in Coram’s Fields. Conveniently, the location meant he could take his daughters with him to play on the swings (“MI6 had by that point become a rather good equal opportunities employer,” says Macintyre).
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