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Making money from stolen paintings — particularly famous ones — is not a straightforward matter, and those who try to do so fall broadly into two categories. The first, most common type is the naïf, who steals a painting but has laid few plans beyond the theft itself. He soon discovers that the painting’s notoriety…
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A minute before he died, Hervé le Gallou stood at the edge of a cliff at Obiou, in the French Alps, with acres of thin air before him. The view that morning, June 23, 2012, was breathtaking: moonscape cliff faces, pocked with snow, that gave way to plateaus of pale grass and ashen rock, then…
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Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Junior enters his sitting room, dressed as Tom Wolfe. It’s mid-September in New York City and hot out. Wolfe, who is 81 years old and lean as a racing greyhound, is wearing a chalk-white linen suit and a cerulean-blue shirt, a white pocket handkerchief with navy trim, leather spectator spat boots in…
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How Brother Colm O’Connell became the guru of Kenyan running
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God wants to say a few words. General Ratko Mladic — known by many during the war as “the Butcher of Bosnia”, but who preferred his self-appointed nickname, “God” — is anxious to address the court. This is most irregular. At pre-trial hearings, such as the one now under way in Court 3 of the…
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The murder of a black teenager by a gang of white youths in 1993 was the case that sickened a nation, exposed the racism at the heart of a British institution and shaped the future of the legal system. But it took nearly 20 years and a tiny speck of forensic evidence to bring the…
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When the first call came, Anshul Gupta was dead to the world. It was 7.50am on Tuesday 2 February, 2010. Normally, Gupta would have been showered and suited by this time. He was, and is, a wealthy man with a senior position in a multinational coal-mining firm, and he did not ascend India’s corporate ladder…
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Power is not a sports car, or a thousand dollar suit, or a first-class plane ticket. It’s not a supermodel on your arm, or a 1996 Dom Perignon in your fridge. That’s just money. No, power is walking into a London hotel room at the age of 64, as Steven Spielberg has just done, wearing…
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Sammy Wanjiru lived as he ran: fast. In a country overflowing with talent, he was one of the finest athletes Kenya ever produced – a man who broke world records as a teenager, a serial marathon winner, and an Olympic gold medallist. But it was not just his results that made him special. Kenya has…
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Freedom means something different to Aung San Suu Kyi than it might to you or me. Imagine you had been placed under house arrest for 15 of the last 21 years – would you consider yourself free? How about if, since being released in November last year, you had been placed under constant surveillance, and…
