A LITTLE MORE THAN a year ago, shortly before the start of the 2013 Wimbledon championships, Roger and Mirka Federer took a car from London to the pretty village of Bucklebury, in Berkshire, where they had a lunch appointment with the future king and queen of England. Their hosts were Carole and Michael Middleton, the Duchess[…]
We walked the Avenue, the ancient route along which the stones were first dragged from the River Avon. For centuries, this was the formal path to the great henge, but now the only hint of its existence was an indentation or two in the tall grass. It was a fine English summer’s day, with thin,[…]
A dispatch from the war in the Central African Republic Nobody could tell me the dead man’s name. It was a little after nine on an oven-hot late January morning in the district of Combattants in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. The man had been lynched by a mob only minutes earlier.[…]
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[…]
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[…]
Sebastian Junger believed he knew about war. He had reported on conflict for nearly two decades: in the Balkans, West Africa and Afghanistan. He had been shot at. He had watched soldiers die. With the British photographer Tim Hetherington he had made Restrepo, an Oscar-nominated film about an American platoon’s 15-month deployment in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley,[…]