Feb 12How amnesia made Neighbours forget itselfThe year is 1988: Margaret Thatcher has become the UK’s longest-serving 20th-century prime minister; Prince Charles has narrowly avoided death-by-avalanche w...
Jan 31Umrao Jaan Ada's tale of courtesans and toxic men makes an unempowering musicalEven by the standards of Bollywood sagas, Umrao Jaan is complex and melodramatic. It is based on what is considered the first Urdu novel, Umrao Jaan Ada (189...
Dec 24, 2019My mother was dying – but my best friend brought happiness to a brutally sad dayThe year 2012 had been a long and difficult one. One of three, in fact. It had been three years since my mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer and, ever sin...
Nov 18, 2019Treating mental health with an app: Chips with Everything podcastI spoke on the Guardian's flagship technology podcast, Chips with Everything, about the growing market in digital therapy apps. You can listen to the podcast...
Jul 28, 2019'So flawed and problematic': why the term 'world music' is deadAsk most musicians what genre they play and you’ll likely get a prickly response. As one well-known, and slightly tipsy, jazz musician once told me: “If you ...
Apr 13, 2019I’ll never see Mum again. But I’ve learned to live with Mother’s DayI can’t remember the last Mother’s Day I spent with my mum. It would have been in 2013, since in August of that year she died, but the day itself is lost in ...
Jan 14, 2019Why are we so obsessed with young, successful people like Sally Rooney?When 27-year-old novelist Sally Rooney became the youngest-ever winner of the Costa Book Prize last week, it was to deafening cheers of critical acclaim that...
