Table of contents for 4/21/2025 in The Big Issue

• From my house, I see a lot of trees. We live on the edge of the city, just before it butts into the country, and the view from the back, over rooftops, is of trees. They climb out from the White Cart river valley, and up over the hill towards Glasgow. Mostly birch, ash and some oak, they signal the seasons. In winter frost sits between them. Sometimes early morning mist rises through them. On dark, quiet summer nights, I can hear owls call from over there. I assume they’re owls. I’ve decided they’re owls. The trees are coming into leaf now. I have no doubt that this view, and its changes, has had a calming impact on me for the years we’ve lived there – the external talking…

The only time I met with the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, it was to discuss replacing ‘handouts’ with ‘hand ups’. We were both interested in such an idea as I explained the paucity of a hand up in current church thinking. The one, the handout that does no more than help you for the hour or the day. The other, the hand up, that could lay the foundation stones of a new life. How do we convert the giving of fish to the teaching of how to fish? It was a truly exciting thing for me to be with the big bloke in Christianity – which has behind it thousands of years of encouraging people to give a bit of what they’ve got to the poor. Although no…

The Great Gatsby was not a first-time hit. When it was published by Scribner’s in 1925, it was generally reviewed positively but often with the caveat that it wasn’t as successful a portrait of the jazz age as F Scott Fitzgerald’s previous two novels – This Side of Paradise in 1920 and The Beautiful and Damned in 1922. Sales were underwhelming. Published in April 1925 – 100 years ago this month – it had sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October. It certainly didn’t make Fitzgerald rich, as he’d hoped that it would, believing it to be his finest work, his first “consciously artistic achievement”. There was a second print run in August 1925, which was to amend six textual errors, rather than cope with demand – poignantly, the second…

At 16, I was already making junior international teams in the cross country. I remember going to a meet in Lisbon and having a brilliant time. It was my first sense that through my running, I could travel the world, visit amazing places and meet great people. As well as starting to see the results from working hard in sport, it was also GCSE year. So I was trying to juggle exams with training. I would get home from school, get my homework done, watch Neighbours, then get to the track. I was pretty organised, but had to be to fit everything in so training wouldn’t be compromised. I structured my time so I would be finished by six o’clock so I could go training. I had the Athena poster…

Seven years feels like a long gap between a movie and its sequel. But it seems appropriate for Den of Thieves 2: Pantera to take the slow road. The original heist thriller was only a medium-sized hit in cinemas, scoring around $80 million (£61m) at the global box office in 2018. It found its enduring fanbase on streaming and Blu-ray in the years after release, joining Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) and Ben Affleck’s The Town (2008) in the blokey canon of endlessly rewatchable cops-and-robbers catnip, their imposingly long running times becoming macho Bubble Bath to luxuriate within. Back in 2018 writer and director Christian Gudegast took some critical knocks for studying the Heat blueprint perhaps a little too closely, pitting a hard-charging cop (Gerard Butler) against a ruthlessly competent bank…

From a receipt for a dog kennel to original manuscripts for some of the most famous British operas in the repertoire, the Britten Pears Arts Archive is packed with curiosities. Central to the collection are nearly 20,000 files comprising composer Benjamin Britten and tenor Peter Pears’s correspondence over the course of their 39-year relationship. Decades on, there are still stories to be discovered about classical music’s tweediest power couple, hidden among the carefully preserved scribbled notes and scrawled reminders. Similarly, at the Beethoven exhibition held at the British Library back in 2021, although the draft for an early symphonic movement in C minor was coveted, it was the great composer’s shopping list – meat, bread, potatoes, mustard, horseradish, wine and rum – that was among the most engaging Beethoveniana. It…

Get in touch The Big Issue, 2nd floor, 43 Bath Street, Glasgow G2 1HW letters@bigissue.com @bigissueuk @bigissue.com @bigissue /bigissueUK @thebigissue Turn off the cap I have just read your article [on the two-child benefit cap, Issue 1662, 14-20 April], and it is one very close to my heart. Our foster-daughter and her partner, who live on the outskirts of Hull, have been together for 14 years. They now have six children, four of whom were born post-2017 and three of whom have additional needs. Neither parent works, partly because of the additional responsibilities of caring for a large family, and partly because Hull is such a deprived area with a huge unemployment problem. So they are dependent on universal credit. There is no food bank within walking distance, and they…

The world of contemporary literature is filled with its own snipes, grievances and discourse, but one thing I am grateful for is that the puritanism that is infecting Hollywood studios has not leaked onto the page. And thanks to Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Awards, literature for the most part now avoids obvious cliches and offers a wide range of erotic perspectives. Sex even features prominently in novels regardless of its narrative importance. Take Brittany Newell’s second novel, Soft Core, for instance. As Ruthie – also known as the stripper Baby, also known as the dominatrix Miss Sunday – volleys from her home to the club and into the dungeon the kink scenes she details satisfy an anthropological curiosity as well as an erotic one, making for a kinetic…

KELVIN GREGORY, 63 I met some of the new Big Issue Ambassadors the other week and it was really, really good, very engaging. I’d met Kwajo (Tweneboa, Big Issue’s Housing Ambassador) before – I did an article with him a couple of years ago. They are very interesting and important people. It’s good to see people who are celebrities coming on board. I love doing that kind of work with Big Issue. For what Big Issue has done for me, I love to give a little bit back through taking part in the events. I like reaching out to people and that interaction with the public, but meeting these people who are coming on board and supporting the magazine, I can give them an insight into what it’s like being…

Imagine a science lesson without Bunsen burners; a maths lesson without calculators. I remember the first time I walked into a music department and realised that it contained no instruments whatsoever. How could the teacher convey the magic and brilliance of music without having the resources to do so? And why does it matter? A creative education is the first step on a pathway out of poverty. Here’s why. A music department can be the ‘rehabilitation unit’ for many kids with challenges that other departments simply fail to engage with. This could be a child who is non-verbal, has ADHD, autism, or emotional/mental health needs, or displays repeated violent behaviour, or is experiencing safeguarding issues and so on. In fact, numerous studies conducted over the last 25 years show us…

It’s sometimes said that we are living through a new Cold War, in which East and West are once again fighting for global supremacy through a series of proxy conflicts, chiefly, in our era, in Ukraine. Cold War II is not wholly the same as Cold War I: mid-20th century China was not the emerging superpower it is now, and Nato back then enjoyed the unwavering support of the White House. Yet similarities abound, not least the importance of psychological warfare and propaganda. Intelligence services now push messages through an array of digital media; back then, the CIA used the very analogue means of books and publishing. First, a little context. For 45 years after WWII, Europe was divided by the most heavily guarded border on earth, the Iron Curtain.…

You know you’re a family of irretrievable nerds when University Challenge is appointment TV every Monday. In fact, admitting that seems a bit shameful – like saying you enjoy dressing as an Arthurian knight at weekends, or solving complex maths problems on a Saturday night. Please don’t beat me up! You can have my Wham bar! In my defence, I am hopeless at it. I sit there with the wind whistling between my ears, commenting on whether I think presenter Amol Rajan has a cold, and being critical of the pathetic mascots. The only time I become animated is when there’s a question about food, pop songs or a painting I might once have studied at art college, in between drinking £1 blue cocktails and trying not to be sick…