Italy possesses a rich culture. Art, music, food and architecture - the country features near the top spot worldwide for nearly all of these. It’s a pleasant coincidence, then, that these are high up in the list of things most wanted on a good holiday. However, Italy’s embarrassment of riches can also be its Achilles heel. Even scratching the surface of all that Italy has to offer would take more than a month, a luxury most of us cannot afford. So in a country so full of great places to visit, where do you start?... read more

To give you an idea of the scale of our sewer system in the UK, every day we flush nearly 11 million tons of raw sewage down our toilets. This is 77 million tons per week, or 4,004 million tons a year. That is just shy of half a billion tons of raw sewage, just in the UK, channelled through nearly 400,000km of sewer systems. We are clearly a dirty bunch, and it is not exactly something we can decide not to do. Unfortunately, despite having nigh on half a million kilometres of piping lying underground waiting for our outpour, it appears that is still not enough to protect our beaches. read more

During the recent catastrophic global economic collapse (you might have caught it on the news) Iceland almost went bankrupt. In January of this year, the government collapsed due to public dissent over the handling of the financial crisis. A new, left-wing government was formed shortly afterwards, the combined debt of the banks reaching six times that of the country’s gross domestic product, at that time around €14 billion. As of July this year, the interest rate stands at 12%, down from a record 18% at the end of last year. It's been a ... read more

“Yeah, but the book was better.” It’s almost like a mantra, a sort of badge of honour to tell your friends that sure, the movie was OK but you read the book first and the book just happened to be better. Conventional wisdom dictates that anything once removed from its source material is inevitably going to be worse. A photograph of the Mona Lisa is no Mona Lisa, after all. But there are times when the movie is better than the book. It’s rare, but it happens. This is a celebration of those instances when you can thumb your nose at ... read more