A hotel serves as a site for discreet abortions.

A young British man was drawn to a white-supremacist group, until they started plotting to kill.

A secretive hedge fund used the British court system to punish an IP thief‚ even though he was already in jail.

On returning to Britain, which is no longer home.

The story of a national obsession.

A teenager in a dreary suburb of Paris live-streams her own suicide—and acquires a morbid kind of digital celebrity.

How sunken treasure and a sibling rivalry led Charles and John Deane to invent modern deep-sea diving.

“‘I’m going to devote myself full time to securing and then winning a referendum on leaving the EU,’ Daniel Hannan replied. The aide laughed down the line. ‘Good luck with that.’”

“If I had to pick one sentence I’ve heard more than any other in the last six years of conversation about economics, it would be ‘Why aren’t people more angry?’ The Brexit vote showed that plenty of them are. But perhaps it expressed that other feeling, the one of bewilderment, just as much. ‘Take back control’ is a cynical but extremely astute pitch to an electorate in that state of mind.”

In bleak farmlands of East Anglia, the first wave of Eastern European migrants learned exploitation and extortion from their own experiences with day labor. Then they began to prey on fellow immigrants, luring in them into debt and then forcing them to commit crimes to pay it off.

A sad harmony of tourists and local English legends.

Why do all those rugged coastlines, moors and stone buildings make England seem haunted?

Coastal erosion is leading more than a few Britons to watch their homes crumble into the sea.

Tracing the steps of migrants from the Middle East and Africa to the Kent countryside.

On systemic corrpution in the upper house of British Parliament, where lawmakers have the freedom to work for any business—banks, oil companies, Facebook—willing to pay for their “expertise.”

A day in the life of a child in 1960s England.

"Carrie’s father was studying, in the evenings and on weekends, for a degree in politics, but on the day of a party he had to leave his books and submit to the different laws of the female domain, obeying the instructions that his wife rapped out, vacuuming and tidying, setting up the drinks tray. She followed impatiently after him, because he had no feeling for arranging the cushions or the flowers; he thought these things were not worth having a feeling for. The children exchanged sly looks and jokes with their father behind their mother’s back, conspiring against her remorselessness. But as soon as the guests arrived she relaxed into smiles, as if that other, sterner self had never existed."

In 1984, Jacqui met Bob Lambert at an animal-rights protest. They fell in love, had a son. Then Bob disappeared. It would take 25 years for Jacqui to learn that he had been working undercover.

Workers and diners in a British cafe experience a small act of weather-related magic.

"None of the others notice Tommy pull up a chair and seat himself next to the counter, his eyes level with the cup. The furious churn of the storm grips him. He hears a hurried tinkling as tiny fists of hail sugar the bottom of the cup. For the first time in years he does not think of Alice. The storm’s rumble elongates, thunder and lightening overlapping. A tinny crescendo rattles inside the ceramic shelter of the cup."

Searching for a mysterious whirpool on an obscure map.

On literary tourism:

Dickens World, in other words, sounded less like a viable business than it did a mockumentary, or a George Saunders short story, or the thought experiment of a radical Marxist seeking to expose the terminal bankruptcy at the heart of consumerism. And yet it was real.

A group of scientists started tracking thousands of British children born during one cold March week in 1946. Those children are now 65 and the data generated through careful tracking of their life history has become extremely valuable.

In 2006, seven men stole £53m. Six were caught, but more than half the money remains at large. On modern money laundering best practices.

Why did a veteran BBC on-air personality confess on camera to a mercy killing he did not commit?

In the British sport of “ferret legging,” underwear-less competitors tie their trousers at the ankles, stuff a pair of the carnivores down there, and hold on for as long as possible. Reg Mellor is the world’s best.

Kevin Fulton, a spy planted in the IRA, thought he was dead when he faced interrogation by a notorious IRA enforcer. But, it turned out, the enforcer was also an agent. How British intelligence undermined the IRA.