Candy Opera

As Candy Opera release their debut album after 35 years in the wilderness, Neil Cooper talks about life in the 1980s with Liverpool’s great lost band

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Buffalo stance

The End of the Game has been picked up by BBC World, injecting more irony into this fascinating portrait of an ageing hunter out to bag his final trophy, writes Hugo Fluendy 

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Decades

Joy Division were on the cusp of mainstream success forty years ago. Neil Cooper looks at how they conquered the world

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Dark horse

As Bojack Horseman heads for the knackers’ yard, Stephanie Provan salutes the show’s defiant demands on its audience

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History Maker

Alistair Braidwood who worked as a secretary for Alasdair Gray, and was an editor on ‘Of Me & Others’, pays tribute to a brilliant, kind and peerless polymath

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Picture this

Hollywood still uses women as adornments, but 2019 saw a raft of believable female characters light up our screens, writes Stephanie Provan

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De Palma

A new documentary examines the work of one of the most influential players in modern US cinema, writes Robert Gallacher

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Hope and despair

Nicotine

The highly lauded Nell Zink is one of many US writers considering the challenges of activism today, but her work lacks one vital element, writes Sibylla Kalid

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Lost girls

sal video

Author Mick Kitson tells Sibylla Archdale Khalid how he conjured Sal, one of the most compelling literary characters of 2018

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Rip it up

Scotland has a richly diverse and inventive musical history from Lonnie Donegan to Young Fathers. Test your Scottish pop knowledge in our quiz

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World Book Trip

Orbitor, Cartarescu

If you could only recommend one novel from your country, which would it be? Ana Iliescu salutes Mircea Cartarescu’s Orbitor, a triumph of Romanian literature

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Another News Story

A moving documentary turns the camera on itself to examine the relationship between corporate media and the human tragedy on which it feeds. By Tamara Abdi

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Meeting Jim

A new documentary about a key character in the story of the Edinburgh Festival gets lost in plodding self-importance, writes Victor Eaves

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Testing times

Against international evidence about its negative effect, the Scottish government has introduced testing throughout the education system, beginning at Primary 1. Sue Palmer sets ministers their own test

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Mister Malcontent

Bill Hicks has been derided as an anti-corporate fanatic, UFO devotee and gun fetishist. But what he would really have hated is being described as the lost saviour of stand-up, writes Allan Brown

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She Punks

Sam Knee talks to Neil Cooper about Untypical Girls, his new book about pioneering all-female bands from post punk to riot grrrl

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Denise Johnson

Ahead of two Scottish dates, velvet-voiced soul singer Denise Johnson talks to Neil Coooper about her new album of acoustic covers of Manchester bands

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Silent Spring

Book of Joan

Set in a near-future Earth devastated by global warming, The Book of Joan is a rare attempt to deal with a colossal issue. Sybilla Archdale Kalid on why climate change can’t be contained in modern literature

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Lux Lives!

Nine years since he left the party, an exuberant annual celebration of the Cramps’ colourful frontman is still in full swing, writes Paul Robinson

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A big big love

Photos by Jonathan Furmanski

They may be ambivalent to one another, but the Pixies’ music is still adored as the documentary charting their reunion reveals. By Alastair McKay

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History repeats

Did the former Stoke MP lift sections of a long ago OU book for his 2004 historical tome? One of the original authors Chris Harvie finds it oddly familiar

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High Times

The creators of Britain’s first counter cultural paper talk to Neil Cooper about their new visual catalogue of the ’60s radical underground press

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