Issue 1199

04 Sep 2017
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About this issue: Overview

Former snooker world champion Steve Davis has reinvented himself as a DJ, playing everything from prog rock to techno, and talks to us ahead of a set at this week’s Festival No6. It’s the latest chapter, his fans will recognise, in a very interesting life.

The Cod Wars were hardly the greatest conflict in European history but when trawlers from Hull went up against Icelandic gunboats in the early 1970s the repercussions hit the fishing industry hard, threatened the Nato alliance and even have echoes in Brexit. We interview some of the Hull trawlermen involved.

Author Hugh Thompson deployed an overweight mule for the slow trek across England that inspired his new book. With plenty of time to talk to locals, he writes for us about the realities of life in the rural north – and it’s not a pastoral idyll.

Carbon capture plants might allow us to remove the harmful CO2 that comes from burning coal, and protect jobs across the north. On our news pages we report on renewed calls to fund the development of the controversial technology – and the assertion by environmentalists that carbon capture is a distraction from the need to end the use of fossil fuels.

Elsewhere in the mag, we have an interview with Booker Prize-nominated author Kamila Shamsie, the BBC’s world affairs editor John Simpson writes a revealing letter to his younger self, there’s our crossword and Sudoku – and much more.