Karine Polwart

It's hard to conceive in the polite British Folk Scene of 2009 that being a folk singer could ever have been considered a radical and dangerous pursuit. But in the Chile of the late 1960s and early 19...

Ah ... lured you in eh? Been watching it too? Hoping we can extract together some meaningful observations upon modern Europe as a result? Let's see. Israel's entry is a duet between a beautiful young ...

I hang my head in shame and confess (as I've confessed before):I watch American Idol.Every week. Now I can't be bothered with Pop Idol and its lame British corporate equivalents. But there's something...

For Charles Darwin, who sat with his 10 year old daughter Annie in the days before her death after a long period of illness in 185l, an event which, painfully, cemented his views on the cruel struggle...

Shortly after Jenny-The-Orang-utan first arrived at London Zoo in 1837, causing her most eminent possible visitor, Queen Victoria, to exclaim that she was “most painfully and disagreeably human”, Char...

When I was twenty-one, the shrunken body of my lovely Grampa Peter Quinn finally gave out for good. The evening before his funeral, a friend dropped through my letterbox a tape called “Handful of Ear...

Well a serious unexpected dose of English snow meant me and my fella Mattie didn't make it down to London for the annual UK folky party fest that is the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Instead Mattie cooked ...

I live just outside a village of around 1000 people or so. On December 30th, our local music collective (which I'm part of) hosted a family ceilidh for a few hours in the afternoon. The house band inc...

1.The first voice has an almost giggle in it, as it always has. A nervous flutter sounding like it might have done when it was breaking firstforty years ago and more.Bewildered. And in between.It doe...