PP Arnold: ‘Rod Stewart and I had a close call with the law in the 60s. A nosy landlord let the police into my flat’
The singer on escaping an abusive teen marriage, a great snog with Mick Jagger, and rotten eggs
February 2023
Talking posh still pays – that’s why Boris Johnson is rolling in it
Emma Beddington
The former PM’s high earnings have been partly attributed to the way he speaks. But I’ll take Bill Paterson or Maya Angelou’s sonorous tones over the voice of privilege any day, writes Emma Beddington
January 2023
Joan Didion to David Hockney: facing up to the art stars – in pictures
A new exhibition features bracing, intimate portraits of compelling cultural figures by Brigitte Lacombe, Catherine Opie and Tacita Dean
January 2022
Maya Angelou becomes first Black woman to appear on a US quarter
US treasury secretary says the writer and civil rights campaigner’s appearance on the coin represents ‘what we value, and how we’ve progressed as a society’
March 2021
'Sexism stands at the door': 11 female film-makers written out of mainstream Hollywood history
Maya Angelou and Jean Seberg were just some of the women who faced everything from racism and sexism to transphobia, yet produced some of cinema’s most defining pictures
January 2021
Amanda Gorman at Biden's inauguration reminded me: politics needs poetry
Maya Angelou Barbie doll launched in US
September 2020
Further reading
When comfort reading won't cut it: books to restore hope in humanity
From Man’s Search for Meaning to a celebration of life in the face of death, Cathy Rentzenbrinkpicks the books that confirm her faith in people
July 2020
Books that made me
George Alagiah: 'Steinbeck taught me the power of words'
The television presenter and author on Graham Greene, Germaine Greer and reading poetry during chemotherapy
May 2020
Alaskan school board lifts ban on Gatsby and Catch-22 after protests
The Matanuska-Susitna borough in Palmer restores modern classics by authors including F Scott Fitzgerald and Joseph Heller to curriculum after community action
April 2020
Free food and $100 prizes: Alaskans rally to get challenged classics to students
After school board in Alaska pulls books by authors including F Scott Fitzgerald from the curriculum, local businesses are working to encourage reading them
August 2019
Frozen in time
Frozen in time: Maya Angelou cooks for Toni Morrison, September 1994
To honour the author’s Nobel prize for literature, Angelou hosts a feast for 150 in her Winston-Salem home
July 2019
‘Like air, I’ll rise': Ilhan Omar and others on words to conquer hate
Inspired by Omar, the Guardian and Pen America asked writers to share inspiring lines from poems about overcoming hate – and readers to submit theirs
March 2019
Back pages
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou – archive, 1 April 1984
From Ayòbámi Adébáyò to Zadie Smith: meet the New Daughters of Africa
August 2018
Brief letters
Fair trade cocaine wouldn’t delight dealers
Brief letters: Middle-class cocaine use | Black photographers in Vogue | Maya Angelou and Rudyard Kipling | The Silk Roads | Whale-dolphin hybrid
July 2018
Even Rudyard Kipling felt iffy about If
Letters: thoughts from John Anzani, Richard Maidment and Mike Wright following the decision to erase Rudyard Kipling’s poem, If, from a display at the University of Manchester
June 2018
Maya Angelou and me: adapting her memoirs brought me eye to eye with an icon
She lived a sensational life – but it was her assumption of her equality that made Maya Angelou radical, as I rediscovered when turning I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings into radio drama
September 2017
'Plagiarists never do it once': meet the sleuth tracking down the poetry cheats
Ira Lightman is a man on a mission: to root out plagiarism in poetry. And his latest case is the most shameless yet
June 2017
From Heaney’s poetry to Rushdie’s surprise appearance: inside Hay’s 30-year archive
As the Hay festival prepares to donate its records to the British Library, the Observer is given exclusive access to the documents that chart its rise
