‘I did not let Kim Philby go. He gave me the slip’: what an MI6 spy told me over lunch
A new TV series highlights the part played by the UK intelligence service’s Nicholas Elliott in unmasking the 1960s Cambridge spy ring – events he recalled years later over lunch at his club
November 2017
Peter Preston on press and broadcasting
Reading Donald Trelford’s history of a public friend and companion
Peter Preston
The former Observer editor’s book tells how newspapers have an existence of their own – and sometimes their lives need saving
Read all about it: the history that made the Observer’s front page
After 150 years of greeting the world with adverts, wartime newsprint rations and a new editor changed the paper’s format – it would never look the same again • Click here for more on the Observer at 225
March 2016
David Astor: transformative Observer editor and founder of Amnesty International
David Astor: transformative Observer editor and founder of Amnesty International
February 2016
David Astor by Jeremy Lewis review – definitive life of a Fleet Street great
A fine biography of the privileged amateur who gave the Observer its journalistic DNA in the postwar era
Why my father David Astor was right to campaign for Myra Hindley
David Astor’s support of the Moors murderer fits in with his lifetime of fighting injustice
Book of the day
David Astor by Jeremy Lewis – review
David Astor: a king in the golden age of print
David Astor and psychoanalysis: how the personal became political
November 2015
Archive teaching resource
The Observer Foreign News Service
This month’s teaching resource from the GNM Archive focuses on the long running Observer Foreign News Service, exploring its contribution to the coverage of world affairs by the press in the period after the second world war and beyond
October 2014
Other lives
Brian Bell obituary
Other lives: Deputy editor of the Observer Magazine who made great use of colour photography
March 2014
Jane Bown: 'I was born the wrong side of the blanket. On the kitchen floor'
On the eve of the release of a film celebrating her life, Jane Bown, the Observer's veteran photographer, reflects on her glittering career and her troubled early years. By Tim Adams
December 2013
Without the Observer, and David Astor, Mandela would have hanged
In 1964, when Nelson Mandela and others were facing the death penalty, one newspaper, the Observer, kept the issue before the world's eyes, and effectively saved the ANC leadership
