EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
For the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
Paul Whelan was in a hotel in Moscow getting ready for a wedding when intelligence officers burst in and took him out of the building. He was then charged with espionage. But what was going on?
(BBC, approx 18 mins reading time)
Paul Whelan would be brought for multiple custody hearings and appeals over the months and we squeezed in almost every time. Although we were only allowed to attend for the opening remarks, we managed to snatch several conversations with him. That first day, though – in a cage, with a dozen cameras trained on him – he looked tense and spoke little. Almost two months had passed since his arrest, and he said he was coping “fine”. But when I asked for his side of the story, his eyes flicked towards the guards. “If I do that, I’ll be in a bad way,” Whelan told me, warily. “They don’t want me to speak with you.”
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