For more than 100 years, Hull was one of the biggest cities in England never to have boasted a top-flight football club. That finally changed in fairy-tale fashion at Wembley in May 2008, when a terrific volley from 38-year-old local lad Dean Windass took the Tigers to the big time at last. By then, Adam Pearson had already left the club – but you’d struggle to find a City fan who didn’t...

In the late 1920s, Virginia Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, an extended essay based on her assertion that women of the time needed a safe, private space if they were to be able to write. Hers was a feminist argument, of course, a generation and a continent away from the experience of the young Joe Bvumburai – but the principle is pretty much the same. Growing up in the suburbs of Lusaka,...

It’s always a bit of a worry in the back of my mind, ahead of talking to people for this magazine, whether they’ll talk back. The monosyllabic interviewee is the journalist’s worst nightmare. Now, I hasten to add that there really haven’t been many of these as entrepreneurs tend to have the gift of the gab, but I knew I was on solid ground with voiceover artist Liz Drury – a woman who talks for...

One of the many endorsements on Finbarr Dowling’s LinkedIn profile hails him as a “truly inspirational leader who gets the very best out of a team”. His credentials speak for themselves – 30 years working for Siemens around the world on a list of projects as long as your arm – and one of his latest can be seen from miles around. The huge turbine towers made at the Green Port Hull factory, which...

You could think of it as Emma Kinton’s new library – shelves climbing from just above floor level all the way to the ceiling, packed with treats to fire the imagination. But rather than the books that you would normally associate with an accomplished teacher of English, the contents of these shelves are bottles and jars all brimming with the herbs and spices that form part of the curriculum at...