Susannah Frankel put the Femidom to the test

A leading article on a famous death in Paris

The author Sue Townsend on a lifelong obsession

Julian Clary speaks out about his experience of corporal punishment at the hands (and via the cricket bat) of a teacher

‘The Independent’ has long championed equality. In this column, John Lyttle recalls an experience of homophobia

Polly Toynbee tuned in to the soap opera scandals that were gripping the nation in ‘Brookside’

 

In this personal account, Aung San Suu Kyi reveals why she became so entwined with a nation’s cry for democracy

On the fall of the Berlin Wall

 

Here’s to the next 30 years of The Independent, as well as the last. We’ve come a long way since that first edition, a black-and-white broadsheet, rolled off the presses in the early hours of Tuesday 7 October 1986. Reading again that front page, framed on the wall of our offices, it’s hard to resist the inevitable observation: the world too has changed so much in three decades.

Having gone into hiding after a fatwa on him was declared
by Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of Iran, the author of ‘The Satanic Verses’ broke cover to defend himself
 

Political commentator Peter Jenkins on Geoffrey Howe’s devastating attack on the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher

 

Between half a million and a million Rwandans, mostly from the Tutsi ethnic group, were victims of a mass slaughter

After 25 years of The Troubles, the British and Irish governments finally gave the world reason for hope. It was a moment for David McKittrick to take stock

Five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled the collapse of Soviet domination of eastern Europe, freed peoples were starting to look West 

The name of a previously obscure Bosnian town became synonymous with genocide and the shame of an international community that failed to act