Picture, if you can, a single person with the talents of Keats, Schubert and Seurat: an inspired poet, a prodigious... | Continue reading
Craig Wright seemed to get more and more frustrated. He both wanted fame and repudiated it, craving the recognition he... | Continue reading
Ursula Le Guin was able to direct a whole array of ‘what if?’ questions against the conventions of children’s... | Continue reading
Can democracy, sovereignty and globalisation be happily combined? What American examples show is that European elites... | Continue reading
That feeling of similar-but-not-quite is present all through the history of our engagement with the Neanderthals: when... | Continue reading
Conspiracists describe epiphanies where they start to see the big picture, the universal meta-conspiracy that ex... | Continue reading
Thin, skimpy dresses left women cold and more susceptible to illness (flu was ‘muslin disease’), perhaps even to... | Continue reading
I am scared of Facebook. The company’s ambition, its ruthlessness, and its lack of a moral compass scare me... | Continue reading
The world is a wild and unlikely place: the giraffe, stranger than the griffin, taller than a tall house, does us the... | Continue reading
For most Haitians, it didn’t matter whether the plantation owner was Black, mixed-race or white; or whether he claimed... | Continue reading
Degas’s notion of success was particular to him. He wanted only artistic success, of which he was the sole judge. But... | Continue reading
Nabokov and I are hardly a match made in heaven – I’m stumped by the most elementary brainteasers, every chess... | Continue reading
Fifteenth-century tracts instructed the imperilled soul to repent, make a good confession and detach from worldly goods... | Continue reading
Certainly one wants at times to shake off this clammy individual, to say: pah, sociopath, case closed, not interesting.... | Continue reading
Before tennis, most sports were enjoyed because they were pleasurable to play, but tennis created space for a new kind... | Continue reading
Two young women, Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita, have been held in judicial custody at a maximum security prison in... | Continue reading
The stories concocted about Mary Toft are a hybrid of science, folklore, fantasy, pornography and satire, drawing on... | Continue reading
The coming together of Cézanne and Pissarro – their common cause, their peaceful coexistence, their rivalry, their... | Continue reading
Whenever a Westerner learns that I’m an only child, the facial expression is a give-away: ‘You must have been... | Continue reading
When you pick a blackberry, you can enjoy it just as someone in Abu Hureyra did a wild plum or cherry 15,000 years ago.... | Continue reading
I still can’t decide whether I’ve retired or just resigned, or am in fact redundant and unemployed. I’m undeniably... | Continue reading
I still can’t decide whether I’ve retired or just resigned, or am in fact redundant and unemployed. I’m undeniably... | Continue reading
It is easy to overlook how loud pre-modern education was. Most of our evidence for more than a thousand years of... | Continue reading
The realm of writing, for Nathalie Sarraute, remained the neutral, the anonymous, the impersonal, expressed as the pre... | Continue reading
Phillips had been waiting for me to arrive for half an hour. He was desperate to talk to someone, even if that person... | Continue reading
‘It’s ominous,’ a colleague at a post-92 university told me. ‘Some smaller, newer universities may go bust. This... | Continue reading
A substantially reduced chance of death for patients in intensive care is good news of a sort, but isn’t going to make... | Continue reading
One has to wonder whether the advocates of a new Cold War have taken the measure of the challenge posed by 21st-century... | Continue reading
The Vikings, for all their strange customs and unknowable psychology, were more like us than we might like to admit. But... | Continue reading
Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing... | Continue reading
It’s hard not to enjoy London Visitors as a parody of the London art world’s thinly veiled contempt for Tissot –... | Continue reading
There was very often a scientific purpose to the collecting – it’s always good to find new species – but there is... | Continue reading
The future flashed before my eyes in all its pre-ordained banality... | Continue reading
One has to wonder whether the advocates of a new Cold War have taken the measure of the challenge posed by 21st-century... | Continue reading
Churchill ran into the kitchen during an air raid and told her to get into the shelter, but Landemare, who was making a... | Continue reading
The men and women of the Middle Ages may have had a greater aversion to unpleasant body odours than their descendants do... | Continue reading
The escalating warning signs – that absolute cultural power provincialises, if not corrupts, by deepening ignorance... | Continue reading
The men and women of the Middle Ages may have had a greater aversion to unpleasant body odours than their descendants do... | Continue reading