People have been seeing weird things in the sky since the beginning of recorded history, but popular fascination ...

Though he enjoyed a spell as Auden and Isherwood’s ambassador in London, he resented Isherwood’s use of their Berlin years in ...

Tombs Ltd, the New Zealand print shop where I served a small part of an apprenticeship that would have made me a compositor. ...

Daniel Defoe , in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), was unimpressed by the prehistoric remains.

The French word for rape is viol. It signals the violence and violation inherent to the acts it names. Since early September, Dominique Pelicot, a 71-year-old Frenchman, has been on trial in Avignon ...

Jefferson Hope’s condition seems similar to the one that threatens the unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, ...

In Mali, a country currently ruled by a cohort of pro-Russian army officers, the only way a journalist can stay alive or avoid a prison sentence is by practising ‘sunshine journalism’: praising the ...

For Mendoza , the ambitious courtier in John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603), being in favour is ‘delicious heaven’; he is quite ‘drunk’ with it. Walter Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when ...

In the preface to the Decameron Boccaccio describes Florentine society laid waste by bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. But before he gets to that he has a confession for the reader: he has been ...

While normal life must compete with a whole ecosystem, a mirror bacterium might behave like the only real thing in ...