“Only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind”, W. B. Yeats wrote in 1927; “sex and the dead.” ...

Lays heaven at its feet, hell at its head, Its smiling face inverted into frown.

In March this year the International Union of Geological Sciences, the body tasked with defining Earth’s geological timeframe, made a shock decision. It rejected the proposal that since 1952 we have ...

Forty-one-year-old Police Constable Trevor Lock was at his usual post, guarding the Iranian embassy in London, on the morning of April 30, 1980. At 11.36 he noticed a young man whom he took to be ...

The Norwegian novelist Hanne Ørstavik is fairly explicit about the fact that her chief subject is love. Her first novel to be translated into English bore the title Love (2019; Kjærlighet, 1997), and ...

Rob Jackson’s Into the Clear Blue Sky is a fascinating exploration of the atmosphere near and far. It is also a reminder that we’re not making much progress towards a future based on clean energy.

There is surprisingly little in the quiet Thuringian city of Jena to suggest that just over two centuries ago it was the site of a cultural ferment equal to that of Renaissance Florence or Periclean ...

The French economist Thomas Piketty is best-known for Le Capital au XXIe siècle (2013; Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014) – a study intimidating in length (704 pages, with an audio version ...

Liliana Corobca is a historian of communism in eastern Europe (she carries out archival work on subjects including censorship, book banning, mass deportations and labour camps), and she moonlights as ...

Fathers and Fugitives is a strange and beautiful book that unfolds unexpectedly. It is a gloomy book, too, suffused with a quality the writer Jan Morris once saw in S. J. Naudé’s fellow South African ...

“I am stymied as to what sort of book I am going to produce”, writes Alexei Navalny on October 21, 2021, after nine months of pre-trial detention. As he feared, Patriot – a memoir that begins as a ...