“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.” ...

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 ...

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 ...

At first glance the subjects of Elisa Gabbert’s third essay collection, Any Person Is the Only Self, might elicit an eye roll. Another essay about Frankenstein? Gabbert’s sixteen pieces, many ...

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 ...

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 ...

Chawton House, with its extensive gardens and parkland, once belonged to Jane Austen’s brother Edward Knight. He arranged for his sisters and mother to live in a villa nearby (now the Jane Austen’s ...

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.

In that interlude between 1933 and 1941, when not much was going on in the world, “unquestionably the nastiest looking bit of work that ever dropped on to a breakfast table”, in the words of its ...

In the past Michael Longley has been sceptical about his Selected Poems. In an interview with Peter McDonald in 1998 he declared his Poems, 1963–83 “premature”. The process of selection encouraged a ...

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement”, proclaims Mary Oliver (1935–2019) in “When Death Comes”. She was, readers loved her for it, and she surely had more ...