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

It was noisy in Harry H. Tombs Ltd, the New Zealand print shop where I served a small part of an apprenticeship that would have made me a compositor.* I worked upstairs in the composing room where the ...

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 ...

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

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

One of the only ways for foreign correspondents to get into Mali now is to rely on the services of human smugglers, as ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

The world has been Surrealist for a hundred years, though the adjective that people turn to in trying to describe ...

Children’s fiction has its own peculiar power: like a swordstick in an umbrella, it can flash sharp at unexpected moments. Taken seriously, it can work not just to educate but to transform and ...