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

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 ...

Many TV shows are set in hospitals, but fewer novels, at least ones that take place outside the psychiatric ward. Hospitals make for good drama: the path to diagnosis is a mystery plot with inherent ...

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

One of the only ways for foreign correspondents to get into Mali now is to rely on the services of human smugglers, as I did a few weeks ago. A former journalist turned fixer told me there were ‘no ...

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

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 ...

In November 2022, archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Philadelphia, two hours south of Cairo, discovered a clump of papyri in a shallow grave. On one of them were written nearly a hundred ...

Music critic Ian Penman is back with a pioneering book of essays alluding to a lost moment in musical history ‘when cultures collided and a cross-generational and “cross-colour” awareness was born’.