Didion’s essay ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, from 1966, is where readers first met Quintana, in the year she was born. ‘Although I ...

Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are.

Malak Mattar’s monumental 2024 black-and-white painting inspired by Guernica is entitled No Words (… for Gaza).

I thought,’ White wrote in his autobiographical masterpiece The Farewell Symphony (1997), ‘that never had a ...

The earliest known author was married to the moon. In the 1920s, in the shadow of an anti-colonial uprising against British rule in Mesopotamia, the archaeologists Leonard and Katharine Woolley dug up ...

In November 2017 the China Daily ran a story about a Beijing barbecue restaurant called Liuyedao (‘The Lancet’), which was offering a discount to any customer who could show they had recently ...

In his Memoirs of the Plague in Florence, Giovanni Baldinucci described how melancholy it was ‘to see the streets and churches without anybody in them’. As the city fell quiet, ordinary forms of ...

Crossroads, watershed, turning or tipping point, whatever cliché falls just this side of revolution: that’s the way the New York Democratic mayoral primary on 24 June will be remembered decades from ...

Namwali Serpell’s highly accomplished, highly deceptive novel The Furrows starts with the trauma of childhood grief. Its subtitle – ‘An Elegy’ – invokes the literary genre that most strongly addresses ...

When I think about, say, 1995, or whenever the last moment was before most of us were on the internet and had mobile phones, it seems like a hundred years ago. Letters came once a day, predictably, in ...

Any hope we have of containing the escalating climate crisis depends on getting to net zero, which will mean cutting greenhouse gas emissions drastically in the next few decades. Coal, gas and oil ...

Have you ever experienced the love of an animal? Jack, my family’s golden retriever, put on an admirable show of adoring all of us, but we knew his deepest attachment was to my mother, on whose lap he ...