Since the deplorably premature death of W G Sebald in a road accident in 2001, Jo Catling, a former colleague of his at the University of East Anglia, has been among the most dedicated keepers of his ...

There was a time when commodity histories were everywhere. They tended to focus on consumption and trade over very long distances. Ulbe Bosma’s The World of Sugar is much more than this sort of book.

Looking at the triumphs and turpitude of the modern world, the temptation is always to seek someone responsible. In 1900, succumbing to that temptation, Mark Twain pointed to the 15th-century German ...

One hundred years ago, Karel Capek’s play R U R: Rossum’s Universal Robots debuted in Czechoslovakia. It went on to become an international sensation, with runs everywhere from Austria to Japan to the ...

Tolerance does not come naturally to humankind. For most of recorded history, what people believed about the natural world, about government and society or about the moral code was laid down by ...

As Dorothy Rowe’s classic study My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend explains, sibling relationships – invariably intense, often fraught – are among the most underexamined of familial connections.

Like many who work in secret intelligence services, Vladimir Putin was heavily influenced by spy fiction. His imagination was coloured by novels and films, and he spoke of his amazement that ‘one ...

The days when LSD made headlines as ‘The Most Dangerous Thing Since the Atom Bomb’ are long gone; now we’re in a ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’, with Prince Harry drinking ayahuasca tea and Mike Tyson ...

There is a charming naivety to Noo Saro-Wiwa’s travelogue. Focused primarily on trying to capture the experiences of Africans living in China, it becomes a tourist adventure through the country, the ...

In June 1941 I happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis. Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas-chambers were being built and the ...

Nigel Biggar retired a few months ago from the Regius Professorship of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford. He is a notable figure in the world of moral philosophy, not only because of his ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...