I did a big lecture (big for me, anyway) at the Leon Levy Center for Biography. It was in a way Daniel in the lions' den, for ...

Three years before he vowed, in “Carrion Comfort”, not to feast on despair, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins grieved the physical decay of growing old: “And ...

The fourteenth century was a time of ecological disasters: plagues, storms, floods, earthquakes, droughts and famines. It was also, as Shannon Gayk notes, a time of “theological and literary ...

The results of the Oscar Wilde Society’s Wilde Wit competition are in. This much we gather from the new issue of Intentions, the society’s newsletter. The challenge was to come up with a quip worthy ...

431pp. Chatto and Windus. £18.99.

In The Five (2019), Hallie Rubenhold examined the lives of the victims of Jack the Ripper, women until then remembered only because of the man who murdered them. In her latest book, she turns her ...

“Our romantic affair with the automobile has cooled”, writes Witold Rybczynski in this brisk, informative history of automotive design. What was once passionate – an infatuation that also seemed an ...

After On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, scientists, theologians and novelists found dozens of ways to respond to Charles Darwin’s scandalous theory. Some, unwilling to relinquish their ...

She’s “a fractal of our country, her biography a variation on its history, a version of the same story”, says Nour of Mouna, his shape-shifting mother, and of his birth country, Egypt. Nour is the ...

A man wearing a dark rollneck sweater and a long coat stands in front of a two-tone door, his brow furrowed and his beard overgrown. Staring into the camera as if for a mugshot, he holds a newspaper ...