A revolutionary who critiqued Marx; a Christian who refused baptism; a Jew who held Jewishness in contempt: Simone Weil was a ...

“Only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind”, W. B. Yeats wrote in 1927; “sex and the dead.” ...

In March this year the International Union of Geological Sciences, the body tasked with defining Earth’s geological timeframe, made a shock decision. It rejected the proposal that since 1952 we have ...

The French economist Thomas Piketty is best-known for Le Capital au XXIe siècle (2013; Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 2014) – a study intimidating in length (704 pages, with an audio version ...

At first glance the subjects of Elisa Gabbert’s third essay collection, Any Person Is the Only Self, might elicit an eye roll. Another essay about Frankenstein? Gabbert’s sixteen pieces, many ...

Forty-one-year-old Police Constable Trevor Lock was at his usual post, guarding the Iranian embassy in London, on the morning of April 30, 1980. At 11.36 he noticed a young man whom he took to be ...

Fathers and Fugitives is a strange and beautiful book that unfolds unexpectedly. It is a gloomy book, too, suffused with a quality the writer Jan Morris once saw in S. J. Naudé’s fellow South African ...

Chawton House, with its extensive gardens and parkland, once belonged to Jane Austen’s brother Edward Knight. He arranged for his sisters and mother to live in a villa nearby (now the Jane Austen’s ...

Time of the Child is Niall Williams’s twelfth novel, and his third to explore the fictional Irish village of Faha, located in the rural west where Williams himself, a native Dubliner, has made his ...

Rob Jackson’s Into the Clear Blue Sky is a fascinating exploration of the atmosphere near and far. It is also a reminder that we’re not making much progress towards a future based on clean energy.

In the past Michael Longley has been sceptical about his Selected Poems. In an interview with Peter McDonald in 1998 he declared his Poems, 1963–83 “premature”. The process of selection encouraged a ...