“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.” ...

Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland from the 1690s to the 1730s, could supposedly bend a horseshoe with ...

In the past Michael Longley has been sceptical about his Selected Poems. In an interview with Peter McDonald in 1998 he ...

Editors and writers join Lucy Dallas and Alex Clark to talk through the week's issue. Subscribe for free via iTunes, Spotify and other podcast platforms ...

Darwin’s finches and Schrödinger’s cat, Newtonian alchemy and quantum entanglement, heatwaves and icecaps, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing and Larry Page: reviewing the latest books, our critics discuss the ...

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.

The Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita: ancient Indian texts that challenge Western categories, yet influenced the course of ...

What’s the purpose of philosophy? Alfred North Whitehead characterized it as a series of footnotes to Plato. You can see his point. On the surface, we don’t seem to have progressed much in the two and ...

In that interlude between 1933 and 1941, when not much was going on in the world, “unquestionably the nastiest looking bit of work that ever dropped on to a breakfast table”, in the words of its ...