One of the only ways for foreign correspondents to get into Mali now is to rely on the services of human smugglers, as ...

The world has been Surrealist for a hundred years, though the adjective that people turn to in trying to describe ...

Music critic Ian Penman is back with a pioneering book of essays alluding to a lost moment in musical history ‘when cultures collided and a cross-generational and “cross-colour” awareness was born’.

In the preface to the Decameron Boccaccio describes Florentine society laid waste by bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. But before he gets to that he has a confession for the reader: he has been ...

In November 2022, archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Philadelphia, two hours south of Cairo, discovered a clump of papyri in a shallow grave. On one of them were written nearly a hundred ...

The Archbishop of Canterbury announced his resignation last month, five days after the publication of an ...

Children’s fiction has its own peculiar power: like a swordstick in an umbrella, it can flash sharp at unexpected moments. Taken seriously, it can work not just to educate but to transform and ...

Jefferson Hope’s condition seems similar to the one that threatens the unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, ...

Ionce witnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered ...

It was noisy in Harry H. Tombs Ltd, the New Zealand print shop where I served a small part of an apprenticeship that would have made me a compositor.* I worked upstairs in the composing room where the ...

In the early stages of the Covid pandemic, Captain Tom Moore decided to try to raise £1000 for the NHS by walking up and down ...