Jacobsen’s hypothetical scenario centres on a genetically modified strain of plague, one of history’s most devastating ...

Ancient Rome was a culture governed by the spoken word and Cicero was the most articulate public speaker Rome ever produced. Furthermore, the Middle Ages were comparatively kind to his legacy and ...

How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England, Lauren Working observes that these indigenous men may well have been recently captured and brought to London. English colonists were patrolling ...

A Bulbous Moon - The Poems of Sylvia Plath by Amanda Golden & Karen V Kukil (eds) ...

Tatar begins with natural history. The dominant theme is industriousness: spiders work for us day and night. They eat some 400 million tons of insects a year. There are between forty and fifty ...

California Dreaming - The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool by James Cahill ...

Many people are unlucky, but few have the ill fortune of Tsutomu Yamaguchi. An engineer with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, he was dispatched to Hiroshima for three months in 1945. On the morning of 6 ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

The Fifties and Sixties saw the last widespread revival of interest in Ronald Firbank. In 1958, Sandy Wilson premiered a musical based on Valmouth (1919; possibly the only novel in which a majority of ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...