“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 ...

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 ...

Tucked away in the medieval manuscripts of the works of Lucian, the scintillating Greco-Syrian satirist of the second century AD, is a dialogue entitled Loves. Two friends with different sexual ...

The majority of the Catalan novelist Mercè Rodoreda’s adult life was lived in exile. Born in Barcelona in 1908, she fled Spain when that city fell to Franco’s Nationalist troops in 1939 (having made ...

Liliana Corobca is a historian of communism in eastern Europe (she carries out archival work on subjects including censorship, book banning, mass deportations and labour camps), and she moonlights as ...