‘When Lot lived in Sodom and Gomorrah,’ Peter wrote in his Second Epistle, ‘he was oppressed and tormented day after day by their lawless deeds.’ Having grown up in...
‘We are certainly living in strange times’ is how Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times begins. Roudinesco’s reader, too, is in for a turbulent and strange...
Anyone who has read the inside pages of Indian newspapers over the past few decades will be familiar with the recurring stories of violent urban crime. Some concern ‘crimes of...
If Barry Cunliffe’s large and magnificent new book has a guiding motto, it is a famous sentence by Fernand Braudel about the Mediterranean, which Cunliffe applies to the whole continent and...
My grandmother lives in sheltered accommodation in the London borough of Lambeth. In the late 1940s she and my grandfather, newly wed, migrated to London from Sligo, a small county town on...
My friend Robbie’s always had a bit of a thing about guns. In a country like South Africa this is difficult to avoid. A murder rate of roughly four hundred a week and a rape every 26...
‘The greatest single truth to declare itself in the wake of 1989,’ J.G.A. Pocock wrote two years afterwards, is that the frontiers of ‘Europe’ towards the east are...
Conjuring up the ghost of his dead friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh asks what things are like in the afterlife. Enkidu tells him it might be better that these truths remain hidden, but he agrees to...
Looking through the photographs I took in Tewkesbury in May, I found two pictures of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester...
Colonial psychiatry wasn’t merely a racist instrument of confinement. These were sophisticated scientists at the top of their profession, and some of them cared about their patients. But the combination...
In the fall of 2002, in the company of a dog named Charlie Chaplin and an architect named Michael Meredith, I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas...
In the courtyard of Steam Baths Number Four, on Astashkina Street in Odessa, there are two marble plaques with bunches of flowers laid on the ground beneath them. The first is engraved with the...
‘The word “clue”,’ Kate Summerscale writes, ‘derives from “clew” meaning a ball of thread or yarn.’ In mid-Victorian England, clues were satisfying...
Nineteenth-century German and British linguists, building on some 18th-century hunches, uncovered the connections between members of a large (and rather dysfunctional) family of languages that...
If you are an Inuit or a hummingbird, you are very unlikely to die of heart disease, suffer from diabetes, or be extremely fat. You are also unlikely to drive a Bentley down the Brompton Road,...
For societies that decide to memorialise victims of persecution (genocides, invasions, civil wars, military dictatorships, police states), notions like deterrence and aversion come quickly into...
What’s that coming over the hill? A white, middle-class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! From Cambridge! Here to boldly go, ‘discovering’, then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult...
Are you enjoying your morning coffee as you read this? Or your evening glass of wine? Did you enjoy watching the match last night? Have you read any good books lately? Oh and by the way, how is...