Would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live?

I never thought I would see this opera again. ‘Rule Britannia!’ peals, the curtain parts, and there is a mad queen poling her island raft away into the Atlantic.

Today is Thursday 7 July, a date which is likely, by the time this issue of the LRB is read, to have been abbreviated to 7/7, even if the atrocity in London proved a lot less horrific in its...

What does it feel like to be an octopus? Does it feel like anything at all? Many philosophers think consciousness is an all or nothing phenomenon: you either have it or you don’t. Humans have it, as do perhaps chimps and dolphins. Mice, ants and amoebas presumably do not. Part of the motivation for the all or nothing view is that it is difficult to imagine consciousness being possessed in degrees.

We hardly notice the railway until in the early afternoon we are in the cloisters and a train sounds its horn, which, echoing round the Gothic arches, sounds like the Last Trump.