Edmund Gordon

Iwas​ a competent name-caller and a precocious smoker, but my schoolboy talents stopped short of anything that involved a ball. Catering to my eight-year-old son’s tennis abilities has involved a serious learning curve. The atmosphere on the London and South-East nine and under circuit can be surprisingly intense. Pint-sized competitors gather outside the clubhouse, doing warm-up...

There are​ approximately twenty billion Sun-like stars in the Milky Way. Scientists think that up to a quarter of them are orbited by planets where water could be present; if the same holds true in other galaxies, it would mean fifty sextillion or so planets in the observable universe where intelligent life may have evolved. The chances of Earth being the only one to have realised that...

Fiction​ about creative writing programmes is always vulnerable to accusations of navel-gazing. Camille Bordas has, however, provided her new novel with an alibi. The Material follows the staff and students on the ‘MFA in stand-up’ at an unnamed Chicago university over the last day of the autumn term. It’s a clever conceit, giving the eternal question about writing...

By the time​ H.G. Wells died, in August 1946, the genre he’d done more than anyone to establish was headquartered on the other side of the Atlantic. John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke, the most important British science fiction writers to emerge after the war, published in the pages of American magazines. Attempts to revive the domestic scene failed to gather momentum until 1954, when

Upton Sinclair​ was born in 1878 to a Baltimore family of rapidly diminishing respectability. His father was a whisky salesman who drank a good deal more than he ever managed to sell. When things got especially bad, Sinclair’s mother would seek refuge in the home of her own father, who was secretary-treasurer of the Western Maryland Railroad, or that of her sister, who was married to...