What is it like to be a passenger on a bus, or standing in a cheering crowd at the finishing line of a marathon, in the seconds after a bomb goes off, when you know you’re hurt but not where or how...
It was at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that governments first agreed to do something about climate change. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, agreed at the summit,...
I fell in love with double-crested cormorants twenty years ago, partly out of gratitude. I had just started watching birds, I was terrible at it, and the big black creatures – two...
Someone who indefatigably comes to your house when you have crawled away in exhaustion is a social monstrosity but also, quite possibly, simply caught in a wrinkle in time.
What do moors sound like? Like a universe of bees, whose unison is only a few notes higher than the singing of our own bloodstream, which we half-hear, half-sense during the small hours...
As injury comes to be conceived as payment in default, the psyche develops a penitentiary logic.
Sex workers are workers. Their workplaces should be safe, and they should have the same rights as everybody else.
Bringing up a child to believe it is a miracle is a form of cruelty, albeit at the opposite pole from neglect.
A few dozen photographs were taken of me as a child. I remember lining up with my family on the beach as a wealthy uncle tried out a new photographic toy and, bright glare of sun off sand...
There’s something grim about asking parents to resign themselves to the end of paltry bliss-seeking in order to concentrate their energies on the higher satisfactions of duty, service and sacrifice....
One of the problems of ageing is knowing when to start complaining about being old.
On 11 December 2006, Felipe Calderón, the president of Mexico, appeared on television dressed as a military commander and announced that he was ‘declaring war’ on organised...
According to the myths, Philip will bestow on his followers prosperity – endless kava roots – and freedom from sickness, old age and death. Godhood might bring about the same for a man in a family...
In 1957, in a remote village on the south coast of Bali, the young anthropologist Clifford Geertz was watching a cremation ceremony spill down a hillside when the crowd suddenly parted,...
Nathan Filer seems, by all accounts, a very nice man. Despite being given a six-figure advance from HarperCollins for his first novel, getting glowing reviews, winning the Costa Book Award and...
I return to the complete mystery of why some people are knocked flat and incapable by what seem like only the mildest of dysfunctional backgrounds, compared to others whose childhoods were devastated by...
In July, David Freud, the Conservative peer in charge of changes to the benefit system, wondered aloud in the Lords whether the boom in food banks was ‘supply-led’ or...
In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche gives what Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster call a ‘fascinating short interpretation’ of Hamlet, from which they take their title. They...