At first sight, a new life of Ellen Wilkinson appears to offer readers a return to ‘old Labour’ principles, as articulated and put into practice by one of the party’s most...
Hedda Gabler’s husband, Jørgen Tesman, is an academic historian – diligent, if a little plodding. He is researching a book which he hopes will make a splash, secure him a...
An apnoea is a cessation of breathing. When sufferers of sleep apnoea enter deep sleep, their airway becomes blocked by the tissues around their throat. They may gasp for air, and stir...
In 1619, for a bet, John Taylor – prolific poet, proud Londoner, waterman, prankster, anti-pollution campaigner, barman, literary celebrity, palindrome enthusiast (‘Lewd did I...
As Donna Haraway writes at one point: ‘Woof.’
It isn’t that unlikely events can’t happen in fiction; it’s just that readers have to be made to believe in them. As climate change accelerates, and as the timescale over which it unfolds contracts...
Friendly aircraft are indicated in green on the radar screen, potential threats are yellow and enemies red. Unless you’re colour-blind, it all makes operating a deadly aircraft so very simple: what’s...
The terminological dispute – Anthropocene or Capitalocene? – may not be so important. What does matter is which sense of our present straits prevails.
As students of animal cognition, ‘we are trying to get under the skin of other species, trying to understand them on their terms.’ How do other creatures experience their worlds? How can we begin to...
Just over ten years ago, on 9 January 2007, Steve Jobs stood up on stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and announced that Apple would be bringing out three new devices: a...
In 2016, a pair of scientists at the California Institute of Technology, Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown, announced that they had discovered compelling evidence of an as-yet-unseen giant planet –...
What’s so funny about trolling? ‘Every joke calls for a public of its own,’ Freud said, ‘and laughing at the same jokes is evidence of far-reaching psychical conformity.’ To understand a joke...
The development of a nuclear explosive device and two air-deliverable fission bombs by the Manhattan Engineering District of the US Army Corps of Engineers cost $1.845 billion, equivalent to...
It isn’t just buildings that crumble in earthquakes, it’s language, too. Clichés fall apart: safe as houses, old as the hills, solid ground. Other words slough off their...
We still live among wild animals, just about: the birds that flit and scurry and sing and build in our gardens. They are like iridescent spray: the rose-flush on the breast of a male...
In January 2011, Aaron Swartz was arrested for downloading 4.8 million academic articles from the digital archive JSTOR, using a laptop hidden in a broom cupboard on the MIT campus. He was 24,...
On 11 February, David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) in the US, announced that his team of almost a thousand scientists had...
Epigenetics seeks to explain how, starting from an identical set of genes, the contingencies of development can lead to different outcomes.