On a bright, chilly morning in Cambridge, England, a few weeks ago – as a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece might have it – about 150 people gathered at the University of Cambridge’s Computer ...

A person’s proximity to death is often a turning point: an opportunity to reflect on ventures, obsessions and the mistakes of the past before it becomes too late. Martín Caparrós acknowledges this ...

In her Reith Lecture in 2017, Hilary Mantel reflected that the historical novelist “works away at the point where what is enacted meets what is dreamed, where politics meets psychology, where private ...

Though a talented poet, Rebecca Watts remains best known for her essay “The Cult of the Noble Amateur”, published in the poetry journal PN Review in 2018. It was ironic that this piece attracted much ...

Margaret Drabble explores how Dickens drew on his love of the macabre and grotesque to create literary magic and Norma Clarke takes a tour around the British coast Peter Holland treads the boards in ...

In recent decades, critical thinking about the “liveliness” of the natural world has gained momentum. Anthropologists and ...

640pp. University of Chicago Press. £32 (US $39.95). In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 ...

For all their Kerouacian, gas-guzzling possibility, road trip novels explore constraint far more than they do freedom. They are, after all, set in cars: sites of forced proximity and cramped ...

Germany enjoys the reputation of having confronted its Nazi past with impressive forthrightness, its cities filled with memorials to the victims of the Holocaust. But when it came to bringing former ...