The first note known to have sounded on earth was an E natural. It was produced some 165 million years ago by a katydid (a kind of cricket) rubbing its wings together, a fact deduced by scientists ...

Tolerance does not come naturally to humankind. For most of recorded history, what people believed about the natural world, about government and society or about the moral code was laid down by ...

In the closing scene of the film Valkyrie, Hitler’s would-be assassin Count Stauffenberg, played by Tom Cruise, is about to be shot by a firing squad when his adjutant, Werner von Haeften, suddenly ...

In late 2022, at the G20 summit held at a balmy resort in Bali, Indonesia, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, bumped into the supreme leader of China, Xi Jinping. The encounter, which was ...

The Empusium, the new novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, is subtitled ‘A Health Resort Horror Story’ and is described in the publicity material as revisiting the terrain of ...

The days when LSD made headlines as ‘The Most Dangerous Thing Since the Atom Bomb’ are long gone; now we’re in a ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’, with Prince Harry drinking ayahuasca tea and Mike Tyson ...

J G Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930 and interned by the Japanese from 1942-1946. After his release he came to England and for a short time studied medicine at King’s College, Cambridge. His ...

Historians call it the Bauernkrieg or German Peasants’ War, but to people at the time it was simply the Aufruhr (‘the turmoil’). Through the second half of 1524 and into the summer of 1525, rebellion ...

Reading art history can be like watching paint dry: X studied under the distinguished Professor Y at the Académie de ZZZ. Scandal can pique the reader’s interest – the numberless offspring, the ...

How does the internet get from A to B? You might assume that data travels via satellite, but the reality is quite different. Along the ocean floor, hundreds of thousands of miles of fibre-optic cable ...

During lockdown, a Twitter account called Bookcase Credibility (bio: ‘What you say is not as important as the bookcase behind you’) gathered a hundred thousand followers for its witty captions ...

Jonathan Coe’s latest book turns out to be a bag of tricks, but it starts sedately enough. Phyl, a recent English graduate, is back living with her parents, Joanna and Andrew, making puns about ...