What is it about the body that resists plain description? When we discuss our bodies, we evoke other things: the body as machine, possibly malfunctioning; the body as computer, infinitely programmable ...

There are only two gun stores in Mexico. Throughout the enormous country, which takes three full days to cross by car from top to bottom if you don’t stop, the only places you can legally buy a gun ...

The Earth aged millions of years over the course of the 18th century. In 1650 the Irish archbishop James Ussher had dated creation to around 6 p.m. on 22 October 4004 BCE. His estimate was based on a ...

The authorities in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, have been de-Russifying its street names. Instead of commemorating an avant-garde Russian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s, ...

On the morning of the US presidential election, my twelve-year-old son told me that Trump was going to win: ‘All ...

James Meek talks to Tom about his latest report from Ukraine, where he spent time in Kharkiv and Kupiansk in the east of the country. In Kharkiv, he found a population living in fear not only of the ...

Music critic Ian Penman is back with a pioneering book of essays alluding to a lost moment in musical history ‘when cultures collided and a cross-generational and “cross-colour” awareness was born’.

In an episode of the Simpsons from 1995, the evil tycoon Montgomery Burns bribes Krusty the Clown into supporting his entry in a local film competition. When Krusty ...

If you’re looking for advice on sustaining a marriage, or robbing a grave, or performing liver surgery, then a series of self-help stories by a 14th-century Spanish prince is a good place to start.

It had been twenty years since my last research trip to the British Library when, in November last year, I received an email with the subject line: ‘Important information about our recent cyber ...