The good news is that we’re all doomed. Humankind has made such a hash of the stewardship of creation that God looks like a chump for entrusting it to us. Most of the biosphere would be better off ...

There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop. Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. The title wasn’t the only thing that was bad about the misfiring ...

Building a state takes decades of hard labour. Destroying one can be done virtually overnight. In September 2018, the prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, flew to the Eritrean capital, Asmara, to ...

Early in the 19th century, there were some 260,000 of them across Britain’s naval and merchant fleets. People called them Jacks, but they are mostly nameless – or nameless to history. Even on ...

This is one of the great works of modern scholarship. Professor John Morrill of Cambridge University and eight other editors have, after fifteen painstaking years, compiled all 1,077 of Oliver ...

Marie Curie’s life was defined by professional triumph and personal tragedy. Ninety years after her death, she remains history’s most famous woman scientist. Curie was the first woman to receive a ...

Peter Wright, son of a long-wave radio pioneer, was a scientist with a talent for improvisation who flourished in the unstructured environment of the Admiralty Research Laboratory during the Second ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: ...

Tania Branigan reported from Beijing for The Guardian from 2008 until 2015, so Red Memory is part of a long and varied lineage of books about China by foreign correspondents. Most such volumes are of ...

Percival Everett’s The Trees is a strange beast. Part police procedural, part black comedy, the novel is both irreverently silly and deadly serious. It begins in the cruelly named one-horse town of ...

Family life unfolds in David Roberts’s brilliant debut novel, The Way the Day Breaks, in backseat squabbles and sodden walks. There are camping holidays in the Pyrenees and subdued meals in front of ...

The late American president Ronald Reagan told a press conference in 1986: ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”’ That remark ...