In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novel The Morning Star (TLS, October 1, 2021), ordinary Norwegian lives are disrupted by the sudden appearance of a shining portent in the sky one unseasonably hot summer.

The origins of the modern-day Spanish nation do not predate the existence of empire. In 1492 the Genovese adventurer Christopher Columbus set sail under the flags of the Catholic Monarchs – Queen ...

“Manchester is the south of the north”, writes Jeanette Winterson: spot-on. I’ve never met anyone who has a clear mental map of the place. On the ground it seems to have a grid pattern, but the roads ...

One might have assumed that the political thought of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would be occupied, in a significant way, with cities. Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau and other ...

Ellen Jones reviewed Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil’s ÄÄ for the TLS in 2021 (In Brief, April 23). She has now translated it from Spanish into English as This Mouth Is Mine. In this collection of articles ...

“London has always been famous for its many and beautiful parks”, announced a 1966 guidebook to the capital; “just what those parks are famous for is not necessarily limited to the flowerbeds and ...

A revolutionary who critiqued Marx; a Christian who refused baptism; a Jew who held Jewishness in contempt: Simone Weil was a ...

I first went to look at medieval manuscripts in Longleat House in the early 1970s. In those days readers were placed in an ...

Forty-one-year-old Police Constable Trevor Lock was at his usual post, guarding the Iranian embassy in London, on the morning of April 30, 1980. At 11.36 he noticed a young man whom he took to be ...

In March this year the International Union of Geological Sciences, the body tasked with defining Earth’s geological timeframe, made a shock decision. It rejected the proposal that since 1952 we have ...