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’.

The Pickwick Bicycle Club first met on 22 June 1870, a fortnight after Charles Dickens’s death, at a hotel in Hackney. The club continues to function and the building still stands on the edge of ...

In the second of three conversations about the crisis in the Middle East, recorded shortly before the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was reported, Yezid Sayigh talks to Adam Shatz about why he ...

In the final episode of Political Poems, Mark and Seamus discuss ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Emerging out of Eliot’s experiences of the Blitz, ‘Little Gidding’ ...

People have been seeing weird things in the sky since the beginning of recorded history, but popular fascination ...

Daniel Defoe , in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), was unimpressed by the prehistoric remains.

They vow to cut two trillion dollars from the federal budget – five times the combined annual salaries of all federal employees. They vow an end to ‘wokeness’ in all its imagined forms and the return ...

Some time in the sixth or early seventh century, a woman in Constantinople was suffering from severe abdominal pain. One night she crawled out of bed and dragged herself to the part of the house where ...

In 1977, Abba were waiting at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm when they noticed a dishevelled young man charging towards them. Their security guards spotted him too, along with the spatter of dried vomit ...

Many TV shows are set in hospitals, but fewer novels, at least ones that take place outside the psychiatric ward. Hospitals make for good drama: the path to diagnosis is a mystery plot with inherent ...

Ionce witnessed Stephen Spender being evil in a London club. A mandarin of poetry, he seemed almost fluorescent with stories and vital resentments, twisting the stem of his glass as he offered ...