The Northern Irish film-maker Mark Cousins has cultivated a wide and enthusiastic following among social media-minded cinephiles, but the whimsical documentarian’s penchant for beautifully narrated ...

Linda Gordon is a unique figure in the field of US history. Since her Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A social history of birth control in America came out in 1976, she has produced several first-rate ...

Stephen Glover’s review of Murder in Cairo by Peter Gillman and Emanuele Midolo (May 9), like the book he reviews, focuses on the role of individual journalists. “Patriotic journalists should not spy ...

Guillemots are brown-and-white seabirds. They can live to the age of forty and the females lay one uniquely patterned, pear-shaped speckled egg each year, always in the same spot on steep coastal ...

Publishing fiction at a steady clip since her debut, Cold Earth (TLS, June 19, 2009), Sarah Moss has increasingly become a portraitist of what her latest protagonist calls “the dis-United Kingdom”.

Williams’s Careless People is a compulsively readable account of the effects of social media on democracy. Facebook’s former director of global public policy, Wynn-Williams left the company in 2017.

Change is in the air – or at least it is at Rutgers University. This is where Richard Poirier established the much-admired journal Raritan in 1981; it has become, in the view of Poirier’s successor, ...

The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998) was born in Lwów, which – renamed Lviv – became part of Soviet Ukraine after the war. Poland was permanently changed – socially, politically and physically ...

For Iago in Othello, to be robbed of a “good name” is to be “poor indeed”. In Editing Archipelagic Shakespeare, Rory Loughnane and Willy Maley contend that much power lies in naming. This short book ...

In Jacob Burckhardt’s classic The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94) represented the “what if?” for Italian philosophy, had it not been choked off ...

For many years, I paid too much attention to stories about the childhoods of great artists. I read that Jane Austen was writing fiction as a teenager, and that Mozart was practically still a toddler ...