The dramatic advances in emergency medical care since the introduction, in the late 1950s, of modern approaches to ...

Geoff Dyer is known for his stylish sentences and diverse subject matter. He has written fiction, nonfiction and essays. He’s ...

“It does not harm people to cry”, counselled Diana, Princess of Wales, who did so in public, but “there seems to be a curious conspiracy in adults to ...

The non-scientific like to embellish science with drama. It makes incomprehensible achievements more accessible. Legend has it that Archimedes’ eureka moment about the discovery of buoyancy came to ...

My daughter’s first doll wasn’t a princess, but a bearded man in a toga – a Socrates doll, gifted by my students when she was born. I couldn’t wait for her to start talking so we could dive into ...

When does a novel actually begin? Is it on the title page or with the first line of the story itself? And what about the “paratext” – things like cover ...

Reading, we all know, is a peculiar act. It takes us out of ourselves into realms we might otherwise have missed – deeper, wider, stranger, perhaps launching us backwards or forwards in time, or into ...

Sir Peter Russell (1913–2006) was King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies at Oxford from 1953 until his retirement in 1981. He was also Director of Portuguese Studies, and the author of a ...

A novel about political awakening in free verse might not set every heart racing, but when the author is Mario Benedetti, one of Latin America’s best-loved poets, you know to expect humour, ...

From time to time pessimists declare the literary novel dead and drowned. Currently such pundits distrust its capacity for survival in our tough, market-driven publishing climate, in which sales ...

The Argentine novelist, journalist and librettist Pola Oloixarac pulls no punches. (Unimpressed by Han Kang’s recent Nobel prize, she condemned the new laureate as a “middle-brow author” who writes in ...