David Baddiel’s candid memoir, My Family, is mostly about his parents and their “unbounded non-parenting”. I puzzled over the ...

The ideas of the German-Jewish mathematician Emmy Noether (not least the four-part theorem that bears her name) laid the ...

The Ming doctor Li Shizhen’s pharmacopoeia is widely known in China, and the man himself has appeared on postage stamps and ...

From Raffles to Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, the mix of gentleman and crook has supplied a succession of compelling figures. Among the most famous from real life is Arthur Barry, the subject of ...

Is contemporary poetry uniquely obsessed with identity? The current priorities of commercial publishers and Arts Council funding mean that many writers now struggle for recognition from the poetry ...

“How should one read a book?” Virginia Woolf asked this question, in different forms, throughout her life. In an essay of 1926 with that title, she described the pure pleasure that readers know: the ...