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

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 ...

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 ...

“If it keeps on rainin’”, sings Robert Plant on Led Zeppelin’s 1971 track, “levee’s gonna break.” The song is a cover of a 1929 recording by Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie, inspired by the Great ...