Samantha Ellis

The problem with trying to resuscitate dying languages

9 March 2024 9:00 am

Ross Perlin is determined to support the ‘last speakers’ of endangered tongues, such as Seke. But if these speakers really are the last, they are not, in any real sense, speaking

Reflections on water in the Middle East

28 May 2022 9:00 am

These Bodies of Water begins dramatically (as befits a book derived from Sabrina Mahfouz’s Royal Court show A History of…

Smartphones for Hamlet and Heathcliff

2 January 2016 9:00 am

Medea says ‘hiiiiiiii’ on the first page of Mallory Ortberg’s hilarious book, which puts smartphones in the hands of literary…

‘Working Boats from around the British Coast’: mural with mermaids and a dancing lobster by the visionary artist Alan Sorrell, commissioned for the Festival of Britain, 1951

Fishy women: the mermaid in folklore, art and literature

11 July 2015 9:00 am

The first mermaid we meet in this intriguing, gorgeously produced book is spray-painted in scarlet on a wall in Madrid,…