Thrilling tales of British pluck
Few stirring stories compare with the six-week long Battle of Baku against the Ottomans – arguably the least remembered engagement of the first world war
How the US military became world experts on the environment
In its bid to become a global superpower, the US vastly increased its number of overseas bases in the 1960s, giving it unparalleled knowledge of Earth’s most extreme habitats
What rats can teach us about the dangers of overcrowding
The peculiar career of John Bumpass Calhoun (1917-95), the psychologist, philosopher, economist, mathematician and sociologist who was nominated for the…
Life among the world’s biggest risk-takers
The billionaires currently driving technology and the global economy are willing to take bets on very long odds, and treat everything as a market to be played
Will the photo of your lost loved one be replaced by a chatty robot?
It seems entirely possible that AI simulacra could be fashioned from the digital remains we now inadvertently leave behind, says Carl Öhman
Why today’s youth is so anxious and judgmental
In a well-evidenced diatribe, Jonathan Haidt accuses the creators of smartphone culture of rewiring childhood and changing human development on an unimaginable scale
The beauty of medieval bestiaries
Spiders, owls, elephants and dragons appear alongside dog-headed men and tusked women in a wealth of texts explaining the world in the most vivid terms then available
An absolute earful
Singing sands, the dawn chorus and the crackle of the Northern Lights are among the many natural wonders explored in Caspar Henderson’s paean to the act of listening
Monkey business
A labyrinthine plot involving Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedy clan form the basis of the latest in James Ellroy’s planned new ‘LA Quintet’
A dangerous Christ-complex
His fateful intransigence over the negotiations has been variously ascribed to a Christ-complex, an unhappy childhood and even latent homosexuality
Tribal loyalties
In his ‘journey into the psychology of belonging’, Michael Bond focuses on the positive side of tribalism, leaving its darker aspects mostly unexplored
A surreal account of lockdown
A complex novel explores the ways we try to understand a world that isn’t good or fair or causal or even comprehensible
Waves of feeling
Imagine that all the frequencies nature affords were laid out on an extended piano keyboard. Never mind that some waves…
Smoke and mirrors
On 2 October last year, when he became chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, if you prefer), Richard…
Prophet of disenchantment
Astonishing where an idea can lead you. You start with something that 800 years hence will sound like it’s being…
Otherworldly genius
The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried…
Problems of communication
I could never muster much enthusiasm for the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. His work, on the early universe and the…
A Titan of science
This book, soaked like the Dutch Republic itself ‘in ink and paint’, is enchanting to the point of escapism. The…
Evil genius
One day someone is going to have to write the definitive study of Wikipedia’s influence on letters. What, after all,…
Time immemorial
Some books elucidate their subject, mapping and sharpening its boundaries. The Clock Mirage, by the mathematician Joseph Mazur, is not…
Giving insects a bad name
Heteropoda davidbowie is a species of huntsman spider. Though rare, it has been found in parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia…
Dealing in death
John Troyer, the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, has moves. You can…
James Bond and Q in one
Early one morning in October 1874 a barge carrying three barrels of benzoline and five tons of gunpowder blew up…
Putting us in the picture
on the history, power and beauty of infographics
Believing in big data is equivalent to believing in the stars
Look up at the sky on a clear night. This is not an astrological game. (Indeed, the experiment’s more impressive…
