The Danish author Solvej Balle came to fame with According to the Law (1993; 1996 in English): four linked stories about “the ...

If the best-known glories of ancient Egypt are the pyramids, the mummies and the gold of Tutankhamun, then ancient ...

In recent decades, critical thinking about the “liveliness” of the natural world has gained momentum. Anthropologists and ...

In the opening and title poem of his ninth collection, Ian Duhig recalls finding “a pebble the exact shape of a light bulb”, at which point another “lit … in a thought bubble” above his “dull bulb of ...

To Albert Camus, Amsterdam’s concentric waterways resembled the circles of hell. His protagonist in The Fall (1956), a “judge- penitent” who whiles away his days in a seedy sailors’ bar on the Zeedijk ...

Neill Blomkamp’s underappreciated film Elysium (2013) depicts an Earth ravaged by pollution, a giant shanty town where people lead brutalized lives, most involved in extracting what remains of the ...

424pp. Princeton University Press. £25 (US $29.95). Charles S. Singleton’s version of The Divine Comedy (first published in six volumes between 1970 and 1975, and now reissued by Princeton University ...

The life of Jeremy Catto, a tutor in medieval history at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1970 until his retirement in 2006, opens a window onto a lost world. In the pressure cooker of modern uni­versity ...