The publication in 1888 of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s collection Azul changed the way the Spanish language was written ...

It is a courageous soul who would take on the challenge of writing a Life (even a partial Life) of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

Recipes can take many forms, from detailed sets of instructions to simple lists. Stuck to my refrigerator is a carefully ...

In 1841, Karl Marx got a doctorate for a dissertation about Hegel’s theory of the history of philosophy. He disagreed over details, but endorsed Hegel’s big idea: that every school of thought reveals ...

A novel about political awakening in free verse might not set every heart racing, but when the author is Mario Benedetti, one of Latin America’s best-loved poets, you know to expect humour, ...

The hybrid is a strange concept. On the one hand it’s a commonplace, describing everything from cars to conferences. On the other hand, it is entangled with colonialism, where it has been used to ...

Like many academics who write about philosophy or religion, I get a lot of emails from people keen to share their life stories, spiritual insights and cosmological theories. Now and then a handwritten ...

In June 1939 a San Francisco lawyer named Paul E. Madden pushed through an amendment to Californian state law that would turn out, decades later, to have life-or-death consequences across the nation.

In 1916, Isaac Rosenberg wrote from the front line in France to his friend Edward Marsh that “The Homer for this war has yet to be found”. As Rosenberg knew, those in search of a Homer were looking ...

J. G. Ballard once described Paul Pickering’s work as “truly subversive”. This would certainly be an apt description of his latest novel, in which he picks apart the morality of war and the creation ...

“Fiction hits an all-time high to keep the market steady.” Such a headline might sound like good news – but under it the Bookseller had some bad news to tell the books business last week. True, Tom ...