‘Mindfulness’ is due a backlash, surely. And it starts here. Sort of. The authors, both psychologists, and one an experienced meditator with a lifelong interest in spiritual matters, originally set ...

In a popular American blog propagating Darwinism, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reports, a well-known biologist with mildly unorthodox views has been described as needing a ‘good punch in the balls’.

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

Sir Thomas Wyatt was the ambassador, the ‘beloved familiar’ and allegedly the rival in love of Henry VIII. During his rather short but fiery lifetime, he found himself banished from court and clapped ...

The rediscovery of Hans Fallada in the English-speaking world provides an intriguing case study of retrospective canon formation. After a troubled, unsettled life shaped in turns by morphine, alcohol, ...

The Old Ways is ‘the third book in a loose trilogy about landscape and the human heart’, the other two being Mountains of the Mind and The Wild Places. They offer a lucid and often beguiling mix of ...

THE ARCHITECT ERNO Goldfinger was a man of many paradoxes. He was the son of a-wealthy lawyer and the grandson of a vice-president of a bank, yet he was a lifelong Marxist. Despite his politics, in ...

In the mid-1950s, when I was studying Chinese and Chinese history at Columbia University, professors had ground-floor offices. But upstairs, where the toilets were, we occasionally glimpsed an elderly ...

Half a lifetime ago, when I was living in Rome, I kept Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars in the Penguin translation by Robert Graves as a bedside book. It’s a fascinating book, full of good stories, ...

Harold Bloom’s latest book is a rhapsody to twelve giants of classic American literature who have touched the sublime. He has, Bloom says, been a ‘Longinian critic since earliest youth’. Aged ...

Some modern scholars believe these to be forgeries written later in antiquity, designed to give the otherwise shadowy figure ...

Keith Houston’s history of emojis reveals that explicit images as well as political provocations, flagrant brand ...