In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and ...

Gardens feature in every genre of Roman literature, from obscene epigrams to dry agricultural treatises, though often in the background or on the margins – as the setting for Cicero’s philosophical ...

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 ...

The Danish author Solvej Balle came to fame with According to the Law (1993; 1996 in English): four linked stories about “the raw isolation of humankind”. She then retreated to an isolation of her own ...

The chaos agents who drive Christopher Bollen’s latest thriller belong to two of the most easily overlooked demographics: an old woman and a child. The yawning age gap between the eighty-one-year-old ...

“Few passions are constant, but many are sincere”. The maxim is by the Marquis de Vauvenargues, one-time proprietor of the Provençal chateau where Pablo Picasso and his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, ...

“The need to go home … hit me like grief”. Mairéad, the protagonist of Elaine Garvey’s debut novel, is experiencing the feeling of bereavement that often comes when, at the brink of “proper” adulthood ...

Caroline Moorehead salutes the energetic brilliance of the singer Josephine Baker and Aaron Peck discusses the past, present and future of the avant garde We're joined by Harriet Baker, the winner of ...

“Few writers are able to create a different world for you to live in”, the TLS said of a new novel, in 1963, “yet Miss [Victoria] Lucas in The Bell Jar has done just this.” This was quite a debut, ...

Will artificial intelligence save us from our worst impulses or damn us to extinction? Building on his previous work about the importance of narrative to large-scale human co-operation, Yuval Noah ...

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