Though a talented poet, Rebecca Watts remains best known for her essay “The Cult of the Noble Amateur”, published in the poetry journal PN Review in 2018. It was ironic that this piece attracted much ...

A person’s proximity to death is often a turning point: an opportunity to reflect on ventures, obsessions and the mistakes of the past before it becomes too late. Martín Caparrós acknowledges this ...

On a bright, chilly morning in Cambridge, England, a few weeks ago – as a New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece might have it – about 150 people gathered at the University of Cambridge’s Computer ...

In her Reith Lecture in 2017, Hilary Mantel reflected that the historical novelist “works away at the point where what is enacted meets what is dreamed, where politics meets psychology, where private ...

“Nobody knows anything,” the screenwriter William Goldman once said. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work”, Which means it’s a wonder that any ...

Germany’s colonial ambitions in Cameroon were short-lived. The region became a protectorate in 1884, under Otto von Bismarck, then in 1916, during the First World War, the colonists were forced to ...

Laura E. Helton’s Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black collectors created archives and remade history explores the labour and risks involved in assembling the archival collections held across the ...

Drug cartels in Mexico have been known to dismember their victims or leave messages on their bodies, threatening their rivals or glorifying in their gore. Femicide in the country is endemic. Cristina ...

In April 1576, James Burbage, a joiner turned actor, signed a lease on a half-acre patch of land in Shoreditch. The district was conveniently located outside the walls of the City of London, with its ...