People have been seeing weird things in the sky since the beginning of recorded history, but popular fascination ...

Daniel Defoe , in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), was unimpressed by the prehistoric remains.

James Butler joins Tom to discuss the findings of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, including the causes and consequences of the fire and whether those responsible will be brought to justice.

Jefferson Hope’s condition seems similar to the one that threatens the unnamed narrator of Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, ...

Your browser does not support the audio element. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss his recent LRB Winter Lecture, in which he explores Israel’s ...

In the preface to the Decameron Boccaccio describes Florentine society laid waste by bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. But before he gets to that he has a confession for the reader: he has been ...

While normal life must compete with a whole ecosystem, a mirror bacterium might behave like the only real thing in ...

They vow to cut two trillion dollars from the federal budget – five times the combined annual salaries of all federal employees. They vow an end to ‘wokeness’ in all its imagined forms and the return ...

Your browser does not support the audio element. In episode one of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom begin with a beginning, Homer’s Iliad: its depictions of anger ...

Some time in the sixth or early seventh century, a woman in Constantinople was suffering from severe abdominal pain. One night she crawled out of bed and dragged herself to the part of the house where ...

One of the only ways for foreign correspondents to get into Mali now is to rely on the services of human smugglers, as ...

James Meek talks to Tom about the events leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from the fall of Yanukovych to the wars in the Donbas and Nagorno-Karabakh, and considers what may happen next.