If the best-known glories of ancient Egypt are the pyramids, the mummies and the gold of Tutankhamun, then ancient Mesopotamia ought to be famous for its astonishing legacy of poetry and prose. For ...

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 ...

424pp. Princeton University Press. £25 (US $29.95). Charles S. Singleton’s version of The Divine Comedy (first published in six volumes between 1970 and 1975, and now reissued by Princeton University ...

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 ...

According to Scott G. Bruce, our “inner demons” represent the “last vestige” of more traditional ideas of an infernal hierarchy. The texts in his Penguin Book of Demons predate this inward turn, ...

During the nineteenth century, the “ivory road” in East Africa became one of the most important routes into the vast uncharted expanses of the African interior. It ran for nearly 1,000 miles from the ...

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 ...

This follow-up to Bookworm (2018), Lucy Mangan’s memoir about the books she read in childhood, chronicles some of the reading that has provided entertainment and solace in her adult life, particularly ...

Whose fault is it? In the early hours of November 24, 2021, a dinghy crammed with migrants capsized in the English Channel. It was not the only small boat attempting the crossing from France that ...

The life of Jeremy Catto, a tutor in medieval history at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1970 until his retirement in 2006, opens a window onto a lost world. In the pressure cooker of modern uni­versity ...

To Albert Camus, Amsterdam’s concentric waterways resembled the circles of hell. His protagonist in The Fall (1956), a “judge- penitent” who whiles away his days in a seedy sailors’ bar on the Zeedijk ...