“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement”, proclaims Mary Oliver (1935–2019) in “When Death Comes”. She was, readers loved her for it, and she surely had more ...

Vast in territory yet diplomatically feeble, in terminal decline yet capable of spasms of radical reform, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the eighteenth century was a strange sort of country.

If the twentieth century was “the age of anxiety”, then the early decades of the new millennium deserve to be called “the age of horror”, for two related reasons. The first is the rise of social media ...

In the past Michael Longley has been sceptical about his Selected Poems. In an interview with Peter McDonald in 1998 he declared his Poems, 1963–83 “premature”. The process of selection encouraged a ...

In that interlude between 1933 and 1941, when not much was going on in the world, “unquestionably the nastiest looking bit of work that ever dropped on to a breakfast table”, in the words of its ...

Rob Jackson’s Into the Clear Blue Sky is a fascinating exploration of the atmosphere near and far. It is also a reminder that we’re not making much progress towards a future based on clean energy.

Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland from the 1690s to the 1730s, could supposedly bend a horseshoe with ...

Almost as much as he is admired for his sea-salted vernacular novels of coastal Western Australia, Tim Winton is admired for being Tim Winton. People admire his publicity-shyness and the fact that ...

“It was in the kitchen”, we are told about Herr Aalbert Scellinc, the protagonist of Earwig, and “moved its limbs in a long spiky manner … Long tufts of yellowish hair sprouted from the ear’s thin ...