Massif by Garth Nix (Gollancz, £25)The bestselling fantasy author’s first science fiction novel for adults is set three centuries from now, when humanity has spread out to the stars. The colonisation of... Read more »
In 1979, the government asked Wilfred Cockcroft, a now largely forgotten maths lecturer from the University of Hull, to write a report about a crisis in the teaching of his subject to... Read more »
The late actor Diana Rigg declined to call herself a feminist, noting: “Why would I burn my bra? I need my bra.” Nonetheless, her ideas on womanhood were ahead of their time.... Read more »
When I wrote an unadoring review of Stephen Hawking’s final book, a collection of essays published posthumously in 2018, New Scientist suppressed some of my criticisms on the grounds that it was... Read more »
Irvine Welsh, author I’ve been enjoying Contrapposto by Dave Eggers. The premise that love and art are the only things that make life worthwhile pulses beautifully through this novel and its two... Read more »
When Huddersfield council proposed turning some local grazing land into a cemetery during the Covid lockdown, some nearby residents were unhappy. Not poet laureate Simon Armitage, who also lived close to the... Read more »
My earliest reading memoryThe deaths of Old Dan and Little Ann in Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows were etched into my being as a first grader in Chesterfield County, Virginia.... Read more »
Fetch by Colin Bramwell (And Other Stories, £14.99)Bramwell’s translation of Fernando Pessoa’s work into Scots won him considerable recognition: it took the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation prize and the Highland Book Prize. Between... Read more »
Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate Homer’s Odyssey into English, is to retranslate the ancient Greek epic poem from scratch less than a decade after the publication of her acclaimed version.... Read more »