For all the wrong reasons, Damien Hirst’s Shark (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) has a claim to being the most prescient British artwork of the last... Read more »
Marxist-Leninist rule in Russia lasted 74 years, and in August 1991 it effectively collapsed in just three days: clear evidence of how hollowed out it had become. In the period that followed,... Read more »
Small Birds Singing by Matthew Welton (Carcanet, £12.99)Written in unrhymed couplets that shrink and grow across the page like a concertina going through its scales, Welton’s poems focus attention on the city... Read more »
The only named wind in the British Isles, Helm is a strong northeasterly gale that blows down the slopes of Cross Fell in the Pennines and is known for its unusual cloud... Read more »
“At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up?” Those words on the opening page of Conversation in the Cathedral announced the arrival of a writer who understood that national history could become... Read more »
The eastern breakwater of Granton harbour is almost 1km long, and swimmers can follow its crooked finger, heading straight out into the Firth of Forth, while benefiting from its reassuring presence. One Thursday... Read more »
The adjoining villages of Easington and Easington Colliery in the coalfields of east Durham make the perfect case study of the shift from England’s industrial boomtime to terminal decline. Twenty miles from... Read more »
There is a growing literature of maternal flight: novels about women who leave not just their husbands but also the children they have made. In the real world, men are the more... Read more »
The AI ethicist Eleanor Drage believes that to thrive alongside artificial intelligence, humans need to recognise AI’s “humanity”. She means that while we often speak of AI as though it were some... Read more »