The word “vampire” first appears in English in sensational accounts of a revenant panic in Serbia in the early 18th century. One case in 1725 concerned a recently deceased peasant farmer, Peter... Read more »
In the five decades between 1910 and 1960, more than half a million people in England and Wales became Catholics. Among them were a clutch of literary stars: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel... Read more »
A lot of terrible things happen to Kathy Burke in her memoir, though you won’t find her mired in self-pity. Burke was a toddler when her mother died from stomach cancer, meaning... Read more »
Like many kids of the VHS generation, I must have watched my taped-off-the-telly copy of Disney’s Mary Poppins (1964) well over 100 times. I probably knew every frame as well as Walt... Read more »
Anna North’s fourth book, Bog Queen, is a stranded or braided novel. First “a colony of moss” speaks – or rather, does not speak, but “if such a colony could tell the... Read more »
Joseph Luzzi, a professor at Bard College in New York, is a Dante scholar whose books argue for the relevance of the great Italian art and literature of the late middle ages... Read more »
Noopiming, the first of Canadian writer-musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s books to be published in the UK, means “in the bush” in the language of the Ojibwe people. The title of this startlingly... Read more »
In 2017, 10 years after Susan Orlean profiled Caltech-trained physicist turned professional origami artist Robert Lang for the New Yorker, she attended the OrigamiUSA convention to take Lang’s workshop on folding a... Read more »
Halcyon Years by Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz, £25)Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut who was the first man in space, is reborn as a private eye on board the starship Halcyon as it draws... Read more »