In 1946 a young atmospheric scientist named Bernard Vonnegut made a significant discovery. It had already been shown that clouds could be made to produce snow or rain by “seeding” them with... Read more »
On the front cover of the South African writer Magogodi oaMphela Makhene’s impressive debut collection of linked stories about life under and after apartheid, a young Black girl, primly attired in a... Read more »
In a lifetime of writing, Alexis Wright became aware of “how other people were telling stories on behalf of Aboriginal people in Australia”. A national narrative manipulated by the most powerful, she... Read more »
Why do we read historical fiction? Is it because we love the brutal simplicity of our past? If so, the opening chapter of Tim Pears’s novel is all you could want –... Read more »
Black Holes: The End of the Universe? by John Taylor was the first book I bought with my own hard-earned cash from a poorly paid paper round. It was 1974, I was 11. It was... Read more »
Car companies have been experimenting with driverless cars for decades, but their presence on roads has exploded in recent years. It became increasingly common, beginning in the twenty-tens, to see robo-taxi prototypes... Read more »
Britain, thought Thomas Paine, needed to be destroyed. Its monarchy must be toppled, its empire broken up and the mercantile system that propped up this debt-ridden, monstrous pariah state abolished. Only then... Read more »
Peach melba, as all the world surely knows, was invented in the early 1890s by Auguste Escoffier, the French chef of the Savoy hotel, for the superstar Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba.... Read more »
Roland Allen loves notebooks. Why wouldn’t he? He is, after all, a writer. In his new study, delightfully subtitled A History of Thinking on Paper, he declares: “If your business is words,... Read more »