Naomi Klein’s new book starts on a mountaintop with two “faithful men gathering an audience to share their vision”. It’s a vision of a paradise city, gated at every entrance, no need for... Read more »
By definition, utopia cannot exist. In 1516, educated readers of Thomas More’s Utopia would have appreciated a tension between two possible derivations of this novel word: the Greek “eu-topos”, meaning good place,... Read more »
You could take two outwardly contradictory lessons from the historian David Turner’s new book on disability in the UK. First, that alarmingly little has changed for disabled people since the beginning of... Read more »
This is a dark tale. In its opening scene the author is in conversation with a textile artist in her workshop under the arches in Deptford – arguably one of the last neighbourhoods that... Read more »
The Society of Authors (SoA) has launched a scheme to help identify works written by humans in a market increasingly flooded by AI-generated books. The scheme is the first of its kind... Read more »
If you’ve written a successful book based around one big idea, what do you make the next one about? Back in 2009, Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (co-authored with Richard Wilkinson) argued... Read more »
Novelist Elif Shafak has been named the new president of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), taking over from Bernardine Evaristo as she reaches the end of her four-year term. British-Turkish writer... Read more »
When slavery was abolished in the British empire in 1833, it was thought only reasonable that slave-owners should be recompensed for the loss of their property: the British government had to borrow the equivalent... Read more »
Many nations already enshrine a right not to be defrauded, and even a right not to be deceived. If a company sells you a new medicine, falsely claiming that it prevents cancer, it... Read more »