Oh, to have been born in a small, stylish country with good food and favourable sea breezes. No empire, no holy faith, no condescension, no fatal ideologies. The fish is grilled, the... Read more »
Around 300 people gathered outside Melbourne’s oldest bookshop, Hill of Content, to help it move to its new location just 130 metres down the road. The store first opening in 1922 and... Read more »
This year’s Carnegie medals for children’s writing, awarded on Thursday, brought to light an unexpected trend. At a time of widespread public anxiety about the decline in boys’ reading habits and the... Read more »
People who enjoy science fiction love to imagine the future: time travel, spaceships, something wobbly with a green face. But what if those fans really had access to it – the future,... Read more »
Through all the blood and ice of Russian history, the national music has been a balm. Composers and performers have given a voice to the soul of their people, in all its... Read more »
As a cult series of 20th-century childrenâs books, the Moomins have sold up to 30m copies worldwide. Now, extensive humorous notes that their Finnish creator, Tove Jansson, wrote on each of her... Read more »
One might feel short-changed to read a book about death by Sebastian Junger that did not include some battlefield drama. After 1997âs The Perfect Storm, his bestselling account of a trawler disaster... Read more »
While anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress – whether political or economic – has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded... Read more »
Kaliane Bradley (pronounced Cull-yan, which means âdarlingâ in Cambodian) is packing to move house when I visit her in Walthamstow, east London. The move has been made possible by the publication of her first novel, The Ministry... Read more »