The Pickwick Bicycle Club first met on 22 June 1870, a fortnight after Charles Dickens’s death, at a hotel in Hackney. The club continues to function and the building still stands on the edge of ...

One of the only ways for foreign correspondents to get into Mali now is to rely on the services of human smugglers, as ...

In the final episode of Political Poems, Mark and Seamus discuss ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Emerging out of Eliot’s experiences of the Blitz, ‘Little Gidding’ ...

One of the only ways for foreign correspondents to get into Mali now is to rely on the services of human smugglers, as I did a few weeks ago. A former journalist turned fixer told me there were ‘no ...

In the preface to the Decameron Boccaccio describes Florentine society laid waste by bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. But before he gets to that he has a confession for the reader: he has been ...

In the second of three conversations about the crisis in the Middle East, recorded shortly before the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was reported, Yezid Sayigh talks to Adam Shatz about why he ...

Music critic Ian Penman is back with a pioneering book of essays alluding to a lost moment in musical history ‘when cultures collided and a cross-generational and “cross-colour” awareness was born’.

In 1977, Abba were waiting at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm when they noticed a dishevelled young man charging towards them. Their security guards spotted him too, along with the spatter of dried vomit ...

They vow to cut two trillion dollars from the federal budget – five times the combined annual salaries of all federal employees. They vow an end to ‘wokeness’ in all its imagined forms and the return ...

Some time in the sixth or early seventh century, a woman in Constantinople was suffering from severe abdominal pain. One night she crawled out of bed and dragged herself to the part of the house where ...

In the late summer of 32 BC, Rome declared war on Ptolemaic Egypt and its powerful queen, Cleopatra. In front of the Temple of Bellona, the Roman goddess of war, a member of an archaic priestly order ...