Imagine this unlikely scenario: the President of the United States of America is a charlatan; he talks a lot, or rather ...

During protests in the US in the middle of 2020, a Predator drone circled in the sky above Minneapolis. Some 20,000ft below, ...

In her introduction to The Selected James Simmons (1978), Edna Longley said that in Simmons’s poetry “art and life never look like becoming polite strangers”. He regarded Yeats’s insistence that a ...

191pp. University of California Press. Paperback, £30 (US $34.95). Each spring, I teach a class on the Achaemenid Persian Empire. We spend the first few weeks looking at some very big stuff indeed – ...

In his first major collection, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), the American poet John Berryman addressed the first significant poet of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, both as fellow ...

The Kama Sutra, legend has it, was once much longer. In its earliest form it had 100,000 chapters, authored by none other than the supreme god Brahma, but it was reduced to 1,000 chapters; this ...

In the title story of Diabelli – a collection of short fiction by the Swiss writer Hermann Burger (1942–89), first published in 1979 – a washed-up prestidigitator describes the linguistic traits ...

The French writer Anne Serre wrote Un Chapeau léopard (2008) shortly after the death of her sister. Many would choose to respond to such a loss with a memoir or a work of autofiction. By contrast, Un ...

What does a burial imply? Consider a simple inhumation, the slender body of the departed laid in a shallow pit by his former companions and covered with dirt. This sort of burial reveals a pragmatic ...