How long you live, whether you win or lose cancer lotto or Parkinson’s bingo, have little to do, says Michael Kinsley, with life’s other successes… more

Death of the author: you fall out of print, move to a book dealer’s website, or a grad student does a thesis on you. Finally, a last reader will turn the last page… more

Fire is not like other forces of nature - glaciers or hurricanes. Its history and ours are intertwined. We did not invent fire: we seized it from nature… more

As a waitress in a posh restaurant, she was ally, authority, and confidante for her customers - all within 30 seconds… more

Migrant women make a choice to take their chances abroad. They are not passive victims, even if they choose to work in the sex industry… more

He was not just a director of epics. What excited David Lean was a change of scale: matchstick to ball of fire, catastrophe to teacups, great expectations to small wonders… more

Switzerland: a small country with a skilled workforce, booming exports, and enormous prosperity has become the envy of Europe… more

J.S. Mill’s idea of freedom did not imply that truths are equal, but rather that truth is arrived at in the clash of ideas, in open debate… more

Could you fall in love with someone who had never heard of, say, Chekhov, or Joyce? For most people, Rachel Donadio argues, love conquers literary taste… more

Switzerland: a small country with a skilled workforce, booming exports, and enormous prosperity has become the envy of Europe… more

“Shakespeare wallahs,” Germain Greer stridently insists, created “a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women”… more

Italians, Russians, Spaniards: they all have agreed national epics. The English do not have any such text, says Philip Hensher, and therein lies a problem… more

That “lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose,” the newspaper, will land for the last time on a doorstep one day in 2043… more

“Suicide-mass murder,” writes Martin Amis about Palestinian Arab terrorism, “is more than terrorism: it is horrorism. It is a maximum malevolence”… more

José Ortega y Gasset knew that today, precisely because so much is possible, the worst is possible: regression, barbarity, decadence. To be free is to be free to do evil… more

Does it not demean a woman, every bit as much as it demeans a man, to make of her either a victim of men’s appetites or a fantasist of them?… more

September 7, 1940, “one of the fairest days of the century, a day of clear warm air and high blue skies,” the day the Blitz began… more

Many literary academics have been reluctant to deal with science, imagining they have disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative.” Time for them to face reality… more