The ingredients of compost are dead things or, as the YouTube gardener Bruce Darrell put it, ‘anything that was recently ...

The church had a pastor who really loved the sound of his own voice and he spoke for nearly two hours. His sermon, one day last December in South-East Nigeria, concerned the proper behaviour of men ...

The compass retains a sense of romance. It’s pleasingly approximate, twitchy and impulsive. It feels alive in a ...

For early modern writers, conception was an occasion to describe the otherwise indescribable: a woman’s orgasm, supposedly ...

His spaniel was up on its hind legs, paws on his master’s belly, where my paws happily had lately been. He was my host, and I ...

The evolution of teeth began in the oceans around half a billion years ago. First, filter-feeding fish evolved jaws – not to ...

Osborne proposed welfare cuts of £11 billion in June 2010 and a further £7 billion the following October; state pensions were protected by a ‘triple lock’ – they increased by whichever was the highest ...

It emerged that the embassy had been taken over by gunmen, though their identities and demands were still unknown. I guessed that they must have some connection with the seizure of the US embassy in ...

Not many Edinburgh residents collect beach-cast seaweed, but when a winter storm leaves a strandline deposit on Portobello beach, it feels to me like a gift or a visitation from another world. Seaweed ...

In 1524, astrologers warned of calamity in southern Germany: floods and failed harvests, sickness and war. The clergy would ‘drink the cup of bitterness’. But peasant disquiet was sufficiently visible ...

One can imagine the dilemma this sound narrative history posed to a publisher looking for a catchy title. Even so, The First Cold War is an unhelpful one. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Britain and ...

Towards the end of February, Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan accused the Senate president, Godswill Akpabio, the third most powerful man in Nigeria, ...