Most wars kill men, and leave widows and fatherless children. The war on Gaza follows a different pattern. According ...

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

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

Men were frequently rounded up during the German occupation of Rome, to be requisitioned as labour for the construction of the city’s defences – the Allied arrival at the gates of Rome was endlessly ...

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 ...

For early modern writers, conception was an occasion to describe the otherwise indescribable: a woman’s orgasm, supposedly required if she were to conceive successfully. In early modernity, uroscopy ...

Early in Playboy, the first book in Constance Debré’s trilogy of novels about a woman whose life closely resembles Debré’s own, the narrator describes the feelings of intense boredom she began ...

Through the post arrives an artefact of a vanished civilisation, trailing that nimbus of mystery and sadness and forsaken possibility that belongs to reminders of a world we have lost. It comes in the ...

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 ...