If the best-known glories of ancient Egypt are the pyramids, the mummies and the gold of Tutankhamun, then ancient ...

The Danish author Solvej Balle came to fame with According to the Law (1993; 1996 in English): four linked stories about “the ...

In recent decades, critical thinking about the “liveliness” of the natural world has gained momentum. Anthropologists and ...

Join 40,000 readers to enjoy a regular dose of inspiration and motivation, delivered to your inbox every Thursday.

640pp. University of Chicago Press. £32 (US $39.95). In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 ...

In the opening and title poem of his ninth collection, Ian Duhig recalls finding “a pebble the exact shape of a light bulb”, at which point another “lit … in a thought bubble” above his “dull bulb of ...

To Albert Camus, Amsterdam’s concentric waterways resembled the circles of hell. His protagonist in The Fall (1956), a “judge- penitent” who whiles away his days in a seedy sailors’ bar on the Zeedijk ...

424pp. Princeton University Press. £25 (US $29.95). Charles S. Singleton’s version of The Divine Comedy (first published in six volumes between 1970 and 1975, and now reissued by Princeton University ...

Oba Electroplating Factory is the fourth instalment of Drawn and Quarterly’s seven-volume Complete Mature Works of Yoshiharu Tsuge series. It is a collection of seven short pieces published in 1973–4, ...