My dad was an unhappy man. He used to complain about the slightest thing being out of place – a pen, the honeypot, his special knife with the fattened grip. By the time his health really started ...

Pompeii is famous for being destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, which buried the once-thriving ancient Roman city under some 5 m of volcanic debris. With a dark irony, it was this ...

Featuring an unforgettable opening motif – ‘dun dun dun duuun’ is just one of the myriad ways it’s been expressed in writing – Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No 5 in C minor, Op 6 (aka ‘Beethoven’s ...

Few scientific disagreements lead to public controversy. But there are times when the subject or the participants in a debate so capture the public imagination that otherwise dry, technical matters of ...

To the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, technology was far more than just tools that people develop, but systems through which the world both reveals itself to us and shapes the way we see it. For ...

In this 1976 clip from the long-running BBC children’s show Blue Peter, the UK presenter Valerie Singleton travels to the now-famous Amsterdam house where the teenage Anne Frank hid from Nazi ...

In late 2016, a team of palaeontologists, led by Julia Clarke from the University of Texas at Austin, confirmed they had discovered the oldest known fossil of a bird’s voice box, known as a syrinx. It ...

is the author of The Moral Economists: R H Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E P Thompson and the Critique of Capitalism (2017). He lives in Sydney. Critiques of capitalism come in two varieties. First, there is ...

‘It’s natural,’ says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘to think that time can be represented by a line.’ We imagine the past stretching in a line behind us, the future stretching in an unseen ...

Every society depends on violence workers, but what makes young men take a job that risks their lives and harms others?

Political philosophy – a discipline we trace back to Plato and Aristotle – is reasoning about how we live together in political units. It is about states, government, laws, institutions and ...

Far from turning its back on the sea, the fate of Qing China was tied as much to tides and storms as to cavalry and walls ...