From Shakespeare’s sonnets and Donne’s songs (“Tell me where all past times are”) to Wordsworth and Eliot (“All time is unredeemable”), poets have gone in search of lost time. It was this theme—one of ...

Let’s start at the very beginning: prehistory. Although are we actually starting there? Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory is less about life thousands of years ago, and more about how, ...

Keir Starmer’s promise that Labour will build 300,000 homes in each of the next five years has been met with some scepticism. The last time the United Kingdom managed to build more than that number of ...

Most foreign journalists are barred by Israel from entering Gaza. Most, but not all. In October 2024, the right-wing polemicist Douglas Murray was given exclusive access to the Tel al-Sultan district ...

“We have big plans for the future!” tweeted Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, after his first phone call with Donald Trump, just hours after the United States presidential election was ...

Like many parents, I try to avoid contributing to the plastic deluge. I often give my daughter, now 16 months old, second-hand gifts and toys. But I find it harder gifting hand-me-downs to others so I ...

Twelve months ago, we published our shortlist of Top Thinkers for 2024—and you, Prospect readers, chose well. You picked Daron Acemoglu as the winner, and in October he received a second accolade: the ...

Most governments are at some point relaunched, often more than once. This is usually because a crisis hits—such as the Falklands War in 1982, Black Wednesday in 1992, the Iraq War in 2003, the Brexit ...

The best idea ever—bar none—is that games are really important, actually. And that idea will be embedded in your head after reading Kelly Clancy’s Playing with Reality. Clancy, a neuroscientist, ...

Our greatest novelists shouldn’t have to go through near-death experiences to publish brilliant nonfiction, but perhaps—in a perverse way—we should be glad that both Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi ...

There is a feeling of utter randomness to The Position of Spoons: and Other Intimacies, Deborah Levy’s new collection of nonfiction writing. In a world of pithy blurbs—and the publishing industry’s ...

Few contemporary novelists are such beautiful prose stylists as Alan Hollinghurst. Fewer still have produced a body of work so unfailingly pleasurable to read. To make these claims is to parrot many ...