Belanglo State Forest is two hours north of my home in Canberra – barely a drive by Aussie standards, just a quick detour off the Hume Highway on the way ...

A special interview with the sociologist Richard Sennett takes us from Roland Barthes to Leonard Bernstein, while Hettie Judah considers two memoirs inspired by a love of seventeenth-century art ...

The course of true love never did run smooth, but perhaps that’s only because we were missing the right tech. Three new books about relationships, from Argentina, the Netherlands and the US, show how ...

Susannah Gibson’s new book is a biographical history of the women who formed and hosted some of the most famous London salons in the eighteenth century. Following work on this subject by Norma Clarke, ...

Though she was not a deaf-mute engraver, a gay United States army captain, a Black Marxist physician or a dapper hunchback, Carson McCullers wrote all these characters, and wrote them well, and did so ...

Darkness everywhere. Night pervades, then dies.Now kerb sweepers, bread vans and early trafficrumble by my window-side bed while rain-musicfizzles on slate roofs as dawn pours inside.An alarm squawks ...

The late Derek Parfit imagined the following choice. We could carefully steward our planet’s bounties, investing in infrastructure and renewable energy while leaving resources for future generations.

368pp. Verso. Paperback, £11.99. In December 2018, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, received an email from a group of lawyers headed “Julian Assange is seeking your ...

Selected poetry and poetic prose 1967–2020 Translated by John Taylor 276pp. Diálogos. Paperback, £21.95 (US $26.95).

Heather O'Donoghue puzzles over the locked rooms and red herrings of the crime genre; and Josh Raymond on an animated attempt to understand teenage turmoil.

Flesh has a thousand sons but I have one. He plays with a pig’s rib he has gnawed all the gray meat from. How do you know it lived a long enough life? how do you know it won’t come back angry? He ...