The Ming doctor Li Shizhen’s pharmacopoeia is widely known in China, and the man himself has appeared on postage stamps and ...

It is not often that a book on ancient India is aimed at a popular readership, perhaps with good reason. Sources for early India are arcane and difficult, dates are absent or disputed, and scholarly ...

The American cartoonist and illustrator Charles Burns turned to his own adolescence in Seattle in the 1970s as inspiration for his now cult classic, Black Hole. First issued between 1995 and 2005, in ...

David Baddiel’s candid memoir, My Family, is mostly about his parents and their “unbounded non-parenting”. I puzzled over the title – why the memoir? Then I realized that it relates to earlier outings ...

The line separating the living and non-living is not a sharp one. It has long been realized that the abiotic – chemical elements, water, fire and gasses – clearly affect the biotic, ie life. It has ...

The ideas of the German-Jewish mathematician Emmy Noether (not least the four-part theorem that bears her name) laid the foundation for much of modern physics, yet it is the case that students today ...

The Argentine novelist, journalist and librettist Pola Oloixarac pulls no punches. (Unimpressed by Han Kang’s recent Nobel prize, she condemned the new laureate as a “middle-brow author” who writes in ...