Slavery is one of the oldest and most persistent institutions of humankind. It was already well established four millennia ago when it was mentioned in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Today it has been formally abolished almost everywhere, but there are still reckoned to be some 30 million people living in some form of forced labour.
When I lived in south London, my Algerian barber used to tell me that he came from Souk Ahras, ‘the home town of Augustine’. I found it strange to hear a forbidding doctor of the early church described as a local boy made good, but Catherine Conybeare shows me that I should not have done.
‘Something strange is happening in the world of children’s and YA [young adult] literature,’ writes Adam Szetela, and his horrifyingly compelling book certainly bears that out. It offers a sobering report from the front lines of how identity politics and online pile-ons against anyone who sins against the latest pieties actually play out in the
There is a fine tradition of campus novels that stretches from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) through Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) to Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011) and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It (2024). Emily Adrian’s Seduction Theory, her
What is your p(doom)? This is the pseudo-scientific manner in which some people express the strength of their belief that an artificial superintelligence running on computers will, in the coming decades, kill all humans. If your p(doom) is 0.1, you think it 10 per cent likely. If your p(doom) is 0.9, you’re very confident it
We all know that life is full of people who try to con us, often starting with a voice on the phone. ‘I’m speaking from the fraud department of your bank.’ ‘I’m your local BT engineer.’ No, you’re not from either my bank or BT. In all likelihood you are speaking from a scam farm
There is nobody who finds Gwyneth Paltrow, 52, more interesting than the woman who was a teenager in the 1990s. This was the last era of the true pin-up, the heart-throb, the movie star as icon, rather than the whiffy melange of brand-pusher, pound-shop activist and reality star that constitutes celebrity today. I was as
‘Full of strokes and blows/ broken, pitifully wounded’, the man, naked, or almost so, stands full frontal, legs and arms parted, one limb sometimes slightly bent to signal the beginning of a movement. His body is punctured by lesions and wounds, with small depictions of their material causes attached almost as adornment – knives or
Language, it has been said, is the only true democracy – changed by the people that use it. But as with any democracy, there is plenty of disagreement about what alterations are either possible or permissible. Japanese uses three distinct writing systems – kanji, hiragana and katakana – and the relationship between two of them,
Nicola Sturgeon has all the usual things she wants to achieve in her memoir: rumours to scotch, a legacy to spell out, and so on. But the most important thing to the former first minister seems to be telling her readers that she is in fact not Nicola Sturgeon. The ‘seemingly confident, combative woman who
