Though a talented poet, Rebecca Watts remains best known for her essay “The Cult of the Noble Amateur”, published in the poetry journal PN Review in 2018. It was ironic that this piece attracted much ...

Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio comes a decade after his version of the Inferno. That was set in the University of Essex; this is set on Mersea Island, which makes one wonder: where will his ...

Oba Electroplating Factory is the fourth instalment of Drawn and Quarterly’s seven-volume Complete Mature Works of Yoshiharu Tsuge series. It is a collection of seven short pieces published in 1973–4, ...

According to Scott G. Bruce, our “inner demons” represent the “last vestige” of more traditional ideas of an infernal hierarchy. The texts in his Penguin Book of Demons predate this inward turn, ...

The life of Jeremy Catto, a tutor in medieval history at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1970 until his retirement in 2006, opens a window onto a lost world. In the pressure cooker of modern uni­versity ...

If the best-known glories of ancient Egypt are the pyramids, the mummies and the gold of Tutankhamun, then ancient Mesopotamia ought to be famous for its astonishing legacy of poetry and prose. For ...

Neill Blomkamp’s underappreciated film Elysium (2013) depicts an Earth ravaged by pollution, a giant shanty town where people lead brutalized lives, most involved in extracting what remains of the ...

In recent decades, critical thinking about the “liveliness” of the natural world has gained momentum. Anthropologists and ...

640pp. University of Chicago Press. £32 (US $39.95). In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 ...