News and reviews
Unsuitable featured in Cosmopolitan
Added on 30/06/2025
We all have our own unique ways of expressing ourselves through fashion, even if we don’t realise we do. Whether we dress to stand out, dress to fit in, or simply put clothes on our body just so we aren’t naked, the way we present ourselves to the world is a conscious act that says something about who we are.
READ MOREIs Anyone Listening? reviewed in Nature
Added on 30/06/2025
The summer of 1985 marked Denise Herzing’s first time swimming with wild Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis), in the “gin-clear” waters of the Bahamas. Planning to study their behaviour during a six-week trip, the marine biologist realized within just a few days that she would need to spend decades with these long-lived animals to fully document how they communicate with one another.
READ MOREJim reviewed in the TLS
Added on 27/06/2025
Within a month of its publication in North America in February 1885, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was banned in Concord, Massachusetts, where it was dismissed by local authorities as “trash and suitable only for the slums”. Set in the antebellum South, Mark Twain’s most famous novel centres on two fugitives: Huck, a white teenager escaping an abusive father, and Jim, an enslaved Black man seeking freedom.
READ MORETattoos reviewed in the TLS
Added on 27/06/2025
Writing in these pages last year, Ian Sansom observed tartly that “tattoos became largely unremarkable sometime between Mattel’s introduction of the Totally Stylin’ Tattoos Barbie (Doll N4758) in 2009 and the arrival of Samantha Cameron’s ankle tattoo in Downing Street in 2010” (TLS, August 16, 2024).
READ MOREBeastly Britain reviewed in the Guardian
Added on 27/06/2025
When newts go a-wooing, sometime in the spring, their signature move is the handstand. Girl newts cluster round to watch, while the boy newts flip on to their creepily human hands and shake their tails in the air. The waggiest newt is the winner, although the actual act of love is a strictly no-contact sport.
READ MORESorry for the Inconvenience But This Is an Emergency reviewed in the TLS
Added on 20/06/2025
Donald Trump’s first inauguration as president of the United States was met with protests around the world. More than half a million people participated in the Women’s March in Washington on January 21, 2017.
READ MOREMultitudes reviewed in the TLS
Added on 20/06/2025
Donald Trump’s first inauguration as president of the United States was met with protests around the world. More than half a million people participated in the Women’s March in Washington on January 21, 2017.
READ MOREGhosts, Trolls and the Hidden People reviewed in the TLS
Added on 20/06/2025
Iceland before the twentieth century was by all accounts a gloomy place. The turf and driftwood houses in which most Icelanders lived were stuffy and largely windowless; the oil lamps that illuminated them during the long dark winters too weak to light whole rooms. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that a belief in the supernatural flourished.
READ MOREAmazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact reviewed in Nature
Added on 20/06/2025
Astronomers observed the first confirmed exoplanet in 1992. Some 5,900 are now known, in about 4,500 planetary systems, with around 1,000 containing several planets, according to NASA. No life has been detected yet, showing just “how rare our planet Earth still is” and how “the imagination imbued within science fiction can only carry us so far”, notes science journalist Keith Cooper.
READ MOREWho’s a Good Dog? featured in the Observer
Added on 20/06/2025
All I ever wanted was a pet. Many pets, ideally. As a young child, I was permitted only hamsters and goldfish, and aged eight, around the turn of the millennium, I wept to my mother about the Sony Aibo, fearing that the robot dog would make real ones redundant.
READ MOREVanessa Bell reviewed in the New Statesman
Added on 18/06/2025
One of artist Vanessa Bell’s earliest memories of her sister, Virginia Woolf, was the future writer asking Bell “which I liked best, my father or my mother.” Vanessa was the elder of the two girls, but they were both young enough to be “jumping around naked” in the bathroom.
READ MOREA Philosophy of Shame reviewed in the Spectator
Added on 18/06/2025
In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the ‘grace of feeling shame’. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden.
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