You tell yourself “It’s OK, it’s OK … ” but it’s really not! Scarlett Thomas is a tricky novelist to categorise. She has a playful, restless, sleeves-rolled-up approach to writing, in which she seldom

The origins of modern death Lets face it nobody did death like the Victorians. From Highgate Cemetery to the high drama of seances, from Jack the Ripper to Madame Blavatsky, from Waterloo Station t

End of Empire History sometimes provides us with neat dividing lines. Queen Victoria helpfully died just weeks into the new century, making way for a new era, but the nightmarish Twentieth Century did

Being in love is an act of carelessness of your own safety. Its risk! Sam and Lily are middle-aged lovers in Howard Jacobsons new novel and, in bed, they talk as much as anything else. Jacobson is r

Was George Harrison really the Economy Beatle? Philip Norman wrote Shout!, the first grown-up biography of The Beatles, shortly before John Lennon was murdered. People told him he was crazy, that Th

A goldmine of nutters, obsessives, murderers, vicars and, above all, readers! In a time before the internet, the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary was the Wickipedia of its day, crowdsourci

Dont knock it till youve tried it! We are familiar with some of the names: William Burroughs in the 1950s. Timothy Leary in the 60s, Hunter S Thompson in the 70s, those two guys who started

Have you never forgotten someone youve slept with? Neil Jordan is best known as an internationally famous film director, of course The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, Interview With The Vampire and many ot

Margaret Thatcher and Goth Culture It was the Age of Thatcher, and beyond the playgrounds of the red-braces wide boys and the Sloane Square privileged, it was grim. Unemployment was a weapon in the cl

Lawrence Krauss Head Of Zeus 20.00 Professor Lawrence Krauss has made major contributions to the field of theoretical physics and is one of the worlds great scientific communicators with a gift