You know what you know, and I know what I know, but only when we know what the other knows do we have common knowledge. That’s the crux of cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s latest work, focusing…
Every story, they say, needs a beginning, a middle and an end; every story needs a setting. What if that isn’t true? Can you write when everything is in flux, when you are unmoored from places, and…
"We live in a world that deserves unicorns," says Katherine Rundell. If you haven't come across Rundell's work yet, you will soon. She's written over a dozen books, including an award-winning…
A third of British adults who used to read for pleasure don't anymore. And according to the OECD, literacy itself, not just the habit of it, is declining or stagnating across most of the developed…
Terror has sought Salman Rushdie out time and time again for the past 40 years, ever since the controversial publication of his novel The Satanic Verses and the furious response to it from much of the…
From the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the current escalation of the war between Israel, Palestine and their neighbouring countries, the Middle East has been besieged by almost constant conflict. Is…
Historical fantasy, campus satire, industry exposé; five books in, and no one's quite worked out what a "RF Kuang novel" is supposed to look like. That's rather the point. This September she publishes…
Charlotte Higgins has spent most of her career interviewing and critiquing artists, authors and poets as the Guardian's chief culture writer. It was unlikely that her work would ever take her to a…
In the summer of 2024, riots tore through British towns, and since then old questions have continued to resurface about who belongs in the country. Taj Ali has spent years digging into a history…
Throughout history, art, and artists, have caused moral outrage. For a long time we had the liberal notion that we could separate great art from bad artists, but we do seem to live in a time of…
