The views of Edward Carpenter, a late-Victorian libertarian and outspoken campaigner for gay love, women’s rights, nudism, recycling and just about every other progressive cause, would differ little from those held by many activists today. He advocated “plain living, friendship with the Animals, open-air habitats, fruitarian food and such degree of Nudity as we can reasonably attain to”, and was passionate about the need to “transform” politics and human relationships.

This history charts the evolution of “queenship”, from the first recorded consecration of a queen (the 12-year-old daughter of Charles the Bald) through to the reign of Elizabeth of York, mother of Henry VIII.

Hilton aims to set out how the role grew and developed, but she also paints lively, intimate portraits of the women themselves, and her account challenges a number of accepted orthodoxies. Arranged marriages, she points out, [...]

Exiled on the remote island of Patmos, the blind and aged John, once a disciple of Jesus, awaits the return of Christ together with a small band of stoical followers. Eventually their hope withers and, encouraged by the scheming Matthias, many renounce Christ’s teachings to rejoin the world of men. A group stays on, however, including John’s most devoted follower, young Papias. This tale is chiefly about the inner lives [...]

In this ambitious retelling of Mary Shelley’s novel, the young Victor Frankenstein comes from Switzerland to Oxford, where he meets Percy Shelley (or “Bysshe”, as he prefers). Fired with pseudo-Romantic ideals, Victor sets about the business of trying to “harness nature”.

He tinkers with putrefied corpses in a shed before moving to east London, where he falls in with the “doomsday men”, who are able to provide fresher bodies for [...]

From his hospital bed where he lies in a coma, Dai Wei, a young man shot by a soldier during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising, recounts the story of his life. His story is frequently interrupted as the novel skips back to the present day and his vegetative state, where he cannot see or move but can hear what is happening in the space around him. We learn about Wei’s [...]

Bullied by his brother and other “big boys”, largely ignored by his distracted parents, Kieron Smith feels his only sanctuary is his grandparents’ home – until he is moved from inner Glasgow to a new housing project on the outskirts of the city, where he struggles to adjust.

Like many children, Kieron is both uncomprehending and astonishingly perceptive of what is going on around him. Through him, Kelman mixes the [...]

“All eyes in the country, in the world, are on Pennsylvania right now,” the bright-eyed volunteer staffing the front desk at Obama’s Philadelphia headquarters told me. “We’re making history here; people are talking about issues they wouldn’t have been talking about for another fifty years if Barack wasn’t running.”

For the hundreds of young college graduates who have flocked to the state to work on Obama’s campaign, this is [...]

There was much controversy over last year’s £50m grant to the Tate towards a building in which to display more of the works stored away in its back rooms. Critics have asked if the money would be better spent elsewhere, especially in the light of recent government funding cutbacks.

Richard Fortey’s book would certainly suggest this. A former senior palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, Fortey has written extensively about [...]

This worthy tome is premised on the old cliché that if enough people did enough of the right things, the world really could be a better place. Andrew Mawson was, as he puts it, “tired with policy papers and academic theory” aimed at tackling social problems, so he set up the Bromley-by-Bow community centre in east London, which provides education and health care, and helps people find jobs as well [...]

Poppa Neutrino (né William David Pearlman) first found international fame sailing across the Atlantic in a raft fashioned from refuse collected from the streets of New York. The journey lasted more than 60 days and came perilously close to failure, and when he and his crew finally washed up on the shores of Ireland, their ferry looked like "a spectre, a ghost ship", or a "vessel from the end of [...]