Seeking alien contact could be the thing that triggers our own implosion.
Even as we move ever further away from the Troubles, military salutes at funerals are revealing sectarian alliances.
The new play Gloria has an irate copy-editor gun down her colleagues; the reality of working at a magazine is much less dramatic – but emotion and ambition still run high.
Don’t the Tories expel members who fund rival parties?
Dim middle-class children do not enjoy life chances equal to those of their brighter working-class peers. Their prospects are, by some distance, better.
All things considered, the leaked video of Lord Sewel barely caused a stir. Could it be that we now find ourselves empathising with the exposed?
I asked my new friends if I could stay for a few days whilst my landlords dealt with a rat problem. I ended up staying forever.
In 2015 the Labour Party has been defeated in a second successive election, once more by a significant margin - and the contenders for leader don't offer much hope.
“The people’s flag is palest pink,” Attlee quipped. “It’s not red blood but only ink.” That slogan should be stamped on the back of the “What would Clem do?” T-shirts that have become fashionable among Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters.
A reflection on the summer magic of glow-worms.
Over 70 years, Colin O'Brien has recorded change and continuity in the lives of Londoners, creating a social record of breathtaking expanse.
Can a young, Mandarin-speaking Oxford graduate revive the paper Paul Anderson once accused of "bone-headed Stalinism"?
When Ioannis Ikonomou arrived in Brussels as an interpreter, the EU had 12 official languages. He learnt them all - then kept going.
Hayek’s most striking intellectual trait was one uncommon in academic life – independence of mind, which enabled him to swim against some of the most powerful currents of the age.
Can Jeremy Corbyn really lead the Labour party? NS editor Jason Cowley meets the potential leader to talk campaigns, the media, and how he'd handle PMQs.
From Fiji to San Francisco, William Finnegan evokes the magic and terror of chasing waves in rapturous prose.
“Billy was a shit,” Bogdanovich told me over the phone from LA.
He made his name / From being bulletproof.
Tony Little’s guide to education lists books that “every bright 16-year-old should read”. We asked some of our favourite authors to share their suggestions, from Myles na gCopaleen to Bill Bryson.
A tale of lived versus mechanical time.
From Dr No to the new Spectre, 007 villains have a lot to tell us about the state of the nation.
Violence in human beings has something to do with our sense of meaning, our sense that something is at stake in our identity or integrity.
We pile ever greater pressure upon individual schools, when in fact they only truly succeed as part of a broader network of support, learning and mentoring.
I've always bought colouring books – but these new, "therapeutic" offerings make me feel faintly distressed.
From toddlers to teens, Amanda Craig rounds up the best books for children.
Establishing an explicitly exclusive and anti-populist club is, of course, a long-established route to long-term popularity.
Manglehorn and Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation show two approaches to ageing on screen.
Admittedly, Life in Squares is a pretty high-class kind of soap opera - but it's still about who is sleeping with who.
Farming Today and Open Country take on seafood.
The idea of my child getting behind the wheel of several tonnes of rusting Mercedes is one that I cannot begin to grasp, like trying to imagine what is beyond the universe.
The vineyards still occasionally throw up fossils of dinosaurs that were checking out the local flora and fauna 185 million years ago.
To Emma, there seemed only two explanations possible: either the NHS had woefully undertreated her in the past, or my American colleagues had been wilfully overdoing it in order to maximise their income
Mark Laird's A Natural History of English Gardening reveals gardens as arenas of debate between the natural and the domesticated.
Not many people realise how strong Buddhism is in contemporary Scotland, or that arguably the reason for this is topographic as much as spiritual.
My feet were burnt from standing in very high heels and everything deteriorated quite quickly.
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