In Britain in 1914, the stern and imposing figure of Field Marshal Lord Kitchener pointed a finger at young men, telling them, peremptorily: "Your country needs YOU." In the US in 1917, Uncle Sam...
1. Oxymoronica: Paradoxical Wit and Wisdom by Mardy Grothe. HarperCollins, £10.99. ISBN 97800072810082. Clinical Sports Medicine by Peter Brukner and Karim Khan. McGraw-Hill, £54.91. ISBN...
The relationship between creatives and their backers can be fraught, discovers Sally Feldman
As Brian Ladd's introduction tells us, autophobia is "an obscure psychiatric diagnosis of 'fear of oneself'". Ladd justifies his use of the term to indicate fear or hatred of cars on the basis that...
In the cultural jungle, one person fights the good fight, finds Fred Inglis
Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music by John Lucas, emeritus professor of English, Nottingham Trent University. Boydell Press, £25.00, ISBN 9781843834021"The Beecham story is not new, but so much...
Joanna Lewis on the riches that cast a shadow over an African nation's once-bright future
Daniel Herwitz asks some fascinating questions. What makes a star an icon? Why does the public create and consume iconic figures? Caught between transcendence and trauma, they lead a double existence...
Ever wondered what vampires and bad statistics have in common? According to Joel Best, they are both fiendishly difficult to kill. We live in a world where the media constantly bombard us with an...
Michelene Wandor on writers' revealing accounts of both their muses and their demons
A nanometre is a billionth of a metre. It is the size of a fullerene molecule consisting of 60 carbon atoms. Chemists have long been able to manipulate large numbers of molecules on this scale, and...
In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville's narrator Ishmael declares: "Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." Going to sea is a...
David Ayers finds that creative influences migrate both ways in the literature of the Americas
Did you know that many of the paintings by Francis Bacon, most notably Study for Crouching Nude (1952), were influenced by photographs of convulsing male hysterics from the Salpetriere hospital in...
When this book went to the publisher a few months ago, it had disturbing implications for Europeans dependent on gas for heating and Americans dependent on gas for running a car. The author, a...