Most wars kill men, and leave widows and fatherless children. The war on Gaza follows a different pattern. According ...

The evolution of teeth began in the oceans around half a billion years ago. First, filter-feeding fish evolved jaws – not to ...

His spaniel was up on its hind legs, paws on his master’s belly, where my paws happily had lately been. He was my host, and I ...

Men were frequently rounded up during the German occupation of Rome, to be requisitioned as labour for the construction of the city’s defences – the Allied arrival at the gates of Rome was endlessly ...

Osborne proposed welfare cuts of £11 billion in June 2010 and a further £7 billion the following October; state pensions were protected by a ‘triple lock’ – they increased by whichever was the highest ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire. Find out more about the London ...

‘OK, that’s that. It’s over now,’ Björn Ulvaeus thought after Abba broke up in 1982. ‘But,’ as Chal Ravens writes in the latest LRB, ‘Björn’s zeitgeist detector was, as usual, on the blink.’ By the ...

For early modern writers, conception was an occasion to describe the otherwise indescribable: a woman’s orgasm, supposedly required if she were to conceive successfully. In early modernity, uroscopy ...

Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century ...

It emerged that the embassy had been taken over by gunmen, though their identities and demands were still unknown. I guessed that they must have some connection with the seizure of the US embassy in ...

It's now possible to take a home pregnancy test eight days after ovulation, yet in the 16th century, women sometimes turned to astrologers for confirmation. And in the 1950s and 1960s, one might ...