Is it all relative? Jim Al-Khalili’s attempt to reconcile subjective experience with the science of time shows how little we still know. By Dylan Neri bout the limits of science, German physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote: “the concepts of natural lan- guage . . . seem to be more stable in the expansion of knowledge than the precise terms of scientific lan- guage.” That is, reality seems to be stran…
Love and Death in the World of Jane Austen MYSTERIES Tom NoLaN Two amateur sleuths try to find a killer— and a way to marry. JONATHAN DARCY and Juliet Tilney return in Claudia Gray’s “The Fatal Unpleasantness at Netherfield” (Vintage, 320 pages, $19), the latest entry of a delightful series set in an imagined version of Jane Aus- ten’s literary universe. Jonathan and Juliet, who occasionally act a…
n 2002, at the start of my five- year assignment as Rome corre- spondent for the Financial Times, a government aide showed me around Palazzo Chigi, the official residence of Italian prime ministers. On one wall hung photographs of the premiers since Italy’s creation as a nationstatein1861. Among them, with no suggestion that he was any different from his pred- ecessors and successors, was Benito M…
Fairytale families and spellbinding sonnets [OI By Suzi Feay athers writing about daugh- ters is still a comparatively rare subject in poetry. Theres the odd poem here and there (Ted Hughes on Frieda, joy- ous; WB Yeats on Anne, apprehensive) but Northern Irish writer Eoghan Walls dedicates most of his third collection of verse to the topic in Elsa and the Wolfman (Seren £10.99). Elsa quickly beco…
John Berger: the radical who taught us to see art anew A compelling portrait of the writer and critic who brought European ideas to English sensibilities. By Joe Moshenska n 2025, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens hosted an arresting exhibition of works which commented, in pain- fully direct and captivatingly oblique ways, on the relationships between humans and animals. It was tit…
The long reach of gunfire Surviving a mall shooting leads a woman to re-examine motherhood, migration and mourning. By Lucy Popescu dwidge Danticat’s story “Sun- rise, Sunset”, from her 2019 collection Everything Inside, captured the devastating toll of Alzheimer’s disease on a grandmother and her daughter. In her poignant fifth novel Déy, Danticat writes of another grandmother's men- tal fragilit…
أحمد عبدربه يكشف عن النجوة الواسعة بين المواثيق الدولية وموازين القوة (٢-١) عالم بلا قانون.. سياسة بلا مباد حين يكتب الأقوياء قواعد العالم يضع »عالم بلا قانون .. سياسة بلا مبادئ« القارئ أمام فجوة واسعة بين المواثخيق الدولية وموازين القوة التى تحدد مَن يملك القرار ومَن يدفع الثمن. ومن هذه الزاوية، يستعرض أستاذ العلوم السياسية د. أحمد عبد ربه أكثر من قرن فى العلاقات الدولية، فى كتابه الصادر عن دار…
n 2002, at the start of my five- year assignment as Rome corre- spondent for the Financial Times, a government aide showed me around Palazzo Chigi, the official residence of Italian prime ministers. On one wall hung photographs of the premiers since Italy’s creation as a nation state in 1861. Among them, with no suggestion that he was any different from his pred- ecessors and successors, was Benit…
The first summer's tale Eric Rohmer’s 1946 novel heralds the screen classics the French director would go on to make. By Tobias Grey ric Rohmer was the Scarlet Pimpernel of the French New Wave, so elusive as to be almast invisible. The product of a rigid bour- geois Catholic upbringing, in the 1950s and '60s the director masqueraded as a teacher of classics, long after he had left the profession, …
Puyi and Wanrong in the 1920s Lucky Strikes and eunuchs: the life of Chinas last emperor A vivid look inside the doomed world of Puyi, the last man to sit on the Dragon Throne. By Pratinav Anil uyi, Son of Heaven and Lord of Ten Thousand Years, or, more prosaically, the last emperor of China, led a powerless life. Born in Peking (Beijing) in 1906, he was put on the Dragon Throne by the ultraviolen…
