Philip Larkin, in an obituary of Louis MacNeice said “he was… a town observer: his poetry was the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen and ice-cream soda, lawn-mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the newsboys were shouting. In addition he displayed a sophisticated sentimentality about falling…

“Extractivism” is not a word much bandied about today; “populism” is. But the latter is misnomer: the project that brought Trump to power in America and will not disappear now that Biden is President is a one fomented by ultra right wing billionaires in the USA like Robert Mercer and…

Frank Zappa once commented on the difference timbre makes to any melody, citing the notion of trying to play ‘Purple Haze’ on bagpipes (don’t try it — even thinking about it is bad enough). So if you take the same musical pattern and transform it with the timbres appropriate to…

It’s that time of year when gardeners can’t keep up with the burgeoning growth of their plants. We can only tackle one job at a time and behind your back everything else is growing at a phenomenal rate. …

I have accidentally come across a very remarkable plant. Cobaea scandens is a climbing annual from Mexico that grows to three metres from seed. I first saw it two years ago on the TV programme Gardener’s World and was intrigued enough to buy some seeds. It grows in an ingenious…

AI and Big Data are the future, obviously. Humans are such feeble things and, anyway, free will has been proven to be an illusion. But with all our personal data on the big databases someone knows our own mind better than we do ourselves, don’t they? It’s obviously already happening…

Do we really need farms to produce our food? For most of human history the question would have seemed absurd: it was farming — ie moving from being hunter-gathers to creating domesticated animals and crops — that opened the door to civilisation. But there’s a growing movement that suggests we…