“Biology expands our vision of life, letting us see beyond our experiences of being alive, look back over billions of years of living history, and peer down into the microscopic confines of a cell”. …

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…

How, in the 19th century, did a small, previously marginal, North West European country manage to install its Queen as Empress of India, the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire? Why didn’t the Mughal Emperor conquer Britain? This, of course is a deliberate echo of Jared Diamond’s famous…

That’s us — Great Britain, the UK — I’m talking about. If the term “Warfare State” is unfamiliar to you, as it will be to most I will explain. The term was coined by the historian David Edgerton; I have taken issue with many of the contentions in his book…

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…