The church had a pastor who really loved the sound of his own voice and he spoke for nearly two hours. His sermon, one day last December in South-East Nigeria, concerned the proper behaviour of men ...

For early modern writers, conception was an occasion to describe the otherwise indescribable: a woman’s orgasm, supposedly ...

The ingredients of compost are dead things or, as the YouTube gardener Bruce Darrell put it, ‘anything that was recently ...

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 ...

The Tories, in office, prepared a trap for Labour. It had a large sign on it saying ‘It’s a Trap’ and then next ...

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 ...

Eventually a Royal African Company ship was sent to Barbados and the rescued Sessarakoo taken to England, where he could finally learn the ‘white man’s book’. Sessarakoo was known not for his ...

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 ...

Through the post arrives an artefact of a vanished civilisation, trailing that nimbus of mystery and sadness and forsaken possibility that belongs to reminders of a world we have lost. It comes in the ...

Not many Edinburgh residents collect beach-cast seaweed, but when a winter storm leaves a strandline deposit on Portobello beach, it feels to me like a gift or a visitation from another world. Seaweed ...