Afghanistan has poetry in its soul | Reza Mohammadi
A Taliban poetry book may have raised eybrows but Aghans' lives have been threaded together by verse throughout its historyWhen the Taliban's poetry book was published in the UK this month, many found it very strange indeed, but someone who understands...
John Donne, priest and poet, part 1: love, conscience and martyrdom | Roz Kaveney
John Donne thought too much - about love and death and his rejection of the choices of his family to rise up the church's ranksLike many of us, he thought too much about everything.It was always the complaint against John Donne's love poetry, during th...
Migraines: they are all in the head
They start with a spinning black penny, retch-inducing smells, impaired thought and speech. But migraines bring odd pleasures with their painThe first time it happened I was in bed with a book, aged maybe 10. And I remember going over the same lin...
Why I want all our children to read the King James Bible
The good book should be read as a great work of literature – but it is not a guide to morality, as the education secretary Michael Gove would have us believeFor some reason the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (UK) was not approached...
The battle of the book reviews | Lionel Shriver
Professional critics are no more reliable than Amazon ratings, a study shows. So do we really need them?Is the professional book reviewer an anachronism? In a recent Harvard Business School study of nonfiction reviews, assessments in mainstream media o...
Roy Hodgson liking John Updike will take some getting used to | Barney Ronay
The new England manager is serious and classy so should he really be reading work by such a frisky author?Refracted unflatteringly through the prism of modern football's revolving idiot-scope, there is a tendency for football managers to dwindle away t...
How our fight for Kensal Rise library has drawn a community together | Marika Giles Samson
By fighting our library's closure, we've shown how communities can work together and achieve extraordinary thingsThey arrived at 7:30am on Wednesday, with trucks and security guards, to clear out Kensal Rise library – as they had five other libraries...
So, you think reason guides your politics? Think again | Simon Jenkins
I thought I could see tribal bigotry at 100 paces and fell it with a Socratic blow, but I was deluding myself – and so are youAre you for growth or austerity? Do you sympathise with the Greeks, or regard them as getting what they deserve? If you disa...
Texas’s war on history | Katherine Stewart
Christian-nationalist zealots are trying to rewrite US history, airbrush slavery and enshrine creationism in Texas schoolsDon McLeroy, chairman of the Texas State Board of Education from 2007 to 2009, is a "young earth" creationist. He believes the ear...
Texas’s war on history | Katherine Stewart
Christian-nationalist zealots are trying to rewrite US history, airbrush slavery and enshrine creationism in Texas schoolsDon McLeroy, chairman of the Texas State Board of Education from 2007 to 2009, is a "young earth" creationist. He believes the ear...
So Alain de Botton thinks we need a new kind of porn. Well I’ve got a few ideas for him | Hadley Freeman