The term is usually used to describe the geographical area from the eastern Mediterranean to Iran, including Syria, Jordan, ...

Epstein hosted a dinner at Harvard in 2004, with attendees including evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers (centre right). Credit: Alamy Stock Photo It was not a huge surprise to find myself in the ...

The Life You Want (Hamish Hamilton) by Adam Phillips Imagine you are at the airport, picking out a new book for the trip, and ...

This piece accompanies Marcus Chown’s feature on the discovery of cosmic background radiation, from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. Perhaps the most famous accidental discovery of all is ...

This article is a preview from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here. I’d arranged to meet the sorceress at 4pm, but I was running late. Hurrying past ...

On paper, Buddhism looks pretty good. It has a philosophical subtlety married to a stated devotion to tolerance that makes it stand out amongst the world religions as uniquely not awful. Even ...

Meticulously scientific and scientist-friendly, Daniel Dennett is first and foremost a philosopher, and this is the latest foray in his 50-year quest to establish an evolutionary understanding of the ...

Adults play on water slide set up in Bristol, May 2014. Credit: Alamy It’s late summer and the afternoon sun is beating off Shoreditch’s sheer glass facades and gum-littered pavements. My colleagues ...

As a young child, my brother and I would be packed into the family car each year at Christmas and driven to Rochester, in north Kent. There, my father had an annual engagement that, to be quite frank, ...

For many generations in societies shaped by Christianity, monogamy has been the almost undisputed champion of relationship norms. In Britain and the US, it has been held up as the dominant – really ...

David Olusoga is a British-Nigerian historian, author, presenter and BAFTA-winning filmmaker. He is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. His most recent television series ...

Now that I am in my late eighties, I have sadly become used to losing good friends of a similar age. But the news of the death of Caspar Melville tragically fails to fit that pattern. For Caspar died ...