THE THREAT TO HUMANITY FROM ROBOTS is real, but our new mechanical overlords won’t come from an advanced alien civilisation: we will invite them into our homes. As servants or sex toys, robots will come packaged as a cure for loneliness or sold to us

‘‘WASH THE CRAP out yer eyes” was a thing I heard a lot as a girl, from both parents, sometimes followed by “you can’t see for looking”. This was partly for reasons of survival and safety: I spent my childhood in country Queensland, home to some of t

WHEN FRIDA KAHLOdied in 1954 she was known as a successful artist with an operatically tragic personal history. Some aspects of her life were familiar, such as her two marriages to a more famous painter, the glamorous international bohemian circles i

RICHARD OVENDEN, librarian of the Bodleian in Oxford, recently published an impassioned account of the importance of collections of the written word. In Burning the Books (John Murray, £20), he examines the way in which libraries have been pillaged t

ROBIN HOOD. DICK TURPIN. Long Ben. Bonnie and Clyde. Dillinger. There’s something appealing about those individuals who simply say, “Hand it over.” And since the days of Daniel Defoe, crime has certainly paid well for writers. Out of the Ether: The A

WRITE OF WHAT YOU KNOW, they say, and Ms Lees, properly Gibson-Lees, seems well-suited to her self-imposed task. Her father was probably a spy (the crime), and in Hong Kong, where Ms Lees spent her youth, her mother was a headmistress (the dictionary

I SPENT THE EARLY DAYS OF LOCKDOWN writing and rewriting the conclusion to a book on the history of museums since the Second World War (actually, since the opening of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1939), desperately trying to figure out what the

WHEN A MAN REACHES a certain age, his thoughts to turn to the three G’s — grandchildren, gardening and genealogy. In my case — 59, since you ask — as my teenage children are still at school it’s too soon for the first, and while I love a beautiful ga

WHEN MARIANNE TAYLOR left the Kent coast and went inland to university, she couldn’t sleep. Not because, as I’m sure happened to most of us, there was a boy in the room above who stayed up until the early hours listening to French jazz while smoking

Adam Dant introduces The Bells of Whitechapel: “My print shows the historic significance of Britain’s oldest manufacturing business, across the globe and as a part of the deep fabric of London’s culture and community. “From St Mary le Bow, Cheapside,

Not shame, but more a pulsing regretThat I was so wild and thoughtless,Careless of others’ feelings, feeding my greed.Musk, champagne, drugs and deceptions,The casual cruelties, the kindnesses ignored,I was an animal, saurian with smiles.Yet some use

Lisa Hilton savours a timeless French bistro in Pimlico that displays no timidity with the ladle THE PACE OF DECLINE is a relative thing. Lamenting the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410, St Jerome wailed, “The whole world has died with one city”. Perh

THE PUBLICATION OF a second book on Anthony Whishaw within four years is both a delight and an important event. In Works On Paper Richard Davey uses his interviews with the artist to create a poetic and graceful narrative, complemented by good illust

‘‘SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT shows,” proclaimed my English poetry primer, “that moonlight on stained glass does not produce this effect.” The footnote was to a line in The Eve of St Agnes — the only poem with a description of sexual intercourse approved f

IN THE COURSE OF THE PAST fortnight Professor Cheryl Partington has, in no particular order, appeared on Start the Week, reviewed a biography of Sylvia Plath for the Observer (“crisp …finely judged …a fresh jewel in the diadem of Plath studies”), con

Derrida is the writerof the writing Derrida writes. The readers of Derrida readthe writings of the writer thatDerrida writes to read. Derrida, as a writer,derides the readings of the writingsthat the readers of the writerswhen they read the writers r