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If you've ever wondered how an invisibility cloak would work, how to terraform Mars, how to make a forcefield, whether we're living in a Matrix-like simulation or how far we [...]

My wife argues with the children about video games. I argue with the children about video games. The children argue with each other about video games. Consequently, I argue with [...]

Grade: B+ Most video games challenge the player's problem-solving skills, reaction time or hand-eye co-ordination. But a handful of them offer satisfactions of a different sort: the gentlest of difficulty [...]

'Hi Jacques,' I say as the publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions appears on my Zoom screen with his Franz Hals facial hair. 'Thanks for making the time.' I explain, apologetically but [...]

Several hundred years ago, in the 2014 film 20,000 Days On Earth, Ray Winstone asked Nick Cave: 'Do you want to reinvent yourself?' Cave, looking out from his sunglasses, replied: [...]

Grade: A- One thing videogames are surprisingly good at is scaring the willies out of you. Claustrophobia, unease, jump-scares, anxious-making camera-angles... Gamers of my generation will not have forgotten the [...]

Grade: B- There was much to hope for with this game. Its developer is Rocksteady--the studio which gave us the superb Batman: Arkham series. A lot of money was poured [...]

Grade: A Why don't you go outside and get some fresh air instead of playing that stupid game? A) I've been outside, and I didn't like it. And B) there's [...]

The Forgers: The Forgotten Story of the Holocaust's Most Audacious Rescue Operation by Roger Moorhouse Bodley Head, [pounds sterling]25, pp. 288 In the summer of 1942, the Polish poet Wladyslaw [...]

The internet, as we all know, is a place for rage and hate. It's a free-fire zone in which even something as apparently innocuous as Facebook--original use-case: posting family snaps [...]

Acouple of weeks ago, there was a small sensation in the news pages when a Google AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, released transcripts of a conversation he'd had with one of [...]

When I say goodbye to Sir Salman Rushdie in his offices at New York University in Lower Manhattan in early March, we bump elbows. Not that it's much more than [...]

James Ellroy is occasionally quoted as saying he's the greatest American crime novelist ever. The man sometimes called the 'demon dog of American letters' has no hesitation in affirming it [...]

For a UK audience, the most striking moment in the new Italian PM Giorgia Meloni's victory speech will have been that she anchored its peroration to a quote from G.K. [...]

Four years ago, the Assisted Dying Bill was overwhelmingly defeated in parliament. The euthanasia debate hasn't disappeared, however. One recent poll showed that 90 per cent of the UK's population [...]

Cnation as King began by speaking of sorrow--and went on to speak of love. He used 'love' or its cognates eight times in that short speech. He spoke of his [...]

The latest trend among the scions of Generation Z-those born between 1997 and 2012-is posting 'throwback videos' on TikTok. Talk about a snake eating its tail. Having reached the ripe [...]

Digital art is a crowded field. It's also now older than I am. Yet despite a 50-year courtship, art galleries have been reluctant to allow it more than a toehold [...]

Kennneth Branagh hand-picked Lily James and there is a magic aspect to the career of Britain's fastest-rising starlet. Just don't expect the new transformation to be quite so sweet. When [...]

In the Camps: Life in China's High-Tech Penal Colony by Darren Byler Atlantic, [pounds sterling]12.99, pp. 160 The idea of 'pre-crime' was popularised by Philip K. Dick's story 'The Minority [...]

In the early 1990s, the American novelist Mary Gaitskill suffered an abrupt awakening. 'I lived in New York, I didn't have a television, I didn't listen to the radio. I [...]

A Promised Land by Barack Obama Viking/Penguin, [pounds sterling]35, pp. 751 Well, it's quite the title, isn't it? It tends to invite comparisons. The first one that occurred to me, [...]

How do they do it? Among writers, the earnest audience member at a literary festival who asks, 'Do you write by hand or on a computer?' is a sort of [...]

Calamity Jane's legend as brave frontierswoman, crack shot and compassionate nurse to the Wounded was nurtured largely by herself. The truth, says Sam Leith, was dismayingly different Calamity: The Many [...]

The Hero by Lee Child TLS Books, 7.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 77 What's a hero? There are probably at least two answers to that. One is that heroism is a [...]

When most rock stars have trouble sleeping, they fall back on Valium, temazepam, heroin or Jack Daniel's. But Pete Townshend, guitarist and songwriter for The Who and--we're pleased to discover [...]

'Where's the car?' said my wife Alice, interrupting my Zoom meeting on Saturday morning. 'It's where you left it,' I said perhaps more pointedly than was kind. 'When you drove [...]

Probably, most of you will have only the dimmest idea what a 'fronted adverbial' is. I used one in the last sentence. Can you spot it? Very good. Those among [...]

Doc Martens are one of those quintessentially British things that, like the royal family and lorries queuing on the M20, turn out actually to be Germany's doing. The ancestor of [...]

Cari Mora by Thomas Harris Heinemann, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 331 It has been 13 years since Thomas Harris published a novel, and the last time he published one without [...]

'I grew up in LA where we all thought fame was a joke,' says Bret Easton Ellis. 'My class was filled with people from Laura Dern to the girls in [...]

Mister Miracle by Tom King (writer) and Mitch Gerads (artist) DC Comics, 19.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 320 Mister Miracle is, on the face of it, one of the cheesiest of [...]

By day, I'm a mild-mannered book-world hanger-on; by night, I roar through the streets of Gotham in my heavily armed Batmobile, soar above it on the outstretched wings of my [...]

Edward Gorey delighted in the macabre and contradictory, feeling at home with things not making sense. He was, says Sam Leith, an exquisite but very minor talentBorn to be Posthumous: [...]

Lee Child has sold around 100 million books. How does he do it?According to which bit of hype you read, there's a copy of one of Lee Child's Jack Reacher [...]

On Saturday night we sat around the kitchen table, my family and I, and had a takeaway from the Turkish restaurant on our high street. We opened box after box: [...]