These days it is considered unusual to be both a doctor and a writer. This might have surprised Avicenna, Galen, Maimonides, Copernicus, Paracelsus, Rabelais, Sir Thomas Browne, Henry Vaughan, John Keats, Friedrich von Schiller, Georg Büchner, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anton Chekhov, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, W Somerset ... read more

Deny it. Bury you head. Stop your ears. It makes no odds: Armageddon is coming. We’re on the cusp. Just look around: melting icecaps, rising sea levels, denuded forests, plastic-choked oceans, a murderous pandemic… and, wrath of all wraths, inexorable climate change. Should we be afraid? Nah. Homo sapiens is an inventive species. The seas rise; we design buoyant... read more

An accepted principle in enlightened circles holds that it is morally wrong, or at least ill-mannered, to judge people according to crude or roughly drawn stereotypes. Luckily, this principle is not often extended to millennials, or the young generally, about whom some rich and largely helpful generalisations... read more

History may not repeat itself, but in Turkey it most certainly rhymes. Jeremy Seal’s meticulously researched and vivid book, A Coup in Turkey, tells the story of a charismatic, iconoclastic leader despised by Turkey’s metropolitan elites who comes to power on the votes of the peasantry by promising democracy and a ... read more

There’s an old but revealing joke: Steven Spielberg dies and ascends to Heaven. At the pearly gates, St Peter checks his files and says, apologetically, ‘I’m sorry, Steve. We don’t let your kind in here.’ ‘What?’ shouts Spielberg. ‘You mean Jews?’ ‘Oh no, no, of course not,’ says St Peter. ‘Heaven has no time for that sort of nonsense. We have lots and lots of Jews here. Why, the boss’s son is... read more

The unnamed protagonist of Patricia Lockwood’s debut novel has a pet cat called Dr Butthole. She suspects this says something about her and her generation: ‘One hundred years ago, her cat might have been called Mittens.’ Irreverence is her stock in trade: she achieved online fame for her pithy posts on a Twitter-esque social media platform called ‘the portal’. But she is uneasy with her celebrity... read more