What to do w ith the dead?

On a beautiful summer’s morning almost 110 years ago, men of the British Army stepped out into no-man’s land at 7.30am. It was 1 July 1916, and the start of what was then called ‘The Big Push’. With h

Glasgow, 1942. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was in town to perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tickets had been snapped up by local people – including many who didn’t really know what an opera was. The

Reading Laura Mauro’s “Japanese Toilet Ghosts” [FT459:30-35], reminded me of a less well known fear in the Western world, which –according to the modern rabbinical Internet resource site TheTorah.com

Did you know that Thomas Müntzer, leader of the German Peasants’ War in 1525, used a rainbow flag to rally his followers? It’s an aptly exuberant image for the radical charisma of Müntzer, and for the

You might be surprised to learn that there are more ghost sightings on Christmas Eve than there are at Halloween, so what better time for a ghost hunt? The festive season has always been favoured by l

Why do civilisations that dominated their epoch fail? In an era of autocracy, climate change, the rise of AI and a first-hand understanding of how deadly pandemics can be, it’s a question that seems p