Mythconceptions

“One might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,” goes the old proverb. The meaning is simple: if you are going to be punished for a small crime, you may as well commit the bigger one. In the early

This month’s story, ‘The Curious Case of Davidson’s Eyes’ by HG Wells, has a superficially simple premise. But, as we’ll see, that premise throws up a lot of conundrums in the course of the narrative.

The “Emperor of the Night”, as he has been grandly called,1 the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys was the great pioneer of “lucid dreaming”: to be aware, while you are fully asleep, that you are dreamin

In a John Behan bronze, collector Jacqueline O’Donovan, a child of the Irish diaspora, can sense the desperation of a starving people forced to flee their land

We’ve been using matches for 200 years–but, as Rob Crossan discovers, the story of how they came to be is far more colourful (and hair-raising) than we might imagine

These devices made recorded music accessible, portable and collectable