Q&a

‘Green sickness’, also known as the ‘disease of virgins’ – a diagnosis applied mainly to teenage girls from the 16th to the 19th centuries – is one of the most puzzling conditions in the history of me

I magine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C hea

Is this the age of dictators?” asked veteran journalist Sir Sidney Low. He was writing in September 1923, the month in which a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in Spain. At the sa

John Blair Killing the Dead Vampire epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World 536pp. Princeton University Press. £30 (US $35). A dead body, as anyone who has sat with one will know, is an unsettling

JENNY stepped on to the grass and watched the runner pass along the towpath. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen him. Regardless of the weather, he wore black shorts, a purple T-shirt and sky blue tra

How the life-changing benefits of running are reaching those who desperately need them – behind the walls and barbed wire of the UK’s prisons