In January 2022, a volcanic eruption ripped apart the underwater cables that connect the Pacific island of Tonga to the world. At a stroke, the country was plunged into the kind of isolation it hadn’t experienced in more than a century.

Fossilised dinosaur prints, volcanic craters, ice-carved corries – there are places in Britain where the landscape is a portal to the past. Hanna Lindon takes a stroll through 4 billion years of British history

On being told that they had been bitten by a venomous snake, most eight-year-olds would panic. Not Nicholas Jubber; he was not terrified but disappointed by a diagnosis that contradicted his own. Nich

At St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, the bodies of hundreds of infants born to unmarried mothers were dumped in a disused sewer. Now, thanks to the heroic efforts of one woman, they will be given a proper burial.

This week’s dream: the dazzling coral gardens of ...

Tennyson’s embrace of science and catastrophe theory