Smothering, transformative and beautiful, fog’s close-set shroud has inspired titans of literature, cinema and art–and forces the rest of us to look at the world a little closer, writes John Lewis-Stempel

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

Tennyson’s embrace of science and catastrophe theory

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

Piecing together the inspirations and evolution of Mary Shelley’s famous monster

Best books… Richard Holmes The biographer chooses five ...