Grief and terror

What supernatural folklore reveals about human nature

How Old Norse mythology endured in the Christian era

Carthage burned for six days. After three long years of siege, in the spring of 146 BC Roman soldiers finally broke through the city’s defences and began to slaughter the population. But still the Car

Somehow, it isn’t hard to imagine the scene of battle here, even on a sultry July morning when only the distant growl of a motorbike interrupts the crooning of collared doves. Perhaps it is the quiet.

The most intriguing aspect of this book is that it’s written as a sort of ‘life in the day’ of the Colosseum, that vast edifice begun in Rome by the emperor Vespasian (AD 69–79) to entertain the masse

This is a history of margins and fringes – not only of the Atlantic Ocean itself, but also of the imaginations of those who worked on its surface and lived at its edges. In his new book, Karl Bell dra