Country music has long shed its Bible-bashing image. Today, bluegrass is helping to heal America’s deep divides ...

Academics Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman believe they have finally arrived at an answer. In Born to Rule: The Making and ...

In William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the character Mariana claims, “No legacy is so rich as honesty.” Morgan ...

This piece accompanies Marcus Chown's feature on the discovery of cosmic background radiation, from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. Perhaps the most famous accidental discovery of all is ...

Octopuses are having a moment. So are slime moulds and honeybees. Mushrooms are in vogue. After 250 years of humanity (well, some of humanity…) confidently atop the great pyramid of being, we in the ...

For many generations in societies shaped by Christianity, monogamy has been the almost undisputed champion of relationship norms. In Britain and the US, it has been held up as the dominant – really ...

God: An Anatomy (Pan Macmillan) by Francesca Stavrakopoulou. We don’t know his real name. In early inscriptions it appears as Yhw, Yhwh, or simply Yh; but we don’t know how it was spoken. He has come ...

Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire (Allen Lane) by Priya Satia Priya Satia begins Time’s Monster with a statement: historians, she says, are above all storytellers. At first ...

A century ago, European empires dominated much of the planet. Gurminder K Bhambra and Charlotte L Riley ask what we can learn from the past. The British Empire – and the people who lived under British ...

The 'Super-K' detector is built 3,000 feet down in a mine beneath Hida in Japan. This is one of its most famous images. Marcus Chown explains This picture of the Sun is hardly high-definition. But, in ...

A crucifix hangs on the wall of a Catholic school in Warwickshire in the UK (Alamy Stock Photo) To anyone trying to navigate it for the first time, England’s education system can seem like an old ship ...