Greg Graffin, evolutionary biologist and lead singer of pioneering US band Bad Religion, talks music and rebellion ...

Godwin (4th Estate) by Joseph O’Neill. Joseph O’Neill remains best known for Netherland (2008). Hailed as a Great American ...

Most scientific breakthroughs take years of research – but often, serendipity provides the final push, as these historic discoveries show .

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 ...

The popular association of atheism with immorality is a particular deterrent for women who have religious doubts, since in Arab society they are expected to be “virtuous” in order to marry. “It is ...

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 ...

The great Buddha statue in Nha Trang, Vietnam by Petr Ruzicka On paper, Buddhism looks pretty good. It has a philosophical subtlety married to a stated devotion to tolerance that makes it stand out ...

Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, discusses her new book, on the importance of fiction to democracy.

Technology is enabling us to retreat from the outside world. But we should resist the urge – for ourselves and for each other Patrons outside a busy pub in the Yorkshire Dales. Credit: Alamy There ...

Mycorrhizal fungi growing with a plant root. Credit: Dr Yoshihiro Kobae As Giuliana Furci picks her way through the dense, dripping greenery of Chile’s Patagonian forest, her keen eyes are seeking out ...

The British ethical societies, forerunners of Humanists UK, emerged in the 1880s. As the London Ethical Society put it in its first report in 1887, they offered a basis for “well-doing and well-being” ...

Every hero needs an antagonist to define themselves against. For “the West” – the eternal hero of the dominant discourse on international affairs – the antagonist of the hour is Vladimir Putin, a ...