Hearts & minds
What makes us human? In major new books, an economist, a philosopher, an evolutionary biologist and two psychologists offer compelling - and very different - answers. Matthew Reisz writes
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Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation
Informal links keep society strong but, Frank Furedi finds, we don't make them like we used to
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Edward III
Helen Castor finds a fine-grained narrative on a medieval monarch quite compelling
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Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy
"The King-times are fast finishing," wrote Lord Byron of the brief period with which John Gardner's book is concerned - August 1819 to August 1821. Gardner argues that these years, beginning with the...
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Freemasonry & the Enlightenment: Architecture, Symbols, & Influences
In the small but very active international network of historians of Freemasonry, James Stevens Curl is an éminence grise. His beautiful publications on history and architecture are manifold, and...
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The White Man's World (Memories of Empire)
Joanna Lewis admires an exploration of attitudes to colonialism and immigration in a crumbling empire
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Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood
Demonstrations and riots have spawned much speculation about young people in the UK. Who are they? What do they want? How do they think, and are protesters representative of their generation?...
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The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age
Jerusalem, Montreal, Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing, Berlin, Paris, New York, Oxford...Oxford? Looking at this line-up of major international cities, Oxford strikes immediately as a very odd choice....
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The Necessity of Errors
Mistakes and misunderstandings often serve to further human knowledge, finds Alex Danchev
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Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary
When viewed against an event that propelled the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s back into media circulation, Vampire Nation possesses a certain currency. The May 2011 arrest of the Serbian former military...
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Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture
The negotiation of the Blitz is still a permanent fixture of British post-war culture at the beginning of a new century. As the living record of eyewitnesses diminishes each year, the place of the...
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News in brief
UCL 'no confidence' voteUnion cries foul in defeatA motion of no confidence in University College London's provost Malcolm Grant tabled by the institution's students' union has been defeated....
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Top reward and bottom slicing
V-c's package rose 6% in year when Sheffield targeted lowest paid's pensions. John Morgan writes
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Industrial revelations
To make the case for cash, we must forge a consensus on how science should stimulate growth, argues Imran Khan
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Tongue-tied UK badly equipped to join in the conversation of nations
Amid falling applications to Ucas, languages are taking the biggest hit - bad news for our global standing, cautions Sir Adam Roberts