Angel Kelly is an innocent abroad. To be specific, he is on a slaver bound for Brazil at the close of the eighteenth century, thinking to put his inheritance to fine use by founding a utopian ...

If the best-known glories of ancient Egypt are the pyramids, the mummies and the gold of Tutankhamun, then ancient Mesopotamia ought to be famous for its astonishing legacy of poetry and prose. For ...

According to Scott G. Bruce, our “inner demons” represent the “last vestige” of more traditional ideas of an infernal hierarchy. The texts in his Penguin Book of Demons predate this inward turn, ...

In the opening and title poem of his ninth collection, Ian Duhig recalls finding “a pebble the exact shape of a light bulb”, at which point another “lit … in a thought bubble” above his “dull bulb of ...

Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio comes a decade after his version of the Inferno. That was set in the University of Essex; this is set on Mersea Island, which makes one wonder: where will his ...

424pp. Princeton University Press. £25 (US $29.95). Charles S. Singleton’s version of The Divine Comedy (first published in six volumes between 1970 and 1975, and now reissued by Princeton University ...

Oba Electroplating Factory is the fourth instalment of Drawn and Quarterly’s seven-volume Complete Mature Works of Yoshiharu Tsuge series. It is a collection of seven short pieces published in 1973–4, ...

During the nineteenth century, the “ivory road” in East Africa became one of the most important routes into the vast uncharted expanses of the African interior. It ran for nearly 1,000 miles from the ...

The life of Jeremy Catto, a tutor in medieval history at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1970 until his retirement in 2006, opens a window onto a lost world. In the pressure cooker of modern uni­versity ...

Neill Blomkamp’s underappreciated film Elysium (2013) depicts an Earth ravaged by pollution, a giant shanty town where people lead brutalized lives, most involved in extracting what remains of the ...