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The writings of H.P. Lovecraft have seen a renewal of interest in recent years, despite the fact that he was a well-known racist and xenophobe. Writing in the early 20th century, he imagined monsters that gave form to fear of difference.

Sexual attitudes have relaxed significantly in China since the Mao era. Approaching the 50th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s death and the subsequent end of the cultural revolution, there has been a significant de-politicisation of everyday life that some are calling a sexual revolution.

It is 1925 and the scene is Chimneys. It’s the English stately pile of the Caterham family, but the penurious Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter), has been forced to rent it to the industrial magnate Sir Oswald Coote (Mark Lewis Jones).

Heated Rivalry, the HBO TV adaptation of the second book in Rachel Reid’s Game Changers series, rounded out 2025 as a surprise, word-of-mouth success. It captures the relationship between Shane (Hudson Williams) and Ilya (Connor Storrie), two professional male hockey players, over the course of almost a decade. Along the…

Thomas Hardy’s final novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), was ahead of its time in more ways that one. Upon its publication, it provoked controversy with its explicit criticism of organised religion and traditional marriage, leading to book burnings and public criticism.

Vincent van Gogh sliced off his ear with a knife during a psychotic episode. Ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky developed schizophrenia and spent the last 30 years of his life in hospital. Virginia Woolf lived with bipolar disorder, eventually taking her own life as she felt another deep depression beginning.

Like many of us, George Orwell saw January as a month to be endured rather than enjoyed. You can picture him steeling himself against its cold, gloom, rain, frost and wind.

Watching Waiting for the Out, the BBC’s flagship new drama series, transported me straight back to my classroom in HMP Wakefield in the mid-1990s. This decaying Victorian building at the heart of a challenged city in the north of England is one of the UK’s ten category-A, high-security prisons for…

When Roro (not her real name) lost her mother to cancer, the grief felt bottomless. In her mid-20s and working as a content creator in China, she was haunted by the unfinished nature of their relationship. Their bond had always been complicated – shaped by unspoken resentments and a childhood…

The oldest fossilised remains of complex animals appear suddenly in the fossil record, and as if from nowhere, in rocks that are 538 million years old.

Imagine waking up to find strangers in your home – eating your food, killing your animals, then laughing as they blind you. Later, they tell the world you were the monster.