Culture

If Travel Broadens the Mind…

Travel, they say, broadens the mind. Adds perspective. Opens up the outlook and so on. Makes you sophisticated and cosmopolitan. If you’ve been nowhere other than where you’re from, except on holiday; if you’ve lived in no place other than the place you know, what does that make you? What is the word for it? [...]

Read more →

Vampires in fiction: A Brief History

Vampire fiction has changed a great deal in the past 200 years; from the classics to the modern day phenomenon Twilight, the vampire has been transformed since the rise of Dracula. But how has it changed, and why? It was Bram Stoker’s Dracula that really marked the beginning of popular vampire fiction and gave [...]

Read more →

An Atheist’s Guide to Lucky Pigs

I am reminded of a story about the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr, who was visited at his home in Tisvilde, near Copenhagen, by an American scientist. They had just entered Bohr’s study when the American notice a ‘lucky’ horse-shoe nailed above the door, open-side upwards in the correct and approved manner, so that the luck [...]

Read more →

In A Perfect World It Would Be Spiders For Lunch

Why being irrational saves us from a life of Bush-Tucker Trials Why Not Eat Insects? Not my question, by the way, but the title of a book. It was a book first published in the 1880s by a man by the name of Vincent M Holt, and it’s not been out of print since. In [...]

Read more →