You have a struggling mammal in your mouth. You clamp your teeth into his wriggling furry warmness. Not good, oh no. All that squealing as the warm blood trickles down your chin. The terrified eye. You chew into silence. No, no, we don’t like to eat like this. Our predatory nature is supported by the structure of our gut, 20 feet of small intestine...

“Imagine this is the Sun,” I say, holding up an orange. I am at the foot of Primrose Hill in London with 20-odd people. They have followed me from Cecil Sharp House, the venue for “Sunday Papers Live”, an event that aims to bring every section of the Sunday papers to life. We have been sitting about on sofas, listening to talks on politics, sport,...

On 9 February last year, the then-deputy chair of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, called for the return of capital punishment to the UK. “Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? 100 per cent success rate.” Six months later, the former nurse Lucy Letby was convicted of seven counts of murder...

The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God (Tyndale Elevate) by Justin Brierley Justin Brierley’s new book is a strange thing indeed. The ex-host of the hugely popular Christian radio show Unbelievable? is on a mission to convince us that belief in God (within any religion, though he admits his interest is Christianity) is on the rise. The problem is,...

If science has a native tongue, it is mathematics. Equations capture, precisely, the relationships among the elements of a system; they allow us to pose questions and calculate answers. Numerically, these answers are precise and unambiguous – but what happens when we want to know what our calculations mean? Well, that is when we revert to our own native...

My Blue Peninsula (Linen Press) by Maureen Freely As Israel escalated its assault on Gaza in October, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan posted on social media describing the Jewish state’s campaign in the strip as “bordering on genocide”. The same week, Turkey contributed troops, aviation equipment and artillery to a joint military exercise with...