For our first episode of 2022, we are going back to the 18th century, to look at the women who wielded power and the means they used to gain it. What challenges did they face? Are they remembered more

Fantasy – and indeed most fiction – often involves bitter rivalries. Fights over a kingdom or territory, long-standing feuds where people no longer even remember why it began… Such opposing forces are

We are destroying our planet. The scientists agree, there is no denying that catastrophic climate change is imminent. And yet our leaders continue to pay lip service to the issue without taking real,

The incredible Ursula K. Le Guin won the National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American letters in 2014. In her much-shared speech, she noted that “hard times are coming, wh

Your body is a temple – a saying that has been with us for centuries. The message: look after your body because you and it are going to be together for a long time. The body is in a symbiotic relation

The idea of perfection, the perfect being, is one of the oldest stories in the world. How that perfection might be tainted, or turn against the hand that made it, is something that has always intrigue

Female friendships tend to take a back seat in our narratives, so that when they are given the space to exist, they exist almost solely to discuss a man. Virginia Woolf once commented that “all the gr

Coming of age stories have long been a staple within speculative fiction genres, but in the last decade, we have seen an explosion of popularity in what publishers and booksellers refer to as YA – you

Recently, a number of prominent television and film creators, as well as authors, have either been outed for bad behaviour or made hateful public statements. Anyone who is a regular listener will know

The history of humanity is arguably the history of us trying to explain everything around us. Both science and religion have developed as divergent threads of this goal, inextricably linked but often