The Latest Breaking News from Ovid

Howard Burton’s scholarly look at the companion painting to The Birth of Venus provides a calm and instructive commentary

A cast recording for the souped-up train musical is released, Michael Sheen plays the NHS hero at the National and David Hare delivers his Covid memoir

Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast on Aug. 30, 2023, bringing surging seas and winds over 100 mph. Meanwhile, another climate emergency has been unfolding along Florida’s coast this summer: a marine heat wave bleaching corals throughout the world’s third-largest barrier reef.

Melbourne town hall, Rising festivalJulian Rosefeldt’s magnificent and exhausting film, starring the Oscar winner and Giancarlo Esposito, reverts to evasive surrealist flourishes just as it threatens to become truly angry

The discovery of a body on the beach provides the pivotal moment in an essayistic novel that lacks propulsion and pace

One of my favourite Roman artefacts to show visiting school groups or beginner’s Latin classes is a floor mosaic from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii. The mosaic depicts a chained dog accompanied by the Latin words, CAVE CANEM (“beware of the dog”).

If an anatomical description of the clitoris only appeared in some French school text books as recently as 2017, that’s because the seat of female pleasure, known by this name since at least 1559, was deeply taboo for so long.

Ah, Valentine’s Day: that Hallmark holiday of greeting cards and chocolates, its bloody origins almost entirely forgotten over the last 2,000 years!

From Ovid to George Orwell, writers have long been inspired by the natural world. Fifty years after the publication of Watership Down, Katherine Rundell celebrates the authors who have taken a walk on the wild side