The Coral Thief, By Rebecca Stott

As Gillian Beer showed in Darwin's Plots, the narrative of evolution and the evolution of narrative went hand in hand in Britain from the early days of "natural selection". Recent writers, Ruth Padel to Tracy Chevalier, have continued to dig rich factual fictions out of science's records. Rebecca Stott goes down a separate path. K...- 12/11/2010, Reviews

Longleat Estate: From little acorns, mighty oaks grow

One of my favourite areas of woodland is the Longleat Estate in Wiltshire, near Warminster. It is probably better known for its safari park, but that's not for me. Since January 2009, Longleat has also been home to 200 oak trees planted as a growing monument to the evolutionary thinker Charles Darwin. In 2009, the Natural History Museum marked Darwin's bice...- 06/11/2010, UK

Darwin buys Fenn Wright Manson

Darwin Private Equity has bought Fenn Wright Manson for an undisclosed sum in a deal that will see the only remaining founder of the womenswear retailer step down. - 05/10/2010, Business News

Sarah Sands: Why street art knocks spots off a bust of Churchill

One of David Cameron's natural advantages is a wife who understands non-essential shopping. Samantha Cameron's mother, Annabel Astor, packages taste to insecure Londoners through her home furnishing company OKA. Samantha designs for Smythson, which brilliantly worked out that what Sloanes love best in stationery is bright colours and jokes.- 25/07/2010, Sarah Sands

The Art Instinct, By Denis Dutton

Denis Dutton's big idea is that the human love of art can be explained by Darwinism. All the standard explanations of why we value art – because it's expressive, because it's informative, because of its formal qualities – are mere fragments of explanations, which only make sense in the context of our evolutionary history. - 18/07/2010, Reviews

Travel challenge: A holiday in Australia's 'Top End' and Outback

Every week we invite competing companies to give us their best deal for a specific holiday. Today: the Northern Territory and Queensland. Prices are per person and based on two people leaving from Heathrow in September... Includes flights to Darwin with regular September departures, returning from Sydney, 14 nights' accommodation (in Darwin,...- 17/07/2010, News & Advice

Tormented Hope, By Brian Dillon

This eloquent and incisive book about the uses of acute hypochondria takes as its focus nine noble minds trapped in bodies they treated as treacherous enemies. From Charlotte Bront�'s nervous anguish and Charles Darwin's nameless, over-treated crises to Andy Warhol's Aids-related dreads and Glenn Gould's blend of "self-medication and self-...- 02/07/2010, Reviews

Tormented Hope, By Brian Dillon

A fascinating and erudite meditation on the strange condition that is hypochondria, Tormented Hope examines the lives of nine famous sufferers, including James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Marcel Proust, Andy Warhol and, in a subsequently added afterword, Michael Jackson. - 27/06/2010, Reviews

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, By Richard Wrangham

In his "Dissertation on Roast Pig", Charles Lamb envisaged the invention of cooking by a Chinese boy who accidentally burnt the family pigs: "Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his fingers, and... he tasted – crackling! The truth at length broke into his slow understanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that Ri...- 25/06/2010, Reviews

Time Warner revealed as suitor for Shed Media

Shed Media, the TV producer whose shows include New Tricks and Waterloo Road, yesterday confirmed that US giant Time Warner had approached it over a potential takeover. - 22/06/2010, Business News

Out of their tree: virus blamed as drunken parrots fall from sky

The staggering gait, the mood swings and the headaches will be familiar to anyone who has indulged in a big night out. But in Australia's northernmost city it is not the people who are behaving like drunks, but the native parrots, which are falling out of the sky.- 03/06/2010, Nature

Darwin: A Life in Poems, By Ruth Padel

I love this collection and will happily re-read it several times. What Ruth Padel does so well is to marry her own sharply observed details with the beauty of Darwin's prose – an easily forgotten thing, when the message is so powerful, but what a missed opportunity when there are sentences such as "Man thinks himself, in his arrogance, a great wor- 23/05/2010, Reviews

The Greatest Show On Earth, By Richard Dawkins

"This book is necessary," as its author argues, in part because 44 per cent of Americans think "God created human beings" within the last 10,000 years. Though Darwin's modern bulldog aims here to set out the evidence for evolution via natural selection rather than bash believers again, his fire is undimmed. He starts by ...- 21/05/2010, Reviews

Travel challenge: A Dutch canal holiday

Each week we invite competing companies to give us their best deal for a specified holiday. Today: a canal-boat holiday in the Netherlands. Prices are for seven nights for two people in mid-June; international travel not included... "Cruising from Sneek, you can enjoy a range of exciting water sports on offer... or simply lay back an...- 01/05/2010, UK

StumbleUpon top 5 rated websites: camera-stealing octopus,

A look at this week's top-rated websites from StumbleUpon, recorded on April 22.- 22/04/2010, Media