A look at women’s work and witchcraft after fifty years of legal abortions. Happy birthday, abortion. The 1967 Abortion Act passed on October 27th — fifty years ago today. A truly transformative moment in the lives of many women, who could for the first time have sex unencumbered by the…

“I look at the migrant crisis and like many I think… why are the people so complacent in the destruction of their identity? Why is noone standing up to this?[…] where are the lovers of western culture?” It is with these questions that alt-right journalist Lauren Southard introduces Europe’s new…

A deft coil of metal winds its way between the unsteady legs of a deep-sea oil rig. It will perform routine inspections, even carry out basic maintenance. A regular craft could never do it — so designers took their lessons from the way eels and sea snakes navigate so effortlessly…

Doctor Who has never traded in the seriousness of ‘hard’ science fiction, often laden with po-faced predictions of humanity’s hand-spun fate at the mercy of the technologies and the politics it creates. It’s more a fairytale spacetime cabaret — an exploration of the gloriously impossible rather than merely the improbable…

Many accounts London’s first iconic inferno — the Great Fire of 1666 — marvel at the miraculous fact that so few died. Reports vary, but the settled number is six — only six — people perished as the flames ripped a path of desolation through the city. Most of them…

Fearmongerers let me tell you — London is fine. I was stuck out last night, spilt from the guts of a festival where London was tens of thousands of young people, inexplicably both sunburnt and rain-drenched, cheerfully elbowing each other in the head to the tune of ‘Lie, Cheat, Steal’…

In Paris, in 1872, in the Hopital Pitié-Salpêtrière, a doctor named Jean-Martin Charcot peered at the bodies of women wracked with hysteria, and declared himself unable to find a ‘source’ for the nervous disease plaguing the female populations of the city. Where once the problem was thought to reside in…

What do we talk about when we talk about fascism? At his inauguration speech, Donald Trump said: “We will bring back wealth. We will bring back dreams.” In two sentences, he pretty much sums up the double-promise that fascism makes to the citizens it deems acceptable. In my latest video for Novara Media, I take a closer look at the history of the idea - asking what it is, what looks like, and what it’s for.