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57 results
  • Article
  • Article

Book design, dissected

| Gwendolyn Smith

Gwen Smith talks to art director Peter Dyer about imagery, colour, type and staying true to the pages within.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Sockets and stumps

| Dr Emily Mayhew

Historian Emily Mayhew has met soldiers who have survived the seemingly unsurvivable. Here, she explores the part prosthetics play in the process of military rehabilitation.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Naked, not nude

| Caroline VoutFunmi Lijadu

Classicist Caroline Vout argues that it’s time to take the dust covers off the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and to encounter their bodies not nude, but naked.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Of incubators, orchids and artificial wombs

| Claire HornSteven Pocock

In this extract from Claire Horn’s new book, ‘Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth’, she traces the development of the artificial womb, soon to become a reality.

  • In pictures
  • In pictures

The beautiful language of bookplates

| Alexandra HillEmily Lansell

Don’t judge a book only by its cover. Take a look inside, where decorative bookplates reveal stories that cross continents and centuries.

  • Article
  • Article

Divining the world through an artist’s almanac

| Amanda Couch

Amanda Couch's artists book, 'Huwawa in the Everyday: an almanac' is inspired by the entrail like folds of a medieval folding and its function as a guide for astrological divinations linking the body, health and the heavens. Like the original almanac her work is designed to be carried out into the wider world.

  • Article
  • Article

The making of ‘Quacks’

| Helen Babbs

How do you create a medical comedy that’s authentic and laugh-out-loud funny?

  • Article
  • Article

Two health centres, two ideologies

| Emily Sargent

Two futuristic, light-filled buildings aimed to bring forward-looking healthcare to city dwellers. But the principles behind each were very different.

  • Article
  • Article

How to play on the District line between Stepney Green and Embankment

| Holly GramazioThomas S G Farnetti

From the crossword to the smartphone, distractions for the commuter relieve the tedium of crowded, dull journeys. Game designer Holly Gramazio delves into the world of games for trains.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

Tracing the roots of our fears and fixations

| Kate SummerscaleTim Robinson

Kate Summerscale explores the history of our anxieties and compulsions, and the new phobias and manias that are always emerging.

  • Article
  • Article

Digitising Audrey

| Elena CarterThomas S G Farnetti

Building digital images of what Audrey created means that her work can be frozen in time – for the digital version, at least, the process of decay is halted, and any number of people can view it without the risk of damaging it.

  • Article
  • Article

A medieval guide to practical magic

| Rebecca J S NiceThomas S G FarnettiMartin Hopton

With few sources of effective help available when treating an injured patient, the medieval physician could instead stage a healing ceremony using a practical how-to guide he carried with him.

  • Article
  • Article

The chymist’s trade card

| Julia Nurse

An 18th-century trade card reveals far more than its owner may have intended.

  • Article
  • Article

Bringing Braille back to the modern world

| Alex LeeIan Treherne

For anyone who thinks Braille is so last century, read on. New tech is helping dust Braille down and bring it to today’s visually impaired people.

  • Article
  • Article

Graphic battles in pharmacy

James Morison’s campaign against the medical establishment inspired a wave of caricatures mocking his quack medicine.

  • Article
  • Article

Conserving Audrey

| Elena Carter

Elena describes how specially designed storage allows Audrey’s scrapbooks to retain all traces of her creative process, although their intrinsic fragility means deterioration is almost inevitable.

  • Article
  • Article

The meanings of hurt

| Alanna SkuseSteven Pocock

In the early modern period, gruesome incidents of self-castration and other types of self-injury garnished the literature of the time. Alanna Skuse explores the messages these wounds conveyed.

  • Long read
  • Long read

The ambivalence of air

| Daisy LafargeCarol Nazatto

Daisy Lafarge investigates the effects of air quality and pressure on body and mind, exploring air as cure, but one with contradictions.

  • Article
  • Article

How not to play

| Holly GramazioThomas S G Farnetti

Here are seven ways to sidestep doing as you’re told in a game. But strangely, they seem to be as much a part of playing as the game itself.

  • Article
  • Article

How I escaped my anxiety and depression through architecture and poetry

| Rhael ‘LionHeart’ CapeThomas S G Farnetti

Social anxiety led him to introversion and silence. The brutalist architecture of London’s Barbican Estate inspired his liberation in poetry.

  • Article
  • Article

How to play in a museum

| Holly Gramazio

Some museums create games for visitors to play. In others, if you’re creative and inquisitive, you can make up your own. Find out how a game can give you a different perspective on art and objects.

  • Interview
  • Interview

Inside the mind of Somewhere in Between’s curator, Laurie Britton Newell

| Gwendolyn Smith

The exhibition's curator shares her secrets.

  • Article
  • Article

The origins and meanings of pharmacy symbols

What have snakes, unicorns and crocodiles got to do with pharmacies? The history of these modern signs goes back to the Greek gods.

  • Article
  • Article

Who was Audrey Amiss?

| Elena Carter

Elena Carter introduces the vast collection left behind by artist Audrey Amiss, who documented her life in astonishing detail.

  • Article
  • Article

A brief history of tattoos

| Amy Olson

The earliest evidence of tattoo art dates from 5000 BC, and the practice continues to hold meaning for many cultures around the world.