
Who is Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?
Ali Khamenei was born in Mashhad, Iran, in 1939, as the second son of a local religious leader, Javad Khamenei, and he grew up in relative poverty. He learned to read the Quran in early childhood before attending a...

Hidden gems of LGBTQ+ cinema: celebrating the wonderful slippery queerness of Penda’s Fen
I was not around in 1974 to witness the first television outing of Alan Clarkes Pendas Fen. Broadcast only seven years after sex between men was partially decriminalised in England and Wales, this enigmatic film was beamed...

Elio: Disney’s enjoyable new animation may be an original story – but it’s also a forgettable one
In a summer cinema release schedule filled with sequels, remakes and franchise instalments, Disneys latest animation Elio is a rare original story. Recently, much has been written and hands been wrung about the lack of...

Trump’s first term lies at the heart of escalation between Iran and Israel
The US president, Donald Trump, is weighing up whether to join Israel in attacking Iran. The fact he is even contemplating such a move is, in my opinion, a direct consequence of his 2018 decision to tear up the agreement...

How mice ‘listen’ with their whiskers
Oh no! You dropped your keys on the ground, and it is too dark to see them. You might have to feel the ground with your hands, but a mouse could use its whiskers to find the keys. Mouse whiskers, also known as the vibrissa...

The recent success of the Netflix show Adolescence has drawn attention to misogynistic rhetoric and how it spreads online. Safeline, an organisation supporting survivors of sexual abuse, has warned that terms like...

The light triad: psychology’s answer to our darkest fears about people
Are you losing faith in humanity because of everything that is going on right now? If so, that is no surprise. Our habit of doomscrolling convinces us that people are inherently self-centred and uncaring. According to the...