Why was the generation born in the 1920s and 1930s the last of the joiners?

A recent study found that the average human sperm count has decreased by 40 per cent over the past 50 years. As public anxiety grows about infertility, environmentalists are blaming man-made chemical...

David Gordon talks to Christopher Bland, the new chairman of the BBC. Do we need public service broadcasting?

Mark Irving talks to Jonathan Miller

The great incarceration experiment of the 1980s has left the US with a prison population which far exceeds those in other advanced countries. Despite locking up one in every 50 working age men the US...

No one felt like celebrating at the UN's 50th anniversary last year - the wounds of Bosnia, Rwanda and Somalia were too raw. David Hannay, formerly British ambassador to the UN, says its failings are...

It's ten years since Glasgow began its journey from "mean city" to "city of culture." But literary and media accounts of the city remain fixed on its rumbustious proletarian past, and its...

Is high inflation in the UK dead or dormant? Kit McMahon, formerly chairman of Midland Bank, takes an historical look at rising prices and considers whether inflationary fears are now dampening growth

In the spirit of Plato, a new generation of science mavericks is seeking to find a mathematical understanding of nature, from the number of petals in a flower to the shape of spots on a peacock. Ian...

Writers still form identifiable generations. For all their curmudgeonly individualism, the "angry young men" of the 1950s stood for something. By contrast, argues Allan Massie, the 1980s generation...