‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door.’ Bilbo Baggins is thinking of adventure, of course, not pandemics. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.’ Yet The Lord of the Rings is a lesson in how far you can travel without leaving home.

While the term “intersectionality” was coined in 1989, the existence of marginalized identities extends back over millennia. Byzantine Intersectionality reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities.

Last week I was about to enter a coffee shop in Berkeley, when a person came rushing out, mask-less and shouting. For a second I thought I could see her voice, showering the insidious droplets I have learned too much about.

The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence.

Keats mixed up Cortez and Balboa. Heaney misremembered the name of one of Wordsworth’s lakes. Poetry—even by the greats—is rife with mistakes.

What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead?