Michael Rosen: ‘Stories hung in the air about great-aunts and uncles who’d gone’
Searching for the missing pieces in his family brought poet and author Michael Rosen closer to the horror of war
Roslyn Poignant obituary
Anthropologist, researcher and writer who became an expert on historic photographs
From Greek myth to the monkey-pig: what is a ‘chimera’?
Greek mythology and Milton’s vision of Hell were invoked this week when scientists announced the creation of a monkey-pig ‘chimera’
Nobel winner Peter Handke avoids genocide controversy in speech
Literature laureate accused of supporting Slobodan Milošević gives inaugural lecture
Best science, nature and ideas books of 2019
With Naomi Klein, Robert Macfarlane and Barry Lopez tackling issues like the climate emergency, AI, gender bias and tech giants, Ian Sample picks the outstanding books of the year
Oncologist Azra Raza: ‘Don’t give up hope. Don’t give in to despair’
The Columbia professor on taking healthcare out of the stone age, her ideas for cancer prevention – and why getting too close to patients is an occupational hazard
Callum Roberts: ‘Sharks do bite people, they do kill people, but it’s more error than intention’
The marine biologist’s new book describes his lifelong love affair with the oceans, and the grave threats undersea life now faces
From Alice in Wonderland to the Hitchhiker’s Guide: top 10 books about mathematics
From Lewis Carroll to Douglas Adams and even Dostoevsky, the imaginative possibilities of numbers have animated some dazzling fiction
Naomi Oreskes: ‘Discrediting science is a political strategy’
The Harvard professor on science and scepticism – and why climate deniers have run out of excuses
Norman Myers obituary
Environmentalist who first calculated the damage caused by clearing tropical rainforests to raise cattle for hamburgers
Cancelled for sadfishing: the top 10 words of 2019
From people becoming a proper noun to woke’s use as an insult, we pick our key words of the year
In brief: The Giver of Stars; Letters from an Astrophysicist; The Pianist of Yarmouk – reviews
The story of a 30s horseback library in Kentucky, correspondence with a cosmologist, and the memoir of a Palestinian refugee in Syria
Why mathematicians just can’t quit their blackboards
Photographer Jessica Wynne captures the peculiar devotion of academics to working out their problems with chalk
Jonathan Franzen’s right: you need to pick your battles
If your sole priority is achieving victory in a planetary-scale existential struggle, there’ll be nothing left for anything else
Michael Coe obituary
Archaeologist who explored the ancient civilisations of Mexico and Central America