The Latest Breaking News from Herman Melville

The Moby Dick author stayed at the property at the end of 1849, and is commemorated with a blue plaque outside

The spirit of Duke Ellington pulses through a glorious musical spin on Twelfth Night; neighbourliness has its limits in Amy Jephta’s South African satire; and puppets have a whale of a time with Herman Melville

From ‘The Great Gatsby’ to ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’, Finn Cliff Hodges looks at the best covers out there

Herman Melville lived on the same street, which was at the centre of a bizarre Benjamin Franklin serial killer conspiracy

The first documented sex between two male humpback whales is just the latest challenge to our presumptions about sexuality

The desolation of a prisoner-of-war camp in the American civil war is drawn with tragic power

The most astonishing and accomplished sequence in Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 arrives near the book’s end, as he describes the near-death experience that inspired his first novel, Death of a River Guide, published in 1994.

When OceanGate, the deep-sea exploration enterprise, created a promotional video for its ill-fated US$250,000-per-head trip to see the wreck of the Titanic, it told prospective passengers to “Get ready for what Jules Verne could only imagine – a 12,500-foot journey to the bottom of the sea.” Those behind the video…

In his obituaries, Cormac McCarthy has been widely praised as a descendant of William Faulkner and Herman Melville among others, those excavators of the American spirit whose biblically influenced prose raised narratives to tragic and poetic heights