When I finished reading The Story of the Stone -- the Hawkes and Minford translation of the classic Chinese novel Hongloumeng or Dream of the Red Chamber -- I lifted myself out of immersion in one of literature's most extraordinary inventions and looked around for something to help me place that experience in context...

When K is woken up by the alarm clock on Saturday morning, he immediately realises something is wrong, because he never sets an alarm on weekend mornings...

What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? | Following Finland's success in international education rankings, there have been many stories about the Finnish education system, but most of these have focused on its pedagogy and the ways that differs from common practice in the English-speaking world...

Poems in the Fu Form from the Han and Six Dynasties Periods | The Chinese fu or 'rhyme-prose' was a wildly diverse form, mixing prose and poetry, having no size restriction, and taking on changing roles over nearly a millennium...

Desire and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber | Yu engages with both Chinese and European literature and critical traditions, in a tour-de-force of scholarship that is perhaps the pre-eminent critical study, at least in English, of Dream of the Red Chamber (Chinese Hongloumeng, best known translation The Story of the Stone)...

primarily a study of Aristotle as a scientist and specifically as a biologist (Leroi's own profession), but it also provides the biographical and historical context needed to understand his science...

A Manifesto for an Intelligent Transport Policy | Advances in technology and the building of transport infrastructure have changed how far people travel rather than reducing the amount of time they spend doing it...

The recent *Fractals: A Very Short Introduction* is an obvious starting point for lay readers interested in fractals...

They have recently been republished in new editions, but the first two books covered here are the classic texts on fractal geometry for higher undergraduate or graduate students: Fractal Geometry has a focus on different definitions of dimension, while Fractals Everywhere makes iterated function systems central...

Research in Recreational Math | This is a fairly random collection of essays on the mathematics of various recreations...

The Ocean's Intelligent Invertebrate is a broad overview of the natural history, behaviour, and life cycle of the octopus...

What Preschoolers Really Need From Grownups | Aimed at both teachers and parents, The Importance of Being Little is a broad survey of some of the challenges of preschool education, from the perspective of a early years educator who moved into research...