A stooped, bespectacled man disembarked last week from the Swedish ship Drottningholm, hurried to the campus of Pennsylvania’s sedate Swarthmore College where he delivered the first of a series of ...

As a young boy, I had to contend with my grandfather’s compost heap. It was a veritable Vesuvius of foul-smelling, putrescible plant waste, a metre high and hidden behind a privet hedge. We had placed ...