FICTION makes it seem easy to explore another life, as the young film-maker Oleg Erdmann attempts to do in Andrei Makine’s latest and characteristically challenging novel. 

A message in a bottle tossed in the sea in Germany 101 years ago, believed to be the world’s oldest, has been presented to the sender’s granddaughter, a museum said.

SCIENTISTS combing through undersea fauna off Indonesia’s Papua province said yesterday they had discovered dozens of new species, including a shark that walks on its fins and a shrimp that looks like a praying mantis.