In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

Tech watchers tell us that the earliest adopter of any innovation is invariably the porn industry. But the steadicam auteurs and their upholstered stars have failed to get much purchase on emojis.

For my money, there is no more captivating view in all Italy than the vast panorama of the harbour of Syracuse, framed by its majestic, honey-coloured Baroque buildings. The city’s origins go back to ...

One of the more peculiar experiences of my early twenties has been realising that my mother was also once a young woman and is neither infallible nor invulnerable. Coming of age has involved coming to ...

John Maynard Keynes observed in 1936 that ‘common sense’ in matters of political economy was often nothing more than a half-understood and mangled version of the academic orthodoxy of fifty or a ...

In his review of The Novel Today (1936) by the Marxist theoretician Philip Henderson, George Orwell refers to the last occasion – six or seven years before, he estimates – when the magazine Punch ...

Monsieur Ozenfant’s Academy opens with an absence – the sort of absence that might have proved fatal to a book written by a less determined author. In his preface, Charles Darwent lists his fruitless ...

In May 1945, the youth club of St Anne’s Church in Kew constructed a huge pile of dried wood on the nearby cricket green in preparation for the announcement of VE Day. When Churchill declared victory, ...

All children love dragons. Why this is so is the subject of much discussion. Perhaps it’s because they really are an incarnation of a Jungian archetype, an innate part of our humanity. Or maybe it’s ...

Few leaders in history have aspired to territorial aggrandisement on the scale of Cecil Rhodes. The Anglo-Saxons were the finest race in the world, he declared, and ‘the more of the world we inhabit ...

Book Reviews by subject: True Crime & Myths & Folklore March 2004 Issue Tim Heald Pub Idol Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman By James Sharpe LR ...

Once upon a time, an ambitious ruler concerned about a rising power on the other side of the globe decided to place a puppet king on a nearby throne in a country that was beautiful, rich in natural ...