Lost culture is exciting. How can something be exciting when we have lost it? Most times when we talk about loss, it’s in terms of the ev...

Seventy-eight years ago, in a bitter Polish January, an appalling atrocity of the second world war began, but it is not widely known about....

Maybe Pliny the Elder was born 1900 years too early. As a man who was interested in everything and who needed very little sleep, he would ha...

'Speak properly,' my mother was forever reminding me as a child. By which, of course, she meant don't use Scots - either the wor...

Small Things Like These by the Irish novelist Claire Keegan is my Book of the Year. There have been several books especially by women autho...