Some place names always raise a smile. Residents of Nether Wallop and Chipping Sodbury must be wearily accustomed to the suppressed giggles...

Today, a new exhibition opens at the Foundling Museum in London. Frederick Walker, The  Lost Path, 1863 © The   Makins Collection ...

300 years ago today Louis XIV to took to his bed for the last time. His legs had been hurting for a while and his doctor thought he had scia...

I have a good friend with a gift for finding the perfect book. A few weeks ago she appeared with a slim volume that had been languishing in ...

Last month, I was inspired by an old magazine to write about aluminium knickers. I warned you then that the publication might prove to ...

When I was a History student (in the 1970s and again at the turn of the century) one of the things I liked most was being buried in the libr...

When I was young, I watched a lot of black-and-white films. They were on the telly every wet weekend afternoon, and although I must have se...

One of the joys of the Internet is how quickly we can now answer questions that we would once have parked in the back of our minds - even w...