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...

      I’ve always loved street markets and I’m sad that now, like all retail shopping, they’re being strangled by the internet. One of my fa...

  Knowing that I had a blog post to write in the vicinity of Christmas, got me wondering about Christmas itself. My particular interest is t...

Camellias in Europe In early April 2009, I went with my husband to Dresden, a place I had long wanted to visit, and we took a side trip to t...

Queen Tanaquil As can be seen from the tragic stories of  Lucretia and Virginia , the women of early regal Rome gained fame when used as exe...

Paracelsus, the sixteenth century Swiss physician and alchemist, said: “ Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage...

Coin of Petronius Maximus. Credit; Wikicomms/ Classical Numismatic Group,      I’ve spent the last year writing a book entitled Ancient Rome...