Tirzah Garwood just isn’t as good as her husband Eric Ravilious
Tirzah Garwood, wife of the more famous Eric Ravilious, is having a well-deserved moment in the sun, benefiting from this…
‘Carried away by those Russians’ – the dreadful fate of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters
The queen’s repeated warnings to Alix and Ella of the danger of marrying Russians were ignored, and both Princesses of Hesse would die appalling deaths at the hands of revolutionaries
What’s gone wrong at Winchester Cathedral?
The Dean of Winchester, the Very Revd Catherine Ogle, has announced that she will be retiring on 1 May 2025.…
The joy of party bags
The perfect, unpretentious, well-constructed party bag was given to guests leaving a recent Hatchards party. It contained a wedge of…
My prep school scarred me for life
‘A part of me died at school’, Charles Spencer writes in his shockingly stark account of sadism and sexual abuse at Maidwell Hall, Northamptonshire, in the 1970s
Please stop clapping at funerals
The Happy Clappies – evangelical Christians who clap along to worship songs during church services – have been around since…
In the dark early 1960s, at least we had the Beatles
The first half of the decade saw towns bulldozed, the Beeching cuts, everyday racism, political scandal and the threat of Armageddon. But there was also Beatlemania…
Hell is a heat pump
Hell is a heat pump
Beware of pity
In her powerful memoir-cum-manifesto, Selina Mills tells us what she misses most, what irritates her most and why she won’t have a guide dog
A last-minute escape from the Holocaust
In a profoundly moving family memoir, Daniel Finkelstein describes the miracle by which his mother, as a child, was rescued from the hell of Belsen
The sadness of Britain’s seaside resorts
Their decline began with the arrival of package holidays in the 1960s – and new schemes for their revival seem already to have backfired
The madness of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods
The madness of the Low Traffic Neighbourhood measures
My search for London’s cheapest flat
My hunt for the cheapest property in London
The puppetry renaissance
Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office…
The joy of loathing the Qatar World Cup
I’ll miss hating the Qatar World Cup
The glamour and romance of London’s vanished department stores
There are two journeys I’ll need to make after reading Tessa Boase’s heartbreakingly poignant book about London’s lost department stores.…
The parallel universe you can explore on two wheels
Many of us daydream about escaping into an imaginary parallel universe. The good news is that Britain has its own…
Spare us the preaching: The Railway Children Return reviewed
It doesn’t help the cause of The Railway Children Return that the original 1970 Railway Children film is currently on…
