Helen MacDonald

A documentary about the M25 that will make your heart soar

4 July 2020 9:00 am

When a 90-minute documentary is introduced with the words ‘This is the M25’, you’d be within your rights not to…

Velázquez’s portrait of his Moorish assistant Juan de Pareja. The glorious lace collar would surely have fallen foul of Spain’s sumptuary laws

Velázquez’s vanishing act

2 January 2016 9:00 am

This is an extraordinary story. In 1845 John Snare, an unremarkable Reading bookseller, goes to an auction in a defunct…

Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (Photo: Getty)

In Crow’s dark shadow

26 September 2015 8:00 am

A dead parent, the interrogation of a literary inheritance, and over everything, a bird: Max Porter is apparently unafraid to…