They had a dream
One of the easiest mistakes to make about history is to assume that the past is like the recent past,…
Drama in the mouth
It would be a mistake to treat Plenty More, the new cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, merely as a collection of…
Churchgoing is good for you
And that’s true whether or not you believe in God
A baking June
If I were the kind of person who invited people to come and have a bite to eat that very…
A choice of children’s books
A children’s author and illustrator, Jonathan Emmet, created a stir recently by saying that women are effectively gatekeepers of children’s…
Women against the vote
The suffragettes’ opponents deserve to be remembered sympathetically
Paris
No city really multitasks like Paris, shorthand for romance, culture, fashion, gastronomy and the kind of street life you find…
From post office girl to woman of letters
Melanie McDonagh on Flora Thompson, whose revealing account of rural Oxfordshire life at the turn of the 19th century became a literary classic
Forgive me, Father
What Catholics really talk about in the confession box
All the president’s women
Hollande’s affair demonstrates that the French are becoming more puritanical about monogamy
Eat, drink and be merry…
... for tomorrow traditional seasonal rituals may just be ghostly memories of a vanished world, says Melanie McDonagh
A choice of children’s books
Animal stories for children are always tricky; as J.R.R. Tolkien observed in his essay on fairy stories, you can end…
The man who broke the silence
How Professor Paul Collier has bypassed the liberal taboo on discussing immigration
Not endearing, just wince-making
To understand quite how disgruntled the reviews of the latest Bridget Jones diaries have been, you have to recall quite…
Less sex, please
From Bridget Jones to prime-time telly, porn culture is now mainstream
Basic instincts
What do women want? You might have thought the Wife of Bath had got this one sorted, but Daniel Bergner…
No saint
G.K. Chesterton was a great journalist, not an angel
Bloody Vikings
Forget that guff about peaceful farmers with an interest in travel
The urban peasant diet
You know that something’s afoot when Lakeland says so. Lakeland is the kitchenware company which has more of a finger…
Measuring up to Machiavelli
Few of today’s statesmen, says Philip Bobbitt, deserve comparison with the ‘seriously ethical’ author of The Prince
