Helen MacDonald

A drive on the wild side

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

Lost, found and lost again

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)

The voice of Crow

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…