Tennyson

An artist in her own right: the genius of Elizabeth Siddal

22 February 2025 9:00 am

Her imaginative, edgy sketches, though lacking technical expertise, often look beyond their time to a post-naturalist, symbolist era

Where would any writer be without a room of their own?

28 March 2020 9:00 am

If you seek out the home of an admired writer, you might find, as with Ernest Hemingway’s house in Havana,…

It’s all Greek to me: a schoolchild’s homework on a wax tablet, Egypt, 2nd century AD

Would James Joyce have finished Ulysses without coloured pens?

11 May 2019 9:00 am

The Mesopotamians wrote on clay and the ancient Chinese on ox bones and turtle shells. In Egypt, in about 1,800…

Is it a bird? Is it a sofa? The secret history of ‘butterbump’

26 March 2016 9:00 am

‘Still I’m called Buttercup —poor little Buttercup,’ sang my husband in an inappropriate and displeasing baritone. Not wishing to encourage…