It is well known that in antique times the institution of slavery was pervasive. The ancient Athenians may have invented democracy, but the voters…

Given that it has become the bugbear of all right-thinking right-wingers, does it strike anyone as odd that the word ‘woke’ is almost unheard, except…

Bath is a small gem of a city in the west of England, named after hot springs which exist nowhere else in the British Isles – the other spas are all…

In 1936, Francis Bacon offered some of his works to the International Surrealist Exhibition, but they were rejected as ‘not sufficiently surreal.’…

There is a picture by Rembrandt of the carcass of an ox or bull. It is variously entitled Flayed Ox, Slaughtered Ox, Carcass of Beef or Side of Beef…

Back in the Sixties, it took footage shot from the surface of the moon for the world to see itself as a single, isolated entity. People watched the…

DECEMBER 2019 – PREHISTORY In days of yore, when no one knew the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic – apart from…

Asked for her opinion regarding the coronavirus which had just appeared in China, Dame Jane Goodall, the conservationist and expert on chimpanzees,…

Davi Kopenawa is the genuine article, a shaman whose dreamworld is attuned to the wonders of the Amazon rainforest. What can he tell us about the…

In his twenties, John Constable, the great English landscape painter, fell in love with a woman called Maria Bicknell whom he had known since she was…