I spend far too long on Instagram nowadays. So long, in fact, that I have favourites, one of whom I am not afraid to confess to (the rest are mostly…

I have written far too much about Boris Johnson already, I know. Everyone has. The country has been through a tumultuous dalliance with him over the…

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,…