It’s been done before but what the heck. What have these in common: Grazia Deledda, Werner von Heidenstam, Jacinto Benavente? Let’s make it ...

Only Avus and, perhaps, Plutarch will find any pork scratchings here. Everyone else can take the afternoon off. The bike is a Matchless twi...

Here’s an odd literary problem. For two years I’ve edited a biography. The author and I are now satisfied the manuscript is factually and st...

Paying autoroute tolls in France is a pain. Not because of the amounts, for these roads deliver good value; rather the interface ergonomics...

When L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is another country. They do things differently there.” he cleverly avoided suggesting whether the things ...

On telly young men in North Face anoraks screech about Britain’s snowfall using rhetoric and sometimes the vocabulary employed in last week’...

Dentists accept being questioned because they can suppress the unanswerable. I asked mine how many Brits-per-year died in the dentist’s chai...

Here are some items I appreciate: growing things ( galanthus nivalis , say, given the season), paintings (the cliff-top church in Turner’s “...