Provincial towns in Britain grew in size and importance in the eighteenth century. Ports such as Glasgow and Liverpool greatly expanded, while industrial centres such as Birmingham and Manchester flourished. Market towns outside London developed as c...

For 25 centuries, the animal stories which go by the name of Aesop's Fables have amused and instructed generations of children and adults alike. They are still as fresh and poignant today as they were to the ancient Greeks who composed them. This bea...

How did a library founded over 400 years ago grow to become the world-renowned institution it is today, home to over thirteen million items? From its foundation by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1598 to the opening of the Weston Library in 2015, this illustra...

"Jones' Icones" is a stunning six-volume manuscript containing paintings of some of the most important butterfly and moth collections at the end of the eighteenth century. It is the work of William Jones (1745-1818), a wealthy wine merchant from Chel...

What did a gongfarmer do? How is a chaperone connected to a bird of prey? What is the etymology behind cloud architect? And is there a link between secretaries and secrets? The story behind these (and many more) job titles is rarely predictable and...

Reynard – a subversive, dashing, anarchic, aristocratic, witty fox from the watery lowlands of medieval East Flanders – is in trouble. He has been summoned to the court of King Noble the Lion, charged with all manner of crimes and misdemeanours. How...

Before the advent of commercial transatlantic flights in the early 1950s, the only way to travel between continents was by sea. In the golden age of ocean liners, between the late nineteenth century and the Second World War, shipping companies ensure...

Built between 1855 and 1860, Oxford University Museum of Natural History is the extraordinary result of close collaboration between artists and scientists. Inspired by John Ruskin, the architect Benjamin Woodward and the Oxford scientists worked with...

The vocabulary of past times, no longer used in English, is always fascinating, especially when we see how it was pilloried by the satirists of the day. Here we have Victorian high and low society, with its fashionable and unfashionable slang, its c...

The Merton library is rightly known for its antiquity, its beautiful medieval and early modern architecture and fittings and for its remarkable and important collection of manuscripts and rare books, yet a nineteenth-century plan to tear the medieval...