This collection of essays offers an intimate history of Austen's art and life told through objects associated with her personally and with the era in which she lived. Her teenage notebooks, music albums, pelisse-coat, letters, the homemade booklets i...

"Here I am once more in this Scene of Dissipation and vice, and I begin to find already my Morals corrupted". Much loved for the romantic plot lines of her novels and witty observations on relationships, Jane Austen was also a prolific letter writer...

"Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement". Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and founder of the USSR, was profoundly aware of the power of words. As a zealous orator and prolific writer, he used...

The Ormesby Psalter is perhaps the most magnificent yet enigmatic of the great Gothic psalters produced in East Anglia in the first half of the fourteenth century. Its pages boast a wealth of decoration picked out in rich colours and burnished gold,...

Oxford Botanic Garden is the oldest surviving botanic garden in Britain and has occupied its site in central Oxford since 1621. Conceived as a place to grow medicinal plants, born in the turmoil of civil war and nurtured during the restoration of the...

By the end of the eighteenth century London was the second largest city in the world, its relentless growth fuelled by Britain's expanding empire. Before the age of photography, the most widely used means of creating a visual record of the changing c...

One windy day a little boy happens upon a large black hat, lying in the street. When he tries it on, he becomes a whole host of different characters he's always wanted to be: a soldier marching through the puddles, a cowboy galloping on his steed, a...

"It's damned hard lines asking for bread and only getting a bullet!" The dramatic and chaotic events surrounding the Russian Revolution have been studied and written about extensively for the last hundred years, by historians and journalists alike....

Who has fallen into the rain puddle? Is it plump hen, turkey gobbler, curly sheep or beautiful fat pig? When all the animals peer into the puddle at the same time, they see the entire farmyard underwater. Off they run to get help. Meanwhile, the hot...

For centuries, volcanic eruptions have captured our imaginations. Whether as signposts to an underworld, beacons to ancient mariners, or as an extraordinary manifestation of the natural world, volcanoes have intrigued many people, who have left recor...