"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford", said Samuel Johnson in 1777. Since then the capital has been characterised variously as a "riddle", a "cesspool" and a "modern Babylon", and both L...

Wilfred Owen is the poet of pity, the voice of the soldier maimed, blinded, traumatised and killed, not just in the Great War, but in all wars since, so resonant has his message become. Although he saw only five of his poems published in his lifetime...

How did German intelligence agents in the First World War use dead fish to pass on vital information to their operatives? What did an advertisement for a dog in "The Times" have to do with the movement of British troops into Egypt? And why did Britis...

In taking soup do not gurgle or make throat noises. Speak well of others or not at all is a good rule. "The Art of Good Manners" covers such topics as table manners, pronunciation, introductions, conversation, courtship and children's behaviour. It g...

...No fewer than two hundred thousand Germans were already upon English soil! The outlook grew blacker every hour. Eight years before the outbreak of the First World War, when national hysteria over the supposed presence of German spies in England gr...

"The Art of Letter Writing" gives over fifty examples of the perfect letter for any occasion. Unsure how to break off an engagement, accept an invitation to a country house weekend, complain about a courier or write to a countess? This book contains...

The "miracle drug" penicillin was first given intravenously to a patient in Oxford on 12 February 1941, leading to a transformation in the way that bacterial infection is understood and treated. What was to become one of the greatest stories in biome...

First published in 1920, "How to Dine in Style" opens a window onto the golden age of elegant dining, where the basic function of ingesting nourishment was elevated to a high social art, attended by intricate details and elaborate ritual. Starched li...

A plain, blank stationer's notebook from the 1780s in the Bodleian Library contains some of the most famous juvenilia in all of English literature. Copied out in Jane Austen's youthful hand, "Volume the First", which takes its name from the inscripti...

Everyone knows a joke about mothers-in-law, but what are the golden rules you need to become a popular one? The authors of this pioneering guide, first published in the 1930s, aimed to dramatically improve relationships for all the family with sound...