Art and Architecture, mainly

The Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova (1881–1931) was initially believed to be too tall and not athletic enough to succeed at ballet, yet still graduated from the Imperial Theatre School in St Petersburg in 1899. In 1906 she was promoted to prima ball...

I love dogs, especially those trained as service animals, and I love koala bears. As bush­­fires ravaged Australia this summer, there were many human her­oes that stepped up to defend their communities. But now the world has became entranced by th...

Rodrigo de Borja (1431-1503) was born into a Spanish nob­le fam­ily in Aragon.  He moved to Italy where the Borg­ia family enjoyed great success - Rod­rig­o's uncle was made bish­op of Valen­cia. Uncle Alonso became the first Bor­gia Pop...

 Soon after WW2 in Oxford (1946), two men met on a train and started talking. One was Roland Berrill (1897–1962), an Australian ex-pat bar­rister who never practised at the Bar but lived on the payments from his investments. The other was Dr...

A wave of C19th religious revivalism swept the USA, leading to in­c­reased calls for temperance. In 1838 Massachusetts passed a temp­er­ance law; it failed but a num­ber of other states followed suit by the time the Civil War began in 1861. In a...

The Romans, lovers of great beauty, valued the spectacular scenery and temperate climate of Surrentum, hovering over the cliffs of the Sorrento Peninsula. Romantic Sorren­to stands on the grey rock on the south­ern side of the Gulf of Naples. In ti...

I assumed that the clearances were some of the most tragic, in­fam­ous bits of Scottish history, where heartless landowners forced suffering people from their lands and homes. The Highland Clear­ances in Scotland re­sulted from a shift from agric...