An American academic finds the people he meets abroad more interesting and more widely knowledgeable than his colleagues and peers at home.

Enough is as good as a feast. But a feast is as good as enough.

The English naturalist Gilbert White writes of the harsh January weather of 1776.

New material that sheds light on the last days of Roger Casement has been released by the National Library on open digital format.

Seamus Heaney pays tribute to a man beloved by his friends for his originality as a poet, his acuity as a critic, his probity and courage and merriment.

George Orwell taught us how to detect cant and doublespeak. He also had some views on language that would do credit to a retired colonel in Tunbridge Wells.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published two hundred years ago today. Miss Austen couldn’t wait to try it out on the neighbours.

Two historians clash in a Belfast radio interview on the Famine. Did the British deliberately plan for genocide by ‘allowing nature to run its course’?

A little bit of Under Milk Wood for St David’s Day. Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard rehearses her two late husbands.

A detailed study of Moscow in the year that Stalin’s purges got into full swing is, writes one reviewer, an almost impossibly rich masterpiece.