It seems the 'Mrs Burton' (born Ursula Kuczynski) who pedalled around the English countryside in 1942 was a colonel in the Red Army. Her life story is extraordinary.
C20th experimental and idealistic collectives, including Santiniketan in Delhi, England's Dartington, Germany's Bruderhof. Their leaders were charismatics too - Tagore, Gurdjieff, et al - ... read more
The director of the Bodleian includes some of the US president's deleted tweets in an historical survey that ranges from the Library of Alexandria to the Windrush papers. The surprise is tha... read more
Fabric - and our hunger for it - as the mother of invention, the driver behind technology, agriculture, trade, politics, culture... it funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal empire. H... read more
This is not the Alexandria in the Nile Delta, but rather Alexandria 'Beneath the Mountains', in Afghanistan, discovered by a wandering scholar and archaeologist called Charles Masson in 1833... read more
From the author of the biography of Shchukin comes the story of another extraordinary pre-Revolutionary Russian collector of European art. He spent 1.5 million francs on 486 paintings, which... read more