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Sit yourself down in a chair. Bend your left leg over your right. While keeping your back straight, scratch the end of your nose with...

“Is it original?” the member of the film crew asked me. “Yes. It’s a letter he wrote to his mother. One of about a thousand that...

The Isles of Yap lie in the Mid Pacific, some 800 miles East of the Philippines. If both name and location suggest something out of...

Every week there are yet more examples of a country, or indeed a world, which seems increasingly insane. Clearly, this is not the first...

“I didn’t think you were the type.” Zu Henry, our neighbour in Bath, was looking through the passenger window of our car and addressing me.

A few weeks ago, I found myself repeatedly humming a tune of a well-known Arabic song lamenting the loss of Andalusia and its splendour.

The other day I was pulled up short by a headline from the USA that a school district in the state of Utah had banned the Bible, King James’

An envied British institution. No, not the National Health Service. Something much more enviable. This year is the 70th anniversary of The

No, despite the title, I am not reviewing the second book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy on Henry VIII's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.

I first came across Fraxinus uhdei in Colombia in 1998. It’s a species of ash tree from Mexico, known in Colombia as urapán...