So Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in October 1876, charting the latest instalment of the Holbein cult. He was renting a room in Isleworth, west London, still hoping for a religious career

It’s a sunny summer afternoon in a verdant corner of the Essex countryside. A pretty pastoral landscape lies before us, with cattle sheltering in the shade of oak trees, rolling green fields, and a gr

The samurai’s history and legacy, Angela Merkel’s 21st-century military and a new aviation festival

In Caravaggio’s “St Matthew and the Angel” (1602), the Bible seems to arrive as a shock to those who wrote it. Matthew, bare-armed and dirty-toed, is a fisherman stranded on dry land. Everything about

What do our beloved hostelries have to do with the discovery of DNA, the D-Day landings and The Lord of the Rings ? Everything, as Ashleigh Arnott discovers

Exhibition of the week Lucian Freud: Drawing into ...