Goodbye to the gilded age

Austenland – is there such a place? If so, it’s to be found in drawing rooms and parlours, not in sweeping vistas. So it’s appropriate that the Hampshire village of Chawton, Jane Austen’s home for the

Glasgow, 1942. The Carl Rosa Opera Company was in town to perform Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. Tickets had been snapped up by local people – including many who didn’t really know what an opera was. The

Silverware, with its glistering surface and ornate designs, dresses the table like no other material and has an unmatched capacity for turning a meal into an occasion, as Matthew Dennison discovers

The platinum blonde in British history

One Bath location that Jane Austen wrote about – criticising the houses as being too small – is New King Street. Come to number 19, in which several rooms recreate interiors in a typical 18th-century

Did you know that Thomas Müntzer, leader of the German Peasants’ War in 1525, used a rainbow flag to rally his followers? It’s an aptly exuberant image for the radical charisma of Müntzer, and for the