Marian Boswall defends the building of lakes, which bring both beauty and biodiversity

Britain’s neglect of its maritime heritage has led to shuttered shipyards, ailing fishing fleets and impoverished coastal towns

Capturing the immediacy of fighting and the writhing bodies of soldiers, as well as keeping narrative clarity, proved enormously difficult for painters depicting battles before the advent of photography. Michael Hall reveals how they rose to the challenge

Tennyson’s embrace of science and catastrophe theory

Smothering, transformative and beautiful, fog’s close-set shroud has inspired titans of literature, cinema and art–and forces the rest of us to look at the world a little closer, writes John Lewis-Stempel

In a John Behan bronze, collector Jacqueline O’Donovan, a child of the Irish diaspora, can sense the desperation of a starving people forced to flee their land