Unfairly maligned as a sneaky troublemaker, the quicksilver ferret is a characterful, curious and highly intelligent creature–with fascinating regal and cultural trappings to boot, writes Octavia Pollock

STAY still,” a strong, male voice commanded from the gloom. The autumn sun was setting on Wildwood Cottage, silhouetting its undulating structure dramatically against a charcoal and orange sky. “Well,

Britain is a country mercifully bereft of threatening fauna–or so you might believe. John Lewis-Stempel provides a miscellany of our otherwise benign land’s more fearsome critters

The worst loss of life among animals during the Second World War occurred before a single bomb had dropped on Great Britain. Official notices of advice to the public on how to prepare for air raids we

Taking as many guises as his names, the Prince of Lies turned at times into a man-devouring ogre, a mutant medley of claws, horns and wings, or the brooding rebel that lit the imagination of Romantic painters, as Carla Passino discovers

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