Discover wildly different courting customs and the origin of international wedding traditions

From George Stubbs’s golden vision of the labourer’s place in society to Ford Madox Brown’s heroically monumental celebration of manual labour, artists gave individual interpretations of work, as Michael Hall reveals

Jennifer Buckley Periodicals, Fiction and the Novel, 1700–1760 Ecologies of print 232pp. Edinburgh University Press. £95. Matthew P. Brown The Novel and the Blank A literary history of the book trades

Exaggerating her beetling monobrow and wispy dark moustache in self-portraits, the artist Frida Kahlo was a female force to be reckoned with, unafraid to pour her heart onto the canvas. Only last autu

THE first billet-doux I ever received came from ...

Just a hop, skip and jump from London, but a million miles from the stresses of the city, newly refurbished countryside retreat Burnham Beeches makes a perfect escape, whether you’re seeking a Mother’