The smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd, the flare of the floodlights – what enchantments they conjure! If you’d visited a regional playhouse over two centuries ago, though, a very differe

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

Slippers have made their way out of the bedroom and into the street, finds Simon Mills–although not without precedent or formalities

Every 5 November, villages and towns across Britain light bonfires and set off fireworks to mark Guy Fawkes Night. In the East Devon town of Ottery St Mary, though, the infernos aren’t stationary. Her

“One might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,” goes the old proverb. The meaning is simple: if you are going to be punished for a small crime, you may as well commit the bigger one. In the early

Whether you call it Christmas, Winterval or just ‘the holidays’, the period between late December and early January is cocoon time: a cessation of work and routine activities. It begins with tradition