JOHN DOWLAND IS MY NAME: musician, composer, greatest lute player of my age in Europe, some say, when in England Elizabeth and James were on the throne. I died in 1626 when I was 63 and was buried on

The sudden burst of gunshots shattered the relative calm of Lisbon’s Praça do Comércio, a beautiful plaza facing the Portuguese city’s harbour. King Carlos I, slumped in his open carriage, barely had

Your indispensable guide to the capital

Do not speak ill of the dead: so runs a familiar injunction, often recalled when it is already too late, and ill has been spoken. And sometimes the dead themselves set a terrible example. Consider the

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 sale of a Fabergé imperial egg and a 15th-century triptych made headlines last year, but one of the most powerful pieces was a painting by Richard Parkes Bonington showing what he could have become, had he not died so young