I’M up at my parents’ old house, surrounded by boxes of books. My mum was a voracious reader. You only had to see all the bookcases in her home to realise that. Many books were bought for her as gifts

Leigh Lawson has embraced acting and poetry with the same determination that sustained Marie Lloyd, the music-hall queen whose memorabilia he collects, as Carla Passino discovers

What is a legacy garden? If historic gardens are those we preserve in recognition of their significance to our horticultural past, then perhaps legacy gardens are those we value because they were conj

Our gardens have difficult histories. As a historian of empire, writing a book re-telling the stories of America’s plants, I spend swathes of my day reckoning with them. Most of the plants we grow wer

Dear Simon, I was particularly interested in Sylvia Lee’s item on Cope’s Pools in Yesterday Remembered (Pools Party, December). I worked at the company’s offices in Edmonton, north London in 1966-67.

HAVING SPENT SO MUCH TIME IN NEWSROOMS and edit suites making television and radio documentaries, I have come to archives late on in my life. These are the precious places that hold records, whether t