When did you first hear about Jeremiah Horrocks? As a child, I saw him and his telescope on the stained-glass windows at St Michael’s Church in Much Hoole, Lancashire. The windows, depicting his groun

HUMANITY HAS CHANGED AN AWFUL LOT IN THE PAST 58 YEARS. THE MOON? NOT SO MUCH. It was in 1968 that astronauts first drew near the moon, and it will be early this year, if all goes as planned, that a c

Alice Loxton EleanorA 200-mile walk in search of England’slost queen352pp. Pan Macmillan. £22. Many are commemorated in stone, but few so grandly as Eleanor of Castile (d. 1290). Following her unexpec

While hunting for antiques in the Netherlands in the 1880s, the esteemed art dealer Joseph Joel Duveen received a tip-off that some “wonderful pieces of china” had come up for sale in a remote village

What is a gamma-ray burst? Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are intense sources of high-energy radiation that we detect on Earth in the form of gamma rays. They were first detected in the 1960s by US military

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