I read this book while I was in the Loire valley and, even though the region in this book is slightly farther south, I felt like I was right there. The life of the woman named Celestine provides a starting point for a pretty amazing exercise in historical research. I'm realizing now that I was ...
Just across the River Thames from St Paul’s Cathedral stands an old and elegant house. Over the course of almost 450 years the dwelling on this site has witnessed many changes. From its windows, people have watched the ferrymen carry Londoners to and from Shakespeare’s Globe; they have gazed on t...
A history of Kentish Town, a district whose ship has never quite come in, but which turns out to have done quite well simply by surviving - a 1944 planning document labelled it "an area in need of removal". This is a good book throughout, but possibly at its finest in the last chapter, when it en...
Anybody who has travelled across the large, beautiful, essentially reclusive countryside of France has been to it, in one of its thousand variants. In the language of bureaucracy, it is the chef-lieu of a Commune: the basic, untranslatable unit of French local government that is presided over by ...
After the Tudor period it was no longer a defensible barrier against foreign or home-grown marauders; instead, it became London’s open space, a combination of highway and arena. Elaborate pageants were staged on its surface, especially by London Mayors. An early seventeenth-century show, which ce...