January 8, 2022
Old Soar Manor

Old Soar Manor in Kent is a miniscule portion of a small 13th century manor house. Save for a couple of glazed windows, the buildings are open to both weather and birds. Short of a ruin by dint of good roofing, the place is empty. There is no office, entry or...

January 7, 2022
Carlyle's House

A painting by Robert Tait in the front parlour of 24 Cheyne Row dated 1857 shows Thomas and Jane Carlyle in their front parlour - at 24 Cheyne Row. Looking at it is like looking through a window into the room in which one is already standing. But the original...

January 1, 2022
Penshurst Place

The Baron’s Hall is the older and smaller of two great halls at Penshurst Place in Kent. Completed in 1341, it uses chestnut for the roof because it is lighter but stronger than oak. The main timbers are still aloft there, some six hundred and sixty years...

December 31, 2021
Claydon House

Externally Claydon House in Buckinghamshire is a rather sober place. Its symmetrical west front of seven bays in cut stone suggests conformity to an austere Georgian style of architecture - and no bad thing. Inside, however, if there is such a thing as high rococo,...

December 31, 2021
The Queen's House Greenwich

The Queen’s House at Greenwich was built for Anne of Denmark, the queen of King James I. Work started in 1616, but Anne died in 1619 and never lived there. The building was completed in 1635 and briefly occupied by King Charles I’s queen consort...

December 30, 2021
The Old Royal Naval College's Painted Hall

Downriver from central London’s more eye-catching historic buildings, the Greenwich ensemble known collectively as Maritime Britain is one of Britain’s 33 cultural UNESCO World Heritage sites. It includes the...

December 30, 2021
Oxburgh Hall

Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk is a magnificent brick-built, moated house of great charm. It has been home to the Bedingfield family since the 15th century. The family’s Catholic and Royalist status left them relatively impecunious - a fate which may have...

December 30, 2021
Chastleton House

Chastleton House in Oxfordshire is a compact Jacobean gem of faded surfaces, bumps and blemishes. Since the early 1600s, its occupants aspired to a status above county gentry but habitually fell short. As Royalists or Jacobites, whose fortunes waxed but mostly waned...

December 29, 2021
Broughton Castle

Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire is a moated, fortified Tudor manor house. Nikolaus Pevsner, no less, called Broughton “the finest and most complete medieval house in the county” and there’s every reason to agree. Simon Jenkins awards the place a coveted 5...

November 26, 2021
The Creation and Fall of Man by Mariotto Albertinelli

There is much to delight the eye in the newly re-opened Courtauld Art Gallery in London. Although the paintings remain the same within their newly-pristine environment, one sees them more clearly thanks...

October 21, 2021

Just a hundred miles north-west of Glasgow, where the COP26 conference is being held in November, lies the Inner Hebridean Isle of Coll. With its adjacent sibling Isle of Tiree, it feels less an off-cut of mainland Scotland than a vagrant...

by Dave Goulson
September 28, 2021
Silent Earth by Dave Goulson

Dave Goulson’s Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse is something of a roller-coaster ride in that the first 250 pages of the book detail the evidence for insect and biodiversity collapse that is happening right now all around us, before...

August 17, 2021
Truth sidelined by tribal epistemology

If you’ve noticed an unusual mix of content on this website, it’s because of the hybrid nature of my professional career, half English teacher, half software developer. Both ploughed their own furrow, and you may have noticed that occasionally elements...

June 24, 2021
Petworth House

Petworth House in West Sussex is a place of superlatives. It is a Grade I house (meaning a property of exceptional interest). It contains one of the National Trust’s largest collections of paintings and sculptures. It is surrounded by a park...

by Muriel Barbery
June 23, 2021
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

That Muriel Barbery’s 2006 novelThe Elegance of the Hedgehog has sold like proverbial hot cakes is no surprise. It is woven with references to philosophers as one would expect from a teacher of philosophy (reminding me of Robert M. Pirzig’s 1974...

June 18, 2021
Mapping in Backdrop CMS

At the end of April Backdrop CMS was graced with the addition of the Leaflet module which enables us Backdrop fans to do much of the mapping that we used to do in Drupal. Thanks for this go to the module’s maintainers,...

April 6, 2021
Greening your website

As we re-evaluate our lifestyles in the face of global climate change, it’s not just how we heat our homes, how we travel, work, rest, play and consume that needs a major re-think. Our websites also consume carbon, and we need to deal with this. As Tom...

by Eliot Higgins
March 14, 2021
We are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins

If you’ve been following the work of Eliot Higgins, you’ll not need to read the accounts of his exposés of Syrian, Libyan and Russian atrocities in this seminal book We are Bellingcat: An Intelligence Agency for the People. If you aren’t...

by Merlin Sheldrake
January 16, 2021
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrak

When Hamlet admonished Horatio by saying “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, fungi could well have been one of them, as Merlin Sheldrake’s scintillating book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds...

by Patrick White
December 17, 2020

As the near-blind matriarch Elizabeth Hunter, the central character of Patrick White’s 1973 The Eye of the Storm, lies dying for five hundred and fifty pages of this long and complex novel, we are also reading about the writer’s own mother, Ruth...

by Dave Eggers
November 1, 2020
The Captain and the Glory by Dave Eggers

Anyone familiar with George Orwell’s Animal Farm will appreciate how satire shifts the reader one remove away from a subject to gain a better appreciate of that subject. The farm’s animals, bitingly depicted by Orwell, illuminated the political...

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