Pyramus: "Now die, die, die, die, die". [Dies] "A Midsummer Night's Dream" "Shakespeare's Dead" reveals the unique ways in which Shakespeare brings dying, death, and the dead to life. It establishes the cultural, religious and social contexts for th...

Veronica the hippopotamus lives with her large family on the cool muddy river bank, swimming in its clear waters. But she is not happy. She dreams of becoming a conspicuous hippopotamus, even perhaps, a famous one, noticed by everyone. So she sets o...

Thames aficionado Robert Gibbings once wrote that "the quiet of an age-old river is like the slow turning of the pages of a well-loved book". "Writing the Thames" tells a much-loved river's story through the remarkable prose, poetry and illustration...

Epitaphs are a unique artform. In previous centuries they were regarded as an opportunity to celebrate, mourn, reflect on, philosophize, lament, or affirm the individual and the mystery of life and death, often giving rise to carefully crafted verse....

Who said "I should have drunk more champagne"? Did Nelson really utter "Kiss me Hardy" from his deathbed? Which statesman was, at the end, "bored with it all"? Which king begged, "Let not poor Nelly starve..." An extraordinary number of deathbed say...

In late November 1623, Edward Blount finally took delivery at his bookshop at the sign of the Black Bear near St Paul's of a book that had been long in the making. "Master William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies" was the first collec...

The locations of Shakespeare's plays range from Greece, Turkey and Syria to England, and they range in time from 1000 BC to the early Tudor age. He never set a play explicitly in Elizabethan London, which he and his audience inhabited, but always in...

When Falstaff calls upon the sky to rain potatoes in "The Merry Wives of Windsor", he is highlighting the late sixteenth-century belief that the exotic vegetable, recently introduced to England from the Americas, was an aphrodisiac. In "Romeo and Jul...

Did you know that coffee was recommended as protection against the bubonic plague in the seventeenth century? Or that tea was believed to make men "unfit to do their business" and blamed for women becoming unattractive? On the other hand, a cup of ch...

When did the British Government become the world's largest drugs pusher? What tree is frequently used to treat cancer? Which everyday condiment is the most widely traded spice on the planet? Plants are an indispensable part of our everyday life. Fro...