One of artist Vanessa Bell’s earliest memories of her sister, Virginia Woolf, was the future writer asking Bell “which I liked best, my father or my mother.” Vanessa was the elder of the two girls, but they were both young enough to be “jumping around naked” in the bathroom.

In several homilies, the late Pope Francis spoke of the ‘grace of feeling shame’. What a strange idea! Nobody wants to feel shame. Adam and Eve, after all, first felt shame only after being expelled from the Garden of Eden.

The British Normandy memorial, inaugurated in 2019, overlooks Gold Beach. Whether it was necessary to build it is debatable. There was already a British memorial in Bayeux, but it suffered from the handicap of not being close to a D-Day beach.

The British Normandy memorial, inaugurated in 2019, overlooks Gold Beach. Whether it was necessary to build it is debatable. There was already a British memorial in Bayeux, but it suffered from the handicap of not being close to a D-Day beach.

This is an important book, brimful of information on what is arguably one of the most significant streets in London, the route for the capital’s expansion over many centuries. As a historical account, however, it is somewhat infuriating.

Everyone has cracks; we hear that’s how the light gets in. Adeline Virginia Stephen wanted a life flooded with light. Marrying her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1912, she said she wanted “everything – love, children, adventure, intimacy, work”.

After the Cold War, globalisation was hailed by politicians and business leaders as the way to create higher living standards, reduce the threat of war and spread Western-style liberal democracy through free trade.

One of the great utopian promises of the internet was that it could teach you how to do anything. When we need to fix a water-damaged iPhone, cook a recipe, revive a faltering houseplant or treat a nasty blister, we turn to Google first. But that promise was only half kept.

Blake sought recovery. He strove to awaken and embolden a re-expanded imagination through the use of poetry, imagery, and piercing insights. Further, unlike many of the Romantic figures with whom he is often grouped, he did not proceed by rejecting the political and technological revolutions that so dramatically marked his era (and have continued in our own), or by appealing to lost times and distant moods, as if he were a lone, tragic visionary.

In 1941, as it entered the second world war, the US Army barely bested Bulgaria’s for size and combat readiness. Nor did US forces have very much idea of what conditions were like in their new theatres of operation. In the winter of 1942, hot-weather gear and lightweight machinery landed in the deserts of North Africa where hot and dry conditions were assumed to persist throughout the year.