Not everybody likes Alsatian wine. Good. That means more of it for me. The slim, green adolescent bottles with sloping shoulders and no hips are distinguished by pollen-yellow labels, often bearing medieval-style lettering. Something happens to grapes in this region of France that makes them taste…
Orkney, Scotland
Orkney, Scotland
Cake is having a moment.In fact, it has been a long moment, a golden hour in the slow oven of history. With an audience of 14 million—more than half the Brits watching TV at the time—The Great British Bake Off, launched in 2010, is the most popular television program of recent years. Indeed, it has…
Cake is having a moment.In fact, it has been a long moment, a golden hour in the slow oven of history. With an audience of 14 million—more than half the Brits watching TV at the time—The Great British Bake Off, launched in 2010, is the most popular television program of recent years. Indeed, it has…
Wilkie Collins was quite literally a colorful character. His doctor described his attire at dinner as sometimes featuring “a light camel hair or tweed suit, with a broad pink or blue striped shirt, and perhaps a red tie." On another occasion he appeared wearing a low-cut shirt "dashed with great,…
Near Sawrey, Cumbria
Near Sawrey, Cumbria
Turin
London
Why do some authors stay famous, while others fade from history’s roll of honor? When it was published in 1811, Mary Brunton’s racy novel Self-Control was a runaway bestseller. Although its theme was moral fortitude, it was wildly exciting. An ardent suitor, Hargrave, kidnapped the heroine, Laura…
Birds of prey are mysterious. Most of us glimpse them at close quarters only occasionally. We hear the “peow-peow” of a hunting buzzard overhead and sight a pale, feathered under-carriage gliding on unseen thermals. Or the disquiet of other, smaller birds alerts us to an aerial dogfight: crows…
It is autumn and I am making a pilgrimage by sea to a literary gravestone. On my left rise the primeval, groined, and gullied mountains of Skye; on my right is the wild coast of Knoydart, one of the least populated regions of western Scotland. The colors of the land in this season are…
Charlotte Brontë liked to let her hair down linguistically from time to time. In an unpublished piece of early fiction, she imagines a scene at a horse race in which the owner of the defeated favorite suspects that his horse was doped. Ned Laury introduces an underworld informer, Jerry Sneak—the…
If at first you don’t secede, try, try again. This might be the motto of Alex Salmond’s Scottish National party, which since 1934 has been advocating the proposition that Scotland should be an independent country, governed not from London but from Edinburgh and able to make its own policy decisions…
There is a new reason to visit London. It is wooden, but lively. Old, but new. Shadowy, but luminous. The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is a reconstruction of what an indoor theater might have looked and felt like around 1600, when Shakespeare was 36 and at the height of his career as an actor,…
When we first meet Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel, she is hiding behind the curtains reading a forbidden book that transports her to the polar tundra:
Two truths tend to strike people around middle age: Money buys less than it once did, and manners are in decline.
The investigator is chasing a suspect, who has just disappeared through a secret trapdoor. Breathlessly, the private dick follows the masked figure down a ladder into a dark passageway: It turns out to lead from the Belgravia mansion into the vault of a nearby bank. Our hero can see the thief in…
Groningen
London
Every Christmas Eve, M. R. James (1862-1936), the celebrated scholar of medieval literature and provost of King’s College, Cambridge, enacted a strange ritual. After participating in the Christmas service at King’s College Chapel—that miracle of 15th-century Gothic architecture whose soaring…
Henry IX is one of the most interesting monarchs Britain never had.
Just as American children grow up with Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, British children grow up with Edward Lear’s fantastical but touching poem “The Owl and the Pussycat.”
In the musical My Fair Lady, snooty dialectician Henry Higgins searches in vain for “purity” of expression in English; he winces at the Scots and the Irish, shudders at the Cockney London accent. His parting shot is, however, fired across the Atlantic: There even are places where English completely…
Amalfi
London
John Keats was to Romantic poetry as James Dean was to cinema: young, gifted, and doomed. His charisma lies in the astonishing energy, humor, and inspiration that he packed into a small physical frame and an appallingly brief time frame: He died of tuberculosis aged barely 25. His eyes were always…
A great English comic novel celebrates its centenary. The funniest femme fatale of all time turned 100 this year.
Biography is a form of love affair, the more intense because it can never be consummated. Like lovers, biographers rifle through their subjects’ letters and diaries for evidence of the absent one’s activities and affections. They guard their subject’s reputation and become jealous of rivals. They…
Venice
London
Helpston, Northamptonshire
Cannes
Queen Victoria
A friend once prophesied that on my tombstone will be written the rueful words: "I really wish I hadn't agreed to do this." He had a point. Standing at a deserted railway station at dusk in the Scottish Highlands tired, hungry, and late, I wondered what on earth had induced me to volunteer for a…
Scottish Men of Letters and the New Public Sphere
Most people include eating well among the delights of a short stay in Paris. But few consider that, as well as fond memories of melting soufflés and crisp croissants, they could acquire the skill to make them at home. In fact, even if you have only a few hours to spare in the culinary capital of…
Everyone has a ball in Vienna.
Many countries have a national saint. Scotland can boast the distinction of also having a national sinner: His name is Robert Burns. Burns (1759-1796), the poet who penned tender lyrics such as "O my Luve's like a red, red rose," scorching satires on high-Calvinist hypocrisy such as "Holy Willie's…