Dreamers Rise

Henry Mayhew, the great chronicler of 19th-century London's working poor, collected the following tale in the course of an interview wit...

The above illustration by the late French artist Jean-Claude Pertuzé is from a version of a folktale known in French as "Jean de l'...

Let some traveller, on seeing Hermes of Commagene, aged sixteen years, sheltered in the tomb by fate, call out: I give you my greetings, l...

Stepan Krasheninnikov: The Kamchadals regard Mount Kamchatka as the dwelling place of the dead; they say that when it emits flames, it means...

Slawomir Rawicz was a Polish military officer in World War II who in the 1950s dictated to a ghost-writer a stirring account of how he and s...

I'm walking in the woods at night in the company of Willie McTell. I see three deer standing a few yards away; somehow, in spite of his ...

I stepped into a little café that was simply a small room with a counter in the rear and a table on either side of the door. The woman behin...

Edward Gibbon: Diocletian, who, from a servile origin, had raised himself to the throne, passed the nine last years of his life in a priva...

I pulled out this slender letterpress chapbook the other day when I was looking for something else. I had forgotten that I owned it. The cov...

Sir James George Frazer: Not only among the Celts but throughout Europe, Hallowe’en, the night which marks the transition from autumn to...

It's a frightening thought that I've reached an age where there are now books that I first read almost fifty years ago, and I'm...

A posh tour bus pulls up outside our house and discharges a group of North Koreans and American supporters, who barge in through our front d...

Charles Dickens: The passengers were landing from the packet on the pier at Calais. A low-lying place and a low-spirited place Calais wa...

Most of this year's butternut squash crop has now been harvested. I grew two types, both of which are hybrids. The tan ones shown above ...

This novel set in a fictitious Eastern European country was published in 1983, that is, the year after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, but sup...

A Josef Škvorecký novella set in wartime Czechoslovakia led me to this droll 1985 BBC documentary about the bass saxophone and its players,...

And some books are just not meant for one ... I picked up The Idiot because I was more or less housebound for a few days and tired of dippi...

Our dog came upon this large Chinese praying mantis in our yard this morning in incriminating circumstances. The mantis was on the ground di...

The gifted songwriter and performer Nanci Griffith has died at the age of 68. Here she is in her prime, with a lovely live version of one of...

One day I hope to retire to grow the vegetable marrows, but until then I have only the window box. — Hercule Poirot Il faut cultiver not...