In the membership roll of the worshipful guild of enabling wives, the name of Martha Freud ranks with the greatest: Mrs Noah, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Marx, Mrs Joyce, Mrs Nabokov, Mrs Clinton, and their...

The day​ after Brexit, in need of distraction, I joined nine other volunteers at a pub on the bank of the River Lea in East London to count eels. The European eel is critically endangered, and...

Dickens fought long and hard against the human tendency to focus exclusively on what is of immediate pressing concern in any given situation. His often anodyne protagonists have to compete for our attention with the idiosyncratic vitality possessed by the dozens of minor characters who surround them (hundreds, if there’s a riot in progress).

If homosexuals are what they are because of birth or through early environment, and are not in themselves deliberately vicious men, they should not be punished. To punish in such circumstances...

Brick Lane used to be the home of the dead. For centuries it was part of a Roman burial ground, an unclean extremity lying beyond the walls of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century...

Throughout Back to Black, her glottal-stopped London accent eerily combines with a Motown swing in the phrasing, each element undercutting and enhancing the other to make a smooth-rough-smooth sound that’s classic and yet also speaks of its particular moment.

In 1738 John Rocque, a Frenchman, began his survey of London. His map (engraved by John Pine) covers an area from Marylebone and Chelsea in the west to Stepney and Deptford in the east. It was...