Alice Spawls

The​ Pastons of Norfolk were an accidentally remarkable family. The survival of their detailed correspondence – the first of its sort in English – means we know the 15th-century Pastons better than we know any medieval king or queen. The letters, first published in 1787, revealed a family on the make. Clement Paston, a yeoman farmer born at the end of the 14th century, set his...

If​ you cycle into Central London every day you see a lot of road: tarmac, grit, paving stone, cobble; the skin of the city. Cyclists are supposed to look ahead, and I try to, but as a child I mostly looked at my shoes and now I find I look at the road. The ground beneath our wheels is noisy, full of instruction, and the roads have their own language, even their own typography....

I should make the first of what I hope need be only a few confessions. We are in the business of history, but also of opinion, of trying to read the characters of the dead. I am not a 19th-century scholar, a Brontë expert, a Brontë fan even. A year ago, I was not interested in Charlotte, or her mysterious sisters or feckless brother, or their eccentric father, and I was certainly not interested in her charming publisher or her upright critics. I was not interested in hearing what the Brontës were, what they have become, or what they were definitely, almost certainly, assuredly, not. I did not want to visit Haworth.

It​ seems to be a foregone conclusion that Vanessa Bell isn’t much good. There are those devoted types, of course, for whom the sensibility of her paintings, as well as their subjects, makes them windows into a beloved world. But perhaps they are seeing something more than this. If so, it shouldn’t be surprising; they have been looking the longest. The current retrospective of...

The photographer​ Sally Mann tells a story about being at a dinner party with Cy Twombly – the two were friends from their hometown of Lexington, Virginia. ‘He was writing directions for somebody – how to get to the antique mall or something – and he wrote them and the guy said, “Oh yes, I know where that is,” and they left them on the table, and I swear...