Rosemary Hill

Arriving​ at his prep school in the bleak winter of 1918 the ten-year-old Osbert Lancaster was made even more miserable than the average new bug by the fact that St Ronan’s, Worthing was a spectacularly sporty school. The headmaster, Stanley Harris, had captained England at football and was also a distinguished cricketer and rugby player. Lancaster, an only child who had lost his...

It is​ a curious fact of history, which my research on antiquarianism has brought home to me, that if something is believed in or wanted for long enough, it will eventually materialise. From John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic...

‘This is a film​ about toy trains. These are real toys – not scale models. That doesn’t mean that toys are good and scale models are bad – but they are different.’ To most people, who have never thought of making a moral distinction between toys and scale models, Charles Eames’s schoolmasterly voiceover at the beginning of Toccata for Toy Trains (1957),...

When​ does weather begin? In the sense of detailed, day-to-day observations of light and temperature, the stuff of art and conversation, weather would seem to be a relatively late development. Seasons, the overarching and background reality of life, are older, although as Alexandra Harris explains, ‘spring’ was invented only in the late Middle Ages. Before all that there was...

Unlike the Mosleys the Windsors seem to have had no ideological commitment to the Nazi regime, or to anything else either. They drifted into the relationship with Germany, which was to tarnish their reputation for ever, propelled by nothing more than a desire to assert themselves and annoy the rest of the immediate family. How far relations went is unclear. Wallis was rumoured to have had an affair in London with Ribbentrop.