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The daughter of a Russian officer, Nadezhda Durova (1783–1866) disguised herself as a man and served in the Russian cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars,

A common orange, like the Navel or Valencia, has a sugary, one-dimensional taste. Eating a Sicilian blood orange is a much more complex experience. Take the Tarocco: its meltingly soft flesh also has a high sugar content, but its sweetness is balanced by high acidity. The result is a complicated, multi-dimensional flavour that unfolds slowly, subtl

Women of Ireland. After Rembrandt. The three of them looking out at me like the men of the Drapers’ Guild, red on their skirts, black on their chests, dark shawls over their heads, though my mother’s hair is bare.

on YouTube you can watch chef Martin Yan breaking down a chicken in eighteen seconds). Chinese

Anna Monkland’s Calcutta novel Life in India,

the Ruts, one of my favourite punk bands, who had ended their set with ‘Babylon’s Burning’, which I think is one of the best punk songs ever written.

They were creating their own infrastructure of opportunity—their own networks and mechanisms for success. A November 2020 article in the Guardian featured a group of underrepresented students who had set up a free network called Team Upside to help their counterparts get into elite universities. They ran mock Oxbridge interviews for students from u

Mrs G has a fine eye for art. On the white wall, the academic realism of Barrington Watson hangs beside the less measured but more joyful brushstrokes of Ken Spencer and the religious iconography of Oswald Watson. She even has an original Carl Abrahams and two drawings by Edna Manley.

The Thames is England’s longest archaeological landscape and thousands of the objects that fill our museums have come from its foreshore. Among them are numerous Bronze and Iron Age swords, shields and spears that were found along the stretch between Vauxhall and Teddington and include the famous Battersea Shield.