BRUGES changed William Caxton’s life. He went to the Belgian city, then part of the Duchy of Burgundy, as a mercer, settling there by 1453, and came back as England’s first book printer. A successful merchant, he later joined the household of Edward IV’s sister, Margaret, who had married Charles, Duke of Burgundy. As part of her retinue, he travelled extensively across Europe, including to Cologne, where he had some of his books printed. With his ‘hande wery & not stedfast’ from the effort of duplicating the translation of Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troyes he had done for Margaret and his ‘eyen dimed with ouermoche lokyng on the whit paper’, Caxton embraced the printing process, which had the all-important advantage of allowing him to distribute copies of his books to everyone ‘attones’. Having learned the technique ‘at grete charge and dispense’, he opened a press in Bruges, where he printed his Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye in 1473. Returning to England in the 1470s, he brought his new craft with him and set up a shop in Westminster, where he printed the very first books in the English language. He died in 1491 as he was about to print his 100th book.
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
