When Nellie Bly got bored of writing about fashion and gardening, she went undercover as a patient in a mental asylum and faked insanity to expose the institutional abuse. When she read Jules Verne’s book Around the world in 80…
Hailed as the most powerful woman in media, Anna Wintour has been fictionalised, caricatured and propelled into icon status since becoming editor-in-chief of Vogue. Then there’s Diana Vreeland, editor of the American style bible between 1963–1971, an industry legend who was the…
Elevated to divine status, unicorns, lions, eagles and the occasional white rabbit are the loved and familiar characters in our romantic bestiaries, but the little weasel has never managed to secure such a position. Always wild, always wayward, it was…
Sex sells – and the message couldn’t have been any clearer when it came to advertising in post-revolutionary Mexico. Images of beautiful people served a multitude of purposes: a nationalistic one to quite blatantly plug the new regime, that of…
At less than a fifth of a square mile, The Vatican City is officially the world’s tiniest country. As the seat of the Catholic church, it’s also a cultural institution and a major museum that was welcoming nearly 7 million…
Full disclosure, we never gave the Periodic Table much thought – it remains in our memory as a clunky patchwork of confusing titled squares taped to the back of our school chemistry folder that our teachers would occasionally torture us…
You’re looking at a very rare portrait from 1650 depicting a Black woman and a White woman, both appearing to hold equal status, some 183 years before the abolition of slavery act. Curiously, rather than commenting on the race debate…
Let us rewind to the sizzling summers of 1936 and ‘37 to holiday on the French Riviera with Pablo Picasso and his international ensemble of friends at the Hotel Vaste Horizon, a modest boarding house nestled in the old town…
The picture-perfect fishing village of Anstruther is situated in the county of Fife on Scotland’s east coast. The fragments of its ruined castle are still sitting perched on a rock above the harbour, looking across the Dreel Burn, the winding…
No magazine has a cover style as distinctive, enduring and charming as that of The New Yorker. With its unmistakably unique title font and with almost a century’s commitment to using original artwork on its front cover in every weekly…
