The sex industry was one of 18th century Britain’s most lucrative enterprises, and the women and girls at the centre of this trade enraptured the nation, endlessly feeding society with tantalising tales from behind closed doors. But all too often,…
Picture this: you, an ambitious, career-driven woman wanting to conquer the Big Apple but struggling to find a place to stay. Lodging costs are likely your top concern. Once upon a time not long ago, it wasn’t just about the…
We all know Toulouse-Lautrec, but how about Georges Bottini? You won’t find a single plaque or street name commemorating his memory, but if there were any artist eponymous with life in bohemian Montmartre, it’s him. He was a true creature…
Have you ever felt like you’ve started late in life? Have you ever experienced an epic failure in your professional career and felt like giving up? That you’re “past it” and it’s “too late” to make something of yourself? Meet…
As the story goes, in 1932, a family of wealthy French aristocrats were waiting to board a train in Paris when they realised that the porter carrying their luggage was one of their own – a fellow aristocrat, that is…
Curiously absent from our historical timelines is “The Great Binge”, a more recently-coined but arguably more appropriate term for that famous period at the turn of the century which we typically refer to as the “Belle Epoque” or the “Gilded…
If you were to take a walk in Mumbai’s Hanging Gardens on Malabar Hill, one of the city’s most exclusive neighbourhoods, you might notice vultures circling above the trees in the distance. Behind the park’s manicured lawns and elegant flower…
Nothing says old-world luxury quite like the Orient Express. The train of kings, courtesans, spies, storytellers and murderers alike, all elegantly dressed and sipping on Champagne from cut-glass crystal flutes as European landscapes rolled by. The Orient Express, which linked…
While you’re almost certainly familiar with his unrivalled genius as a painter, inventor, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor or architect, there is a little-known aspect of Leonard da Vinci’s life rarely taken into consideration in the context of art history;…
We love a good story about a missing painting missing. This one starts in Christmas of 2008: a Hungarian art historian is at home with his young daughter Lola, watching the popular children’s film Stuart Little, when he notices a…
