Other Men's Flowers

Many others have owned the Middle East in the last five thousand years. This fascinating animated map reminds you in 90 seconds who they we...

...but often not worth reading. The Guardian has “ a collective group blog, bringing together regular columnists from the Guardian and Obs...

...but you might feel better while you do it if you went HERE first (or HERE if you’re American).

I was quite right to think that I wouldn't be able to keep writing about Christmas for a week. Enough of all that, let's move on to...

And another thing about Christmas cards: the contemptuous way in which people with very common first names often sign without a surname, thu...

Christmas quizzes and Christmas competitions are among the most grisly of the things that Christmas brings; the mere thought of them is depr...

I have been told that my choice of topics in the pre-Christmas period so far has been shamefully inappropriate, and I suppose this is true: ...

The appalling events around Ipswich have inspired many thousands of words of media comment, much of it trite, prurient or fatuous. One piece...

Coupling the possibilities offered by genetic engineering with the discipline of microelectromechanical systems, scientists at the Georgia I...

The shadow Attorney General’s pronouncements about the success of our Victorian forbears in changing public attitudes to moral codes, toget...

Suppose you are one of those people who doesn’t know everything there is to know about Jane Austen, but would like to. When you’ve read, twi...

Unlike the Scots saying twa piggles dinna mek’ a thrup, this old English one does actually mean something: many small amounts accumulate to ...

Wiktionary , the lexical companion to Wikipedia, has a useful—well, if you're going to Canada—glossary of Canadian English words. Here i...

…petition the Prime Minister to… Several columnists have found easy pickings among the requests which have been submitted to the online peti...

...One song, only for you… Thus warbled the handsome prince in Disney’s Snow White . There were others who had only one song. In most cases...

Eether/eyether, neether/nyether and tomahto/tomayto are fine, but the song gets silly because nobody ever says potahto . Someone will probab...

This phrase was first used by the novelist C P Snow fifty years ago. After it had been taken as the title of an article about his work by th...

This is how they sometimes refer to Thanksgiving Day in the United States (the picture shows the first one). This year it was last Thursday ...

...and don't stop in the summer. From one of our bedroom windows we can just see a little white three-bladed thing on the roof of a hous...

Americans have added many useful words to our (and their) language, but they have also lost a few. They use inquiry for all purposes and fo...