Christopher Howse

A popular cultural export from Portugal over the last decade or two has been the pastel de nata, the custard tart with a caramelised glaze, like a trainee crème brûlée.

“We just cried, because this was our livelihood,” said Louise Maloney after the Great Ouse flooded the cellars of her pub, the New Inn, in Buckingham, during Storm Bert in 2024.

“The question is: what is a pub?” says Christian Arden, an active-looking man in his early 60s.

For centuries Zurbarán’s paintings were hidden away. Now at the National Gallery, they offer respite from our overheated days of uncertainty

Christopher Howse Daisy Partington, 24, was amazingly sympathetic to me, considering her own sad situation.

With its lewd jokes and word-vomit prose, the comedian’s account of his conversion is enough to put anyone off Christianity

Reading Russell Brand 's How to Become a Christian in Seven Days is like being locked in an empty pub all night with a garrulous drunk.

In David Copperfield , Peggotty told the young hero that she thought “Yarmouth was, upon the whole, the finest place in the universe”.

He was a remarkable historian who sought his sources from around the world – without once leaving his monastery

Pope Leo is not the first pontiff to quote JRR Tolkien. In his first encyclical the Pope quotes Gandalf from The Return of the King urging people to set about “uprooting the evil in the fields that we...