The Tumbrel Diaries

The fiendish problem of how to come up with a working definition of the color known to Melbourne retailers in 1926 and 1927 as “Pavlova”...

A small but intriguing coda to my exhaustive researches into the question of the origins of the canonical pavlova, New Zealand’s premier cul...

I cannot think of any single resource for the study of Australian history that has in my lifetime come as close to providing almost overnigh...

El Escorial must surely count as one of the most extravagant acts of self-mortification ever accomplished by a Catholic prince. In any case...

It is hardly surprising that the Princeton economists Anne Case and Christina Paxson reaped a bumper crop of e-mails from outraged short peo...

In a broadcast that went to air on Sunday, December 29, 1935, the great Max Beerbohm sketched from memory a view of the streetscape of Edwar...

When, five hundred million years ago, having formed in the oceans, primitive vertebrates crawled through sand and slime, paddled up creeks, ...

In 1914, evidently before anyone had formed a clear view of what horrors lay ahead, the British music publishers Francis & Day ran a com...

Even in the mid-nineteenth century, by which time dentistry was rapidly improving and laughing gas even offered the gladsome prospect of ane...

The earliest printed reference to the Cheshire cat’s grin evidently comes in 1792 in the concluding lines of Peter Pindar’s A Pair of Lyric ...