Mothering Sunday and Mother’s Day have distinct meanings, as Martin Fone explains in the latest of his Curious Questions. The advent of the fourth or middle Sunday of Lent must have been eagerly anticipated for centuries. Known variously as Laetare Sunday, from the Latin for rejoice, or Refreshment Sunday, from…

Wolves in the Tower of London and an elephant so well trained that Lord Byron wanted to adopt it as his butler — Martin Fone discovers the strange and terrifying history of the last of London’s menageries, and how they helped establish what we’d recognise today as its first zoos. …

The names of Goodyear, Dunlop, and Michelin are familiar to motorists and cycling enthusiasts alike, but it is thanks to another inventor that we enjoy comfortable rides on inflated rubber tyres. Martin Fone tells a tale of an inventor’s extraordinary ingenuity in creating a design that pre-dated its usefulness by…

From volcanic eruptions to dusty floors: the perforative history of the watering can. — The German town of Giessen is home to the country’s oldest botanical garden. Originally started to host medicinal plants, this garden now contains eight thousand species from all round the world. Students use it in their research in medicine, geography, and the history of plants in the outside world. But…

Martin Fone takes a deep dive into the world of plant-based milks and discovers that the dairy alternatives have been around for a lot longer than we may have thought. Unable to spot a trend until its tail lights are disappearing over the horizon, I am not one of the…

Martin Fone investigates the all-important role of feline whiskers-including how they contribute to enhancing the species’ beauty. Is beauty in the eye of the beholder, as Margaret Wolfe Hungerford wrote in Molly Bawn (1878), or is there a more rigorous, mathematical approach to determining what is beautiful? …

Martin Fone delves into Britain’s collective passion for Galanthus and looks at the folklore that surrounds it. Positioned almost at the midway point of the astronomical winter, Candlemas, the Christian festival celebrated on February 2 nd, forty days after Jesus’ birth, is an ideal moment to take stock. In weather…

Our intrepid correspondent Martin Fone has put Sunions (and his eyes) to the test. Curiously, onion, a vegetable known for its strong, pungent aroma and the delicious flavour it brings to cooked dishes, has no smell when it is taken directly out of the ground. …

With the Winter Olympics approaching, Martin Fone wonders how we came from sliding across frozen ponds to putting on huge sporting spectacles in great, frozen arenas. William Fitzstephen, a cleric writing in 1173, described how Londoners amused themselves when the marsh just the other side of the city’s northern walls…