Definitions of comfort changed over time, the author shows, and men and women sometimes interpreted comfort differently. He begins with a description of the mat

Country houses were grand statements of power and status, but they were also places where people lived. This book traces the changes in layout, the new technolo

'One day there is life . . . and then, suddenly, it happens there is death.' So begins Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood. The first sec

Today, it is difficult to imagine a living room without a sofa. When the first sofas on record were delivered in seventeenth-century France, the result was a ra

A historian evaluates the period that marked a convergence of informality and comfort, transforming the worlds of architecture and interior decoration, in an ac