For those of us not observing Ramadan but are blessed to have friends who are, now is the time for an invitation to partake in a fabulous home-cooked feast. During the holy month which runs until the end of July, Muslims fast during the day, then break the fast at dusk with a lavish meal called Iftar. From a slow-cooked goat meat stew called Nihari to desserts flavoured with cardamom, pine kernels and apricots, Iftar is a feast for the senses. Families usually cook special Iftar recipes rarely found outside their homes. Most have been collected over generations, others are carved out of unique bonds and circumstance.

When Rida Hamida approached a mosque with the idea of breaking Ramadan fast with a taco truck, she faced a tough sell. When it comes to the evening iftar—the dinner Muslims share after a day’s fasting in Ramadan—the Muslim population in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, is accustomed to traditional Arabic and South Asian biryani meals, with rice and meat kebabs. But besides being immediately gratifying and accessible, Hamida thought, the taco would also bring Orange County’s Latino and Muslim communities together. So she made a proposal: She’d bring a taco truck to the mosque to serve halal tacos, while the mosque’s leader provided biryani.

Irish women writers, actors, painters, and journalists of the mid-twentieth-century socialised in a heady atmosphere of arty conversation and political raillery, and actively campaigned on issues which affected their rights as citizens. They hosted annual banquets to network with influential people in theatre and the media, invited writers (male and female) to their “at homes” to discuss art and literature, and publicly promoted the work of their members through a literary award system…

[Samuel] Coleridge was that rare thing, a conversationalist: eloquent, witty, with a seemingly bottomless reservoir of cultural knowledge. Nor was he the only one back then who could claim his company was a performance art. David Hume once engaged in so much raillery at a dinner party he left Jean-Jacques Rousseau clinging to a table leg.

Past midnight I awoke. Overhead there was such a bright light I almost had to shade my eyes. Then I realized what I was looking at, the Milky Way. What joy I felt as I recognized my lost constellation, Ursa Major. I now knew in fact what prompted Paul Fort to write, “The sky is one great emerald from south to septentrion.” With joy I knew again the seven stars of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, now commonly known as the “Big Dipper”. From Latin: septem (seven) and triones (a team of three plow oxen). I now knew septentrion, to the north, as did Paul Fort.

On the very ground Alone she sat, as she had there been left A guard upon the wain, which I beheld Bound to the twyform beast. The seven nymphs Did make themselves a cloister round about her, And in their hands upheld those lights secure From blast septentrion and the gusty south.