Toenails cut while dining, meals served to wax effigies of the dead, napkins concealing singing birds - these are just a few of the more exotic aspects of everyman at the table. From the stupendous banquets of the Ancient Babylonians, Feast covers five millennia of formal eating. Sharing a meal, in particular a grand one, has always been a complex social mechanism for uniting and dividing people. Such an event could signal peace, a marriage, a victory, a coronation or a funeral, to name but a few. The feast was a vehicle for display and ostentation, for flattering and influencing people as well as providing a theatre in which to exercise the art of conversation and the display of manners. Feast offers a fascinating and, at times, a highly unusual mirror of society as it evolves. It gathers together for the first time all the threads which contributed to the phenomenon of the celebratory meal: the people, the clothes, the food, the setting, the action and its surrounding circumstances,