"A long time collector of ‘things' Peter trawls the markets with his wife textile designer Karen Nicol and collects old stamps, faded maps, love letters, labels, buttons, dress making patterns, playing cards, textiles cotton webbing that binds books and paper boxes for the basis of his work" more »

It’s always easier to write about the causes of fear than every-day drudgery, and the author’s descriptions of these scares and others make her summer sound exciting – in both senses of the word. She does this as though she’s writing a novel; her account of these events is gripping. more »

When the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust unveiled a portrait with strong claims to be the only surviving contemporary likeness of Shakespeare, it created an international stir. But wait, there's another claim about a 1603 portrait created by an ancestor who was a bit actor in Shakespeare’s troupe more »

Their gilded surfaces and brilliant colors put them at odds with the austere criteria of the scholars' aesthetic from the Song dynasty. In 1368 Cao Zhao wrote that cloisonné enamels were not suitable for study by members of the scholar class and were really appropriate only for the apartments of women more »