Culture Watch

Julia Sneden: We find that it an interesting process, looking back at books we read in our twenties and thirties. The books themselves haven't changed, but thanks to the varied experiences that another twenty or thirty years have added to our lives, we read them from a different perspective. Herewith, the first review of an old, beloved book (actually, three books):"'When you yourself had borne a child, Kristin, I thought you would understand,' her mother had said once. Now, she understood that her mother's heart had been scored deep with memories of her daughter, memories of thoughts for her child from the time it was unborn and from all the years a child remembers nothing of, memories of fear and hope and dreams that children never know have been dreamed for them, until their own time comes to fear and hope and dream in secret.'"     more »

The Bodleian exhibition aims to recreate Dickens’s world through these ephemeral items, taking visitors on a journey back to his time with themes such as Victorian London and its amusements, the coming of the railways, domestic entertainment and children’s school life. A number of Dickens's works have been recorded by the Libraries, bringing London to life. The Bodleian exhibition illustrates the relationship between the fictional worlds that Charles Dickens created in his novels and the historical reality in which he lived. He depicted the social realities of his time with what Henry James noted as his ‘solidity of specification,’ an extraordinary clarity and particularity. The actualities of life, especially life in London - the setting for almost all his fiction - were of singular importance to him. When we read Dickens we experience Victorian life. more »

Julia Sneden wrote: The name Grandabbie was my own invention. I don’t remember how I came up with the solution of combining Grandmother and Abbie into what was to become her label for life. From that time on, we called her Grandabbie, and so did all our friends and most of our neighbors. Poor Grandabbie: she used to tell me: “All my life, I looked forward to being called Grandmother. It’s a beautiful word. But then,” she would sigh, “I hadn’t reckoned with you.” more »

Housed in a suite of galleries in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection includes masterpieces from four areas of European and British decorative arts: silver and gold, enamel portrait miniatures, micromosaics and gold boxes. Weidenbach consciously engages with the extravagance of these objects: her box is encrusted with the same abundance of diamonds and mother-of-pearl as their historic counterparts, posing questions of how this aesthetic functions today. more »