It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience: the chance to see one of the greatest -- and most fragile -- works of European art before your very eyes. The illustrated manuscript known as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry contains images that have shaped our view of the late Middle Ages, but it's normally kept under lock and key at the Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. It's only been exhibited twice in the past century. Now newly restored, the glowing pages of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry are on show to the public for just a few months. "Approche, approche," the Duke of Berry's usher tells the visitors to the great man's table for the feast that will mark the start of the New Year. It's also your invitation to examine closely the illustration for January, one of the 12 months from the calendar in this Book of Hours -- a collection of prayers and other religious texts -- that form the centrepiece of this exhibition in Chantilly. It's su...
"Please, sir, I want some more," said Oliver Twist, in that most famous of lines by Charles Dickens. The workhouse boy was desperate for enough gruel, but Dickens' work as a whole overflows with references to food and drink. And, as Food Glorious Food , the latest exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum in London shows, it played just as central a role in the Victorian writer's own life. The museum occupies the house at 48 Doughty Street that Dickens and his family moved into in 1837 and where he wrote Oliver Twist and The Pickwick Papers . It's the dining room that's the first you step into on your tour, with the table set for entertaining on a lavish, but not too lavish, scale. Dickens wasn't comfortable with grand dinner parties, depicting them, as in Dombey and Son , as frosty occasions where the bad behaviour of the servants reflected the flaws of their employers. The Victorian middle classes didn't do their own cooking, of course; the...