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...
The intro to the lead story in Britain's oldest surviving newspaper, the Corante of September 24, 1621, was a little wordy: "There is advice from Naples, that certaine Ambassadours of Messina are arrived there and from thence are to go into Spaine, to congratulate the king and to give him a present of 150000 crownes...." By 1944, the sub-editors had tightened things up considerably. For the midday BBC bulletin on June 6, John Snagge needed only four syllables to get the news across: "D-Day has come." Breaking the News at the British Library in London takes us back through centuries of reporting the news, making, faking and manipulating it, in an absolutely fascinating exhibition. Hundreds of exhibits -- old newspapers, photographs, film and video -- demonstrate how the technology has improved, and the writing is sometimes a lot slicker, but also that dubious and unethical practices have been going on just as long. For those of us who started our journalism c...