My earliest independent reading memory is The Story of Ferdinand by Leaf and Lawson. I loved that bull! My favourite book growing up Big books gave me the whirlies so it took a while for them to start landing.
Lorena Bradford started monthly tours in American Sign Language, established a program for individuals with memory loss, and brought in medical students to learn soft skills to apply in their caregiving. 'I was a sub-department of one,' she joked to writer Emma Cieslik, who spoke with Bradford over Zoom and at the NGA about her own circuitous path into the profession, and the future of the field of museum accessibility.
A new campaign is aiming to collect 50 objects that sum up Englishness in an effort to move the conversation away from reductive arguments over whether to hang a St George's flag or not. Supported by the Green party politician Caroline Lucas, the musician and campaigner Billy Bragg, and Kojo Koram, a law professor, the A Very English Chat campaign hopes to tackle England's growing social divisions and political polarisation.
The Oxford Artisan Distillery (TOAD) produces its whiskey, gin, vodka and liqueur from heritage wheat and rye varieties rediscovered in the thatch of medieval roofs. It's an example of the extraordinary lengths the distillers go here to create their unique flavours while building a regenerative farming system along the way. Tour the distillery to find out all about the processes involved,
Enrigue's 'penchant for shooting the facts of history through the prism of the absurd' makes him singular-but it also puts him firmly in a long literary tradition. The book 'distills a byzantine swirl of historical events through the lives of a handful of very colorful characters,' intertwining several real and invented incidents with major moments in the Apache Wars, a series of skirmishes involving Native Americans, the U.S., and Mexico across the Southwest borderlands.
Charles Dickens's novels are often criticised for their idealised passive female characters, but as the Dickens Museum now shows, he was, in life and in death, surrounded by formidable, intelligent and independent women. A new exhibition at the museum shifts attention away from Dickens as a solitary genius and instead places women at the centre of his creative world and cultural afterlife.
The ghost of a previous lover is always a challenge, particularly if you (mistakenly) believe that she's actually dead. This is the unenviable situation for Lily, the protagonist of O'Farrell's second novel, who is swept off her feet by dashing architect Marcus and in short order moves in with him. Lily takes his assurances that her predecessor Sinead is no longer with us to mark a more permanent absence;
Dream-Pedlary i. If there were dreams to sell. What would you buy? Some cost a passing bell; Some a light sigh, That shakes from Life's fresh crown Only a rose-leaf down. If there were dreams to sell, Merry and sad to tell, And the crier rung the bell, What would you buy? ii. A cottage lone and still, With bowers nigh,
Subsequently, runaway children turned the valley into a fortress, surviving on food they could catch or grow, with occasional forays into the towns below. Riley has heard the rumours, but it is only when she sees a green-clad boy or is it a girl? hovering outside her bedroom window offering directions on how to find Nowhere that she realises this might be her chance to escape and save her little brother from their sadistic guardian.
The extended footage of Welsh in conversation is certainly engaging, as he discusses his writing and the movies it created, and his own youth in Edinburgh. Some of the rest of the interviewees aren't quite so gripping, however, and the film is padded out with a fair bit of redundant anecdotage from people on the subject of getting hilariously wasted in Irvine's company or at least his approximate vicinity.