Page 26 - Pickwick Papers News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

[ "Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays, with absolute dependability and regularity. —Ed.] - Up front: I don't really know what I'm talking about here. When it comes to collecting, I'm not an expert, and not speaking from authority. "Collection" is of course a colloquial word, with very generalized meaning. Trash is collected (picked up to be trucked away to the dump); any random gathering of things can be referred to as a collection (as in " there was quite a collection of single socks behind the dryer"); and collection to someon...

Charles Dickens Museum opens new display, which will encourage visitors to follow in the author’s footsteps around the nearby sites that inspired the novel

Most people who have a functioning hooter will be well aware we are in the middle of the durian season. I got a timely reminder when my wife returned triumphantly from a day trip to the orchards of Nakhon Nayok last weekend laden with what is called the "king of fruits''. It is also the smelliest of fruits, prompting a brisk trade in T-shirts bearing the message "tastes like heaven and smells like hell".

Tokens of affection were exchanged with sister-in-law whose early death influenced the author’s work A heart-shaped locket owned by Mary Hogarth, containing a lock of her brother-in-law Charles Dickens’s hair, and a silver locket, with moss agate stone, containing a lock of Hogarth’s hair given to Dickens by his mother-in-law in 1837. Photograph: Charles Dickens Museum collection A heart-shaped locket owned by Mary Hogarth, containing a lock of her brother-in-law Charles Dickens’s hair, and a silver locket, with moss agate stone, containing a lock of Hogarth’s hair g...

The novelist, poet and women's rights campaigner Caroline Norton (1808-77) Credit: Bettmann Combining high society campery and historical scholarship in ways rivalling Nancy Mitford, Antonia Fraser, 88, is the great chronicler of melodramatic queens and fearsome princes, from Boadicea to Louis XIV, even Harold Pinter. She is peerless at pageantry, and no slouch when it comes to technical footnotes – there are plenty in her new book, The Case of the Married Woman, about the Factory Act (1833), the topography of late-18th-century Mayfair, the décor of the House of Lords, the use of hair-dye ...