To be offered the job of curating the new Islamic gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum must have been akin to being offered the post of Home Secretary in a Blair government – an “exciting challenge”, but one full of potential disasters. Reading the gallery captions, you can almost see the writers tiptoeing through the religio-political minefield.

That’s not to say that the exhibition suffers for these modern realities. Simple, straightforward explanatory captions have a lot to recommend them, particularly given the current trend among some curators to try to draw big themes and grand narratives from simple, often everyday, objects.

Yet a huge, overarching theme does emerge, naturally, unforced, from this survey of 14 centuries of Islamic history. It is the pervasiveness of globalisation – not some 20th-century, Western-dominated phenomenon, but the ceaseless, restless interchange of ideas, images, and people between what we think of, too often, as the monoliths of “East” and “West”.
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When an artist is honoured with a retrospective by a major gallery, it tends to be taken as a sign of graceful retirement, so what does it mean that the British Library’s main exhibition space is now occupied by an exhibition titled “Front Page: Celebrating 100 Years of the British Newspaper”? With total circulation still going down, despite Britons still being among the most enthusiastic newspaper readers in the world, is this the final nostalgic bow of dead-tree newspapers before the power of the electronic age?

The division of visitors by age within the exhibition is not, perhaps, a good sign. Those aged under 30 were, when I visited, confined to the central part – the bank of computers at which they are invited to prepare their own front page. Older visitors were spread around the walls, checking out those familiar front pages, from Bobby Moore holding the World Cup aloft in 1966 toe Sun’s famous “turn out the lights” Kinnock front page from the 1992 election.

The spine of the exhibition is, as you would expect, a chronological account of newspaper firsts, from 1908 – Daily Mail has its first “Ideal Homes Exhibition” to 2004 – Suduko craze begins. A whole lot of flat, yellowing rectangles on the wall could be rather dull, but a lot of effort has gone into the texture of the exhibition – each 20 years or so being contained within a “room” themed for the period. So the Twenties-to-Forties is viewed from beneath a flimsy air-raid shelter, complete with “don’t forget your gas mask” stickers; the Nineties are seen from a Thatcherite loft apartment, complete with dodgy “designer” furniture.
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Walking into Searching for Shakespeare, the exhibition that opens tomorrow at the National Portrait Gallery in London, I took a wrong turn. Someone was standing in front of the “exhibition this way” sign, so I forged straight ahead, and was puzzled to be confronted by a sword, a workmanlike rapier with just a hint of gentlemanly damascene decoration. The label explained: “On formal occasions and at court Shakespeare would have worn a sword, and in his will in 1616 he left it to a friend from Stratford-upon-Avon called Thomas Coombe. This example from the period …” So, a hint, a flavour of his age, but not really Shakespeare.

Turning around, I went back to the beginning, and found another absence. On a perspex stand is a wonderful fancy, and very warm-looking hat, from the 16th-century, an astonishing survival and fascinating, but again, not Shakespeare’s (what would it be worth if it were?), but one like he “might have worn”.

Yet next, in front of you, are some real signs that, as though scrawled by some graffitist on the wall, “Shakespeare was here”. There are the papers that he touched, that recorded his life before he was “the Bard” and was just a young lad from Stratford-upon-Avon . There’s the parish register from Holy Trinity Church, open at the entry for the baptism on May 26, 1583, of his first child, Susanna. It sits beside the bond recording his marriage, just five months before. They are mute but eloquent witnesses to the reason why a lad of 18 would be marrying a woman of 26. By the standards of the time she was about the right age for marriage, but he was certainly not; you can just imagine the matrons of the town tutting, saying: “He’s ruined his life.”

The end of that life – the dead Shakespeare if you like – is also here, in the will that famously left most of his wealth to that oldest child, Susanna, and only his “second best bed” to his wife, Anne Hathaway. But, as Tarnya Cooper, the exhibition curator, explains, that can’t be taken for the slight that it seems to be. Wives by law received a third of their husband’s wealth for their use, and it is not uncommonly for them to be left out of the bequests in consequence. This will is nonetheless an oh-so-human document, Lines are crossed out, words inserted – there was, on this death bed, no time to make a fair copy.

So we’ve found the young son of a glove-maker, and the old man on his death-bed in Stratford-upon-Avon. But these are not The Bard – the star of London’s great Tudor flowering …
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OK, I admit it, I’m a sceptic about romance, and the whole prince coming to rescue the imprisoned princess, but if you are looking for a real life example that actually worked out, then the case of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is hard to deny. Hers might have been a classic Victorian romantic story. Educated as a precocious hothouse flower, under the heavy arm of a classic paterfamilias who’d certainly worry social services today, she formed a secret attachment with a fellow poet that led to her elopement to Italy. Were the Victorian morality tale to be followed through, this would have ended in disaster, but this is a rare such story with a completely happy ending. (She even got to take her beloved dog with her.)

The story is now told – complete with many of its original artefacts – at the British Library, in an exhibition entitled How do I love thee? That title comes, of course, from possibly her most famous work, which was voted Britain’s “favourite love poem” in 1997. It is from a collection entitled Sonnets from the Portugese, which describes the flowering of her love for Robert Browning, during the last months of their secret courtship. (“My Little Portugese” was his nickname for her. ) The exhibition text reports that it went through more than 100 editions in the 20th century.
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When No 36 Craven Street – a narrow, stately four-storey townhouse – was built in the West End of London in 1728, it was home to William Nind, a prosperous ironmonger. This was just one more addition to a city that was changing fast from medieval to “modern”. Baron William Gaven had knocked down a “mean” alley of old houses to make way for these fine dwellings.

The house’s claim to fame came decades later, when another inhabitant, Margaret Stevenson, found, despite the presence also in the house of her daughter Polly and her husband William Hewson, who ran an anatomy school there, that money was tight. So she took in a boarder from the colonies.

His name was Benjamin Franklin, and his presence brought many of the scientific and political stars of the Enlightenment to its grand front parlour – Pitt the Elder, David Hume, Joseph Priestley and Sir John Pringle.

It also brought the growing conflict between the American Colonies and the Home Country to the very door, with an angry mob gathering outside after Franklin had made public the letters of the Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts.
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