Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

400-year-old map collection for sale

The work, Islandia, was published by Abraham Ortelius in Antwerp in the 16th century. It carries a price tag of £7,500 and is among a catalogue valued at nearly £3 million. The sale includes a globe by Mattaeus Greuter, produced in 1632 and priced at £90,000, and a decorate double-hemisphere map of the world by John Speed. The latter was first published in London in 1627 and is the earliest world map to show the misconception of California as an island. It is on sale fo

Museums lose nearly 200 artifacts

Details obtained under the freedom of information act show that museums including the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Imperial War Museum and the Royal Armouries have lost 198 items since 2000. Items that have disappeared from the museums include a Victoria Cross (VC) medal belonging to one of the Second World War's most decorated soldiers, dozens of antique rifles and pistols, a painting worth £200,000 and a collection of 14 microscopes worth £157,000.

Hindus reject statue of 'Christian' Charlie Chaplin

The 67 ft statue was to be erected as a tribute in a film sequence by a Bollywood director. But the installation was halted after protests from members of the nationalist BJP party who claimed it "hurt Hindu sentiment". Activists in Udupi, near Bangalore, told the director, Hemant Hegde, that they would not allow the statue because Chaplin was a Christian, and that any statue would have to honour the Hindu guru Swami Vivekananda instead. Mr Hegde is shooting

Queen not amused by 'inaccuracies' in The Young Victoria film

The Queen has expressed her disapproval of historical inaccuracies in The Young Victoria and said some of the costumes were too German. The monarch made her comments after special screening of the drama, whose producers include Martin Scorcese and the Duchess of York. It tells the story of the young Queen Victoria and her romance with Prince Albert. A source told the News of the World: "She thought the film had a lot of good points but she is a stickle

Is it or is it not Shakespeare?

We know so little about Shakespeare that we don’t even know for sure what he looked like. Scholars have been quarreling over various purported portraits of him for years. The latest, the so-called Cobbe portrait, was unveiled last week by the Shakespeare expert Stanley Wells, who claimed that it was the only authentic likeness to have been painted in Shakespeare’s lifetime, igniting yet another fuss among the dissenters. This much is certain: the portrait is painted on wood from the

Rare Audio Of Literary Heroes (video)

The voices of legendary authors such as Virginia Wolfe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and J.R.R. Tolkien have been collected and stored in a British library. CBS News? Elizabeth Palmer reports from London.

A new book paints far different picture of the life of radical/novelist Agnes Smedley

[Mr. Wald is H. Chandler Davis College Professor, University of Michigan.] In a contentious lecture following his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005, British playwright Harold Pinter offered a pointed distinction between the quest for truth in politics and dramatic art. In the former, truth is unabashedly subordinated to the maintenance of power; in the latter, it exhibits an elusive or contradictory quality, but the search to depict truth is "compulsiv

Acclaimed German writer's archive lost in building collapse

For the best part of a decade, the heirs of German writer and Nobel prize laureate Heinrich Böll worked on hammering out a deal with the city of Cologne over the transfer of his private papers to the state archives. Three weeks ago, city officials held a special ceremony to mark the historic handover: for €800,000 (£712,000), the Cologne archives took possession of hundreds of boxes containing items ranging from Böll's school reports to scripts of his radio plays, novels and essays

A Nazi Zelig: Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones

Jonathan Littell's novel The Kindly Ones took France by storm in the fall of 2006, when it won the Prix Goncourt--the nation's most prestigious literary prize--and sold many hundreds of thousands of copies. Commercial success fed the heat of scandal, which followed the book to Germany in 2008, vaulting it to the top of the bestseller list. The furor revolved around nothing less than the governing conceit of Littell's thousand-page roman-fleuve: the novel pretends to be the memoir of a Nazi SS of

For Berlin Museum, a Modern Makeover That Doesn’t Deny the Wounds of War

BERLIN The Neues Museum briefly reopened here last weekend (was reborn, seems more like it), and local newspapers reported that more than 35,000 Berliners, many of them waiting hours in the cold in lines stretching nearly half a mile, filed into the still empty building over three days to see it. The art that will go inside (Egyptian and pre- and early history, as in the prewar years) won’t be installed until the fall. This little preview was cooked up as a kind of civic ceremony.

2 exhibits feature art from Babylon

They came, they conquered, they crushed. Time and again over the centuries, new rulers imposed their own might and myths alike on Babylon, one of the most powerful, mystical and elusive of ancient cities. Two exhibitions — one at New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the other at London’s British Museum — provide new insights into the power and reach of ancient Babylon, while proving rather more coy in commenting on the sensitivities of the more contemporary events for which their two cou

Was this Britain's first black queen?

Queen Charlotte died nearly two centuries ago but is still celebrated in her namesake American city. When you drive from the airport in North Carolina, you can't miss the monumental bronze sculpture of the woman said to be Britain's first black queen, dramatically bent backwards as if blown by a jet engine. Downtown, there is another prominent sculpture of Queen Charlotte, in which she's walking with two dogs as if out for a stroll in 21st-century America. Street after street is nam

For funeral museum, will it be R.I.P?

Duane Marsh noticed a couple from Iowa standing hesitantly at the door of the Museum of Funeral Customs, a shrine here to embalming tools, coffins and other artifacts of the rites of death. "This is his idea, not mine," Marsh recalled the woman saying, as she pointed at her husband. "I'm not sure I want to go in." Marsh, the executive director of the Illinois Funeral Directors Association, which operates the museum, was able to convince the woman tha

Iran’s Protocols of Harry Potter

It was high time that anti-Semitism would find something hipper than those dusty Protocols of the Elders of Zion, concocted sometime between 1895 and 1902 by Russian journalist Matvei Golovinski and then used by the pro-Tsarists to discredit reforms in Russia as a Jewish plot. Egyptian and Syrian state media have turned the Protocols into television series, trying to modernize the plot and bringing it forward into the 20th century. Iranian TV has beaten them hands down with “Harry P

Colonel Sanders rescued from river after 24 years

TOKYO – He was covered in mud when pulled from the river, and had lost both legs and hands, not to mention his glasses. But Colonel Sanders still had his trademark smile, 24 years later. A statue of the KFC mascot has been found in a river in Osaka, a city official said Wednesday, nearly a quarter century after being tossed in by crazed baseball fans who felt the image of restaurant founder Harland Sanders resembled a key team member. "He was apparently found stand

New play about Hellen Keller

John M. Orman figured most people were like him when it came to their knowledge of Helen Keller. The life of this American icon was a portrait frozen in time by the drama “The Miracle Worker” — a deaf, blind, silent 12-year-old girl beginning to overcome her disabilities. “Children’s books say she’s courageous and outspoken, but they don’t say about what,” said Dr. Orman, who is chairman of the political science department at Fairfield University. “She had a whole radical past which

The V&A's new Theatre Galleries: An encore for lost treasures

It took 90 hours of conservation just to get the burgundy Christian Dior dress that Vivien Leigh wore in the 1958 production of Duel of Angels into a fit state for its showcase at the new Theatre and Performance Galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum. With one week to go before the galleries open to the public, original Sex Pistols T-shirts are still in their protective covers, and Michael Annals' set model for Long Day's Journey into Night, at the National Theatre in 1971, is

Curtain up on the fall of communism

What's the hottest topic on the British stage right now? The collapse of Soviet communism. Granted, there is one fairly solid reason: 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which is often seen as the beginning of the end for the USSR. But I don't think that completely explains it. I've long held the belief that the shock inflicted by the fall of communism on the British left is the unspoken subtext of many plays written in and since the 90s. I'

Caravaggio used 'photography' to create dramatic masterpieces

The 16th century master used modern darkroom techniques to create his masterpieces, more than 200 years before the invention of the camera. Italian researchers claim the technique explained why many of his subjects were left-handed – the image projected onto the canvas had been reversed. Art historian Roberta Lapucci said Caravaggio's dramatic 'chiaroscuro' style of light and shadow was based on "a whole set of techniques that are the basis of photography".

History isn’t just about bodice-ripping, you know

‘Utterly gorgeous’, declares the advertising for the new film The Young Victoria. Queen Victoria ruled a quarter of the world’s souls, and saw the world change immeasurably during her 64-year reign. As a biographer of Victoria’s young life, I relished the film’s investigation of the power struggles of her marriage with Albert and her battle for self-determination. But the review quoted might refer to a dress, not a film about the life of our longest-reigning monarch. We are obsesse