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

Christmas carol is really a rebel song in celebration of Bonnie Prince Charlie, claims expert

It has been sung at carol services across the country but a centuries-old secret political code has been found in a popular Christmas song. According to one musical expert, O Come All Ye Faithful, also called Adeste Fideles, is actually a birth ode to Jacobite pretender Bonnie Prince Charlie. Born on December 20 1720, Bonnie Prince Charlie was the grandson of England's last Catholic monarch, James II. He was born in exile in Italy and became the focus for C

Tate to re-stage William Blake's 'flop' of an exhibition

Tate Britain is to re-stage an exhibition by eccentric poet and painter William Blake 200 years after the original show was panned. The sole published review described his one-man 1809 show of 16 paintings as a "farrago of nonsense". Now the surviving 11 paintings are worth millions, while Blake - best known for writing Jerusalem - is lauded as the founding father of the Romantic movement. Tate has managed to assemble nine of the fragile paintings

Warren M. Robbins, Collector of African Art, Dies at 85

Warren M. Robbins, whose $15 purchase of a carved-wood figure of a man and woman representing the Yoruba people of Nigeria became the seed of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, died on Dec. 4 in Washington. He was 85 and lived in Washington. His death was confirmed by Kimberly Mayfield, a spokeswoman for the museum. Mr. Robbins was a cultural attaché for the State Department when he bought that statue, but not in Africa. He was wandering the s

The face of Cleopatra: Scientists recreate image of the legendary beauty

From Elizabeth Taylor to Sophia Loren, there have been many faces of Cleopatra. But this might be the most realistic of them all. Egyptologist Sally Ann Ashton believes the computer-generated 3D image is the best likeness of the legendary beauty famed for her ability to beguile. Pieced together from images on ancient artefacts, including a ring dating from Cleopatra's reign 2,000 years ago, it is the culmination of more than a year of painstaking research.

Elizabeth Drew: Frost/Nixon: A Dishonorable Distortion of History

It's not surprising that the movie Frost/Nixon is receiving rave reviews. Like the eponymous smash play it's based on, it tells a dramatic story of a clash of two interesting figures (one of them absolutely riveting), with two richly talented actors, Frank Langella as Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost. The film is even more powerful than the play because of the effects of motion-picture techniques - size, penetrating close-ups, film clips, variegated scenery, and simply more action.

Painting of 'black Florence Nightingale' Mary Seacole bought for £130,000

The 1869 painting of Mary Seacole, by art student Albert Challen, was unearthed in 2003 by a local antiques dealer, who accidentally found it behind a framed print at the boot sale in Burford, Oxon. He saw the artist's initials - ACC - on the wooden backing board, which he then found bore the portrait itself. But he did not know the identity of the sitter. Seacole was a Jamaican-born nurse who travelled to Crimea in the 1850s to set up a treatment centre for soldiers.

A renovated US history museum retains its boxy essence

Heroic efforts to make the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History a more lovable building have been made, and the building has just as determinedly resisted them. The renovated space that opened on Nov. 21 after an $85 million overhaul is an improvement in many obvious ways. Light flows in. The wings of the building connect with each other and a central core more logically. There will soon be a cafe with windows facing onto Constitution Avenue, linking the bui

World’s oldest portrait in peril

An explosives factory in Australia threatens a rock carving of a human face dating back to beyond the last Ice Age. The world’s oldest depiction of a human face could be threatened if Australian mining companies are permitted to build an explosives factory on the remote Burrup peninsula in the northwest of the country. A bulbous image of indiscernible sex, with huge eyes and sunken cheeks, the 10,000 year-old carving is chipped out of hard rock. Thousands of other carvings, mo

The theft of Scoptland's Stone of Destiny is now a movie

It was, Ian Hamilton calmly acknowledges, the moment of no return. ''You sort of know that when you take a crowbar to a side door of Westminster Abbey and jemmy the lock that there isn't really any going back, don't you?'' he says philosophically. ''Not when you know that the next thing you are going to do is steal one of the ancient relics inside.'' Hamilton is lost in reverie for a moment. A wry smile crosses his face and then a thought strikes him. ''Not,'' he says urgently, ''th

Sir Paul McCartney has claimed it was he, and not John Lennon, who

In an interview with the intellectual journal Prospect, Sir Paul said that he persuaded Lennon to oppose the war in Vietnam. He claimed the group's politicisation began after he met the philosopher Bertrand Russell in London in the mid-1960s. But Sir Paul's critics see his comments as a further attempt to revise the history of the Beatles, casting himself in a better light. "We sort of stumbled into things," Sir Paul told Prospect magazine. "For instance, Vietnam. Just w

FDR's New Deal Blueprint For Obama (CBS Sunday Morning)

The economic crisis of late has some people looking back to a set of old initials ... WPA. And they're thinking perhaps that New Deal program will serve as a model for our times. Our Cover Story is reported by Chip Reid: Anxiety and fear surround workers this holiday season. Last month, half a million people lost their jobs … more than 2 million have since last December. "We need action, and action now," said President-elect Barack Obama. "That is why I have a

Titian's masterpiece Diana and Actaeon is saved

Titian's masterpiece Diana and Actaeon is set to be saved for the nation after a series of pledges put the fundraising campaign on track to achieve the £50m asking price. The Scottish government will this week announce that it will donate about £10m, while the National Gallery in London will pledge about £12m and the National Galleries of Scotland a further £2m. Money will also come from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Until now, £11m had been publicly pl

The Empire raises its flag in London

Britain's conquest of a quarter of the world has long been a near-taboo subject for public discussion. Now a museum is to confront visitors to the capital with the darkest moments as well as the high points of the imperial past. The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum, currently housed in Bristol, is the favourite to win a contest for a new cultural institution to be built on a three-acre site on the south bank of the Thames opposite the Tower of London. The proj

Sir Paul McCartney: I was the anti-war Beatle

Sir Paul McCartney claims that it was he – and not John Lennon – who politicised the Beatles. He has shunned music magazines to give an interview to an intellectual journal in which he describes how he introduced the group to the “very bad” Vietnam war. It paints a picture at odds with the conventional view of the Beatles, that McCartney was writing pop ditties such as Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da while Lennon was composing overtly political songs such as Revolution. McCartney

Long-unpublished 1905 Twain essay finally printed

NEW YORK -- It only took a 100 years or so, but the world is finally getting a piece of Mark Twain's mind on the subject of free expression and whether it's safer for your words to be expressed after you're dead. "We have charity for what the dead say. We may disapprove of what they say, but we do not insult them, we do not revile them, as knowing they cannot now defend themselves. If they should speak, what revelations there would be!" Twain observed in "The Privileg

The invisible man rescuing stolen art

There are about 100 of us packed into a restaurant in Upper Holmesburg, Philadelphia - art experts and curators, museum security chiefs, and a phalanx of FBI agents with 9mm Glocks concealed under their G-man suits. We have gathered to say farewell to a man few people have heard of and even fewer could recognise or describe. That is the way Special Agent Robert "Bob" Wittman prefers it. For nearly two decades, usually masquerading as a crooked art

The Simple Job That Morphed Into ‘Valkyrie’

TWO Christmases ago the director Bryan Singer was looking for a modestly scaled movie to make, something he could slide in quickly between behemoths. He had just come off three consecutive comic-book adaptations (“X-Men” in 2000, its sequel in 2003 and “Superman Returns” in 2006), he had helped to create the hit Fox series “House,” and he was now in the market for something different. When he read “Valkyrie,” a script co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, who had been a friend since

Waltz with Bashir (2008)

EARLY in the film “Waltz With Bashir,” Ari Folman, the filmmaker and main character, looks at a photograph of himself as an Israeli soldier in the 1982 Lebanon war and cannot recognize his younger incarnation. The boy in the uniform may as well be a stranger. Last month, sitting in his studio in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, discussing the movie — an animated documentary that has drawn praise in Israel and Europe and opens Dec. 26 in New York — Mr. Folman, 45, said things had changed. “

Che rides again in Hollywood

"Che" film gets thumbs up in Cuba," ran the headline from CNN's Havana Bureau on Dec. 8. Benicio Del Toro, who stars as Che, was in the Cuban capital at the Havana Film Festival this week-end presenting the movie he co-produced. "Che the movie met Che the myth in Cuba this weekend," starts the CNN report, "and the lengthy biopic of the Argentinean revolutionary won acclaim from among those who know his story best. " Indeed, but the acclaim came bec

'Television and the Presidency': The Bush and Clinton Years (Fox News documentary)

FOX News airs the fourth in its five-part series on how television shaped the most powerful office in the world, and in turn changed the course of history. "Television and the Presidency" airs Sunday at 3 p.m. EST. ### "If the other guy is coming at you with a negative, you have to be ready for it," said Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, explaining the role of television ads in the 1988 election. "And if you don't, you're going