Early in 1923, the London Daily Express ran a front-page story under the headline:

‘UNCROWNED KING’ AS
PRIVATE SOLDIER
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
Famous War Hero Becomes a Private
Seeking Peace...

Lawrence was the most visible, and certainly the most romantic, hero to emerge from World War I. His daring exploits in the desert on the eastern front gained him not only the respect of his peers and commanding officers but the adulation of a public greedy for heroes in a war otherwise notable for its glaring lack of celebrated individuals. If he was not, as Korda argues, the very first media celebrity, his fame certainly has an eerily contemporary ring. Newsreel footage made him so famous around the world that he was ultimately known to millions who had no clear idea of what he had done. He was just famous for being famous. And like so many unwitting celebrities, he enjoyed the spotlight until he realized too late that he was not the one who got to decide when to turn it off....

She was an aristocrat and an eccentric who greeted guests with a cockatoo on her shoulder.

Lady Mairi Bury of Mount Stewart, County Down, who died last year, was a colourful character who piloted her first plane aged 11 and her last at 85.

She was a close friend of politicians like Harold Macmillan. She was also one of the UK's greatest stamp collectors.

Her collection is expected to raise £2.6m at auction in Sotheby's, London, on 24 - 26 November.

Sotheby's have described it as one of the finest collections of British stamps to come on to the market in the past 25 years....

Soldiers from the Age of the Princes, the Napoleonic wars and World War II mingled with visitors at this year's Llangollen history festival.

A number of re-enactors were in costume and character to share their stories during The Festival of History and Remembrance (5-14 November).

The highlight of the festival is a fair with 50 history-related stalls.

Venues include Llangollen pavilion, museum and railway with one of the steam engine carriages forming the setting of a Victorian murder mystery play....

A gigantic statue of Jesus - claimed to be the world's tallest - has been erected in a western Polish town.

Christ the King in Swiebodzin rises 33m (108ft) - one metre for every year that Jesus lived, said Sylwester Zawadzki, the priest who created the statue.

But other local officials said the statue was 51m-high (167ft), if one included a mound it sat on and the golden crown on the head.

They said it was higher than famous Christ figures in Bolivia and Brazil.

The total height of Cristo de la Concordia in Cochabamba, Bolivia, is 40.4m (133ft), while Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer rises 38m (125ft)....

The Afghan government and the UK have signed an agreement allowing a priceless gold collection to go on display at the British Museum.

The "Lost Treasures of Afghanistan" or Bactrian gold will be revealed to the British public next year.

The gold jewellery, glassware and funeral ornaments were hidden by Kabul museum staff during the civil war and were only rediscovered in 2003.

They have been touring the world since 2006 and are currently in Bonn.....

The Natural History Museum has been warned that a forthcoming trip to find hundreds of new species in the remote forests of Paraguay could risk the lives of indigenous people and the scientists.

The 100-strong expedition, one of the largest undertaken by the museum in the last 50 years, is due to set off in the next few days to explore one of the most unknown regions of the world for one month.

However the museum has been warned by campaigners that the trip could cause “genocide” for isolated tribes.

The group Iniciativa Amotocodie, that protects local indigenous people, said groups of Ayoreo Indians in the area have never come into contact with westerners before. If they come across the expedition without preparation they could catch common western viruses that could wipe out the small groups in a matter of weeks....

A new show at the British Museum brings us face to face with our darkest imaginings, says Richard Dorment.

Most of us learnt about Egyptian burial practices at school – how the mummified corpse was entombed along with food, wine, furniture, bowls and eating utensils to stave off hunger, thirst, and boredom in the afterlife. I have to admit that even as a 12-year-old I found the Egyptian practice of taking everyday objects with them into the hereafter lacking imagination. If you need the same stuff in the next world as you do in this, I reasoned, death must have all the awe and mystery of a camping trip: wherever you might end up, you might as well make yourself comfortable along the way.

Now I know better. As you’ll discover in the British Museum’s autumn blockbuster, packing the celestial rucksack was only the start of the adventure.

For as well as the mummy cases, funerary statuettes, amulets and scarabs found in the pyramids, archaeologists also discovered “pyramid texts” provided for the use of the dead on their journey into the unknown. Written with reed pens on papyrus and often enclosed in wooden containers, or else inscribed on the walls of tombs or painted on the covers of coffins, these writings are known collectively as the Book of the Dead. Whereas the household utensils unearthed in Egyptian tombs are essentially banal, these rich texts draw us deep into the realms of the unconscious, where we come face to face with the ancient world’s darkest, strangest, and most fearful imaginings.

Once mummification was completed and the mummy placed in the sarcophagus, a priest used an adze ritualistically to “open” the dead man’s mouth and enable his winged soul (ba) to enter and leave the mortal remains at will.

Now the real journey could begin.

The Book of the Dead is not a single volume, like the Bible, but a collection of 200 magic spells and incantations which were believed to protect the dead person from evil and to guide him on his passage through a kingdom of the dead. Each spell was intended to be used in a specific situation the dead person might encounter on the tortuous path to eternal bliss....

A 91-year-old Dutch Jew who fought the Nazis in World War II has marked his bar mitzvah – the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony – almost 80 years late.

Hans De Leeuw says he was "shaking" during the service – usually meant for 13-year-olds – at Jerusalem's Western Wall on Sunday....

The significance of poppies to Remembrance Sunday is largely the result of Canadian physician and Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields’, believed to have been written on 3 May 1915.

The first two lines of the poem – ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row’ – records the growing of the poppies across some of the bloodiest battlefields of World War I.

An overseas American YWCA worker, Moina Michael, later published a poem herself in response to McCrae’s, and started selling silk poppies to raise funds for disabled veterans in Georgia.

Following her efforts, the American Legion Auxiliary adopted the poppy as symbol of remembrance in 1921....

Years after his death, baseball legend Honus Wagner hit a home run for a group of nuns, who will use proceeds from the sale of his extremely rare baseball card to do charitable work.

Texas-based Heritage Auctions conducted the internet auction, which concluded Thursday night with a winning bid from Doug Walton, whose family owns seven stores in the Southeast specializing in sports cards and collectibles.

Walton paid $262,900, Heritage said, with $220,000 of that going to the School Sisters of Notre Dame. The card's price beat initial estimates by $162,900.

Both the card and the account of how it came to be sold make for compelling stories.

Like other stars of the early 20th century, Wagner, a Hall of Famer with the Pittsburgh Pirates, appeared on tobacco company cards....

...Republicans now hold at least 93 of the 131 House seats from the states of the old Confederacy. Less than 20 years ago they did not even hold half. With the defeat of long-serving fiscally conservative Blue Dogs like Representatives Gene Taylor of Mississippi and John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, Southern white Democrats in Congress have become as rare as a Dixie blizzard....

Merle Black, a political science professor at Emory University and a co-author of “The Rise of Southern Republicans,” said that white conservatives first fled the Democratic Party in large numbers in the 1960s, turned off by the civil rights legislation and social programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. But it was not until the Reagan years that they felt comfortable identifying as Republicans.

A similar pattern is unfolding now with white Southern moderates, Mr. Black said, who are repelled by President Obama’s policies but have not fully embraced the other side....

Tom Dempsey resigned himself long ago to the idea that he would one day see his NFL record-long field goal surpassed.

Four decades since his 63-yard boot lifted the New Orleans Saints to a 19-17 victory over the Detroit Lions in old Tulane Stadium, Dempsey and his famously clubbed right foot still have yet to be outdone.

"I'm proud of the record and I realize someday it's going to be broken, because kickers are better now than when I played," Dempsey said Thursday during a visit to the Saints' suburban training center. "I really am surprised because you have to look at the NFL. There are so many great players. Kickers have gotten better through the years. To kick one that long, everything has to be right."...