Ken Loach's 'The Wind that Shakes the Barley', currently enjoying huge success at the Irish box office and the winner of the 2006 Cannes Palm d'Or winner, continues to stir up strong passions. The film depicts the struggle between the IRA and British forces during the Irish War of Independence and the civil war that followed the Anglo Irish Treaty of 1922.

In Britain, The Sun called Loach's film "the most pro IRA ever". Ruth Dudley Edwards, an Irish historian, asked in the Daily Mail why the "Marxist" film director Ken Loach "loath[es] his country so much". Many critics of the film cited the work of one historian in particular, Peter Hart. I must declare an interest here. In the Irish Times letters pages in the summer of 2006, Hart claimed that I "misrepresent" his work, accusing him of stating that "ethnic cleansing" directed at Protestants was a feature of IRA actions. In fact I I did not state any such thing, though, had...

For centuries both women have been reviled as collaborators in Spanish conquests of the new world that verged on genocide. La Malinche was an Aztec turncoat who helped Hernán Cortés conquer Mexico; Inés Suárez was a Spanish seamstress who joined another conquistador, Pedro de Valdivia, in slaughtering the inhabitants of Chile.

Now two of Latin America's female literary giants, Laura Esquivel and Isabel Allende, have come to the rescue by writing novels casting them as misunderstood heroines who could be role models for today's women.

Some critics have balked at the revisionism, saying the novels gloss over the rape and savage subjugation that accompanied the 16th century colonial invasions of central and south America.

Allende, 64, whose Inés of My Soul is published this week by HarperCollins, depicts the seamstress as a warrior, adventurer and founding mother of Santiago who built hospitals, dug wells and fed the poor - in addition to beheading...

TWENTY-TWO years after The Unbearable Lightness of Being was published, the sweeping love story has been released in the author’s homeland — and is poised to become a bestseller.

Milan Kundera’s book, which is set during the 1968 revolt in what was then Czechoslovakia and was made into a film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, was banned by the communist authorities.

The first edition was published in French, and Czech readers have had to wait until now to read the book in its original Czech.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the precedent-setting free-speech trial over Allen Ginsburg's "Howl and Other Poems," we've reprinted here the introduction to "Howl on Trial: The Battle for Free Expression," (City Lights, 2006).

The "Howl" that was heard around the world wasn't seized in San Francisco in 1956 just because it was judged obscene by cops, but because it attacked the bare roots of our dominant culture, the very Moloch heart of our consumer society. At the end of World War II, I came home feeling disconnected from American life, like multitudes of Americans uprooted by military service. And we didn't stay home long. With new larger perspectives of the world, many of us soon took off for parts unknown. And the "white arms of roads" beckoned westward. I didn't know the actual demographics of it, but I had the sense that the continent had tilted up, with the whole population sliding to the west. It was a time of born-...

San Diego -- Seven bells on the forenoon watch, 11:30 a.m., the tug Pacific Queen let go the towline and the three-masted bark Star of India heeled gently in a light wind.

The Star of India, a 283-foot-long survivor of another time, sailed on the Pacific just off San Diego this weekend as it does once a year.

The Star, pride and joy of the San Diego Maritime Museum, was launched on the Isle of Man 143 years ago Tuesday and is the oldest active sailing vessel in the world, the last operating survivor of the great age of sail.

"We see this as an old ship,'' said Jerome Hall, a professor of marine archaeology at the University of San Diego. "But this was on the cutting edge of technology in the mid-19th century.''

It is hard to believe the Star was ever modern; it is built of iron, not steel, and has no engine. But it sailed from the British Isles to New Zealand, made passages to India and California, and sailed 21 times...

The canoe is coming back to its home at the American Museum of Natural History. But the Indians won’t be paddling it anymore.

The colossal Haida canoe populated with 17 painted plaster Northwest Coast Indians had been a fixture of the museum’s West 77th Street halls for so long — almost a century — that the life-size Indians themselves acquired their own kind of historical significance.

But this year, workers removing decades of grime from the canoe discovered just how much a good cleaning enhanced the beauty of its original paintings, of an eagle and a killer whale.

So now the 63-foot-long canoe will be exhibited as it originally was in 1883: hanging from the ceiling. The paintings will be in full view 15 feet from the floor, but up in the air, the Indians would be barely visible. So they are not coming back.

The Indian sculptures “were accurate,” said Peter M. Whiteley, the museum’s curator of North American ethnology. “But the figures...

Film fans have spent millions of dollars at an auction of Steve McQueen memorabilia, with one bidder paying $70,000 (£37,000) for a pair of sunglasses once worn by the actor. His widow Barbara was among those who donated cars, trucks and motorbikes to the sale, at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

McQueen, nicknamed the King of Cool, was one of the biggest box office draws of the 1960s and 1970s and was as famous for his racing as he was for his acting.

For nearly 50 years, everybody has tiptoed around the subject but hardly dared to mention it by name.
 
Now, the Empire is being brought out of the shadows by the people who were once its subjects.

So great is the interest from Commonwealth subjects keen to know more about their heritage, that the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol is to put the private photographic collections of hundreds of former British colonists on line as part of its new Images of Empire exhibition.

From Thursday, 6,000 never-before-seen images of colonial life, as well as 100 films, will be available online, in a move that — according to the museum's experts — would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago.

The first pictures include the incredible scene of the rhino in the living room, an orphan rescued during Operation Noah to save animals stranded as the newly built Kariba Dam flooded the Zambezi valley in the early 1960s. The creature was called...

N 1989 an unknown 26-year-old filmmaker from Louisiana delivered what might have been the final blow to the shaky edifice known as the Hollywood studio system. Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” an independently financed tale of love and adultery, won the grand prize of the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d’Or, as well as an acting prize for one of its stars, James Spader.

Acquired by the fledging distribution company Miramax, the film, made with a reported budget of $1.2 million, went on to gross almost $25 million in the United States, a spectacular figure that put Miramax on the map and established American independent film as a force to be reckoned with. As they watched their ancient hegemony crumble away, the studios rushed to establish their own “independent” divisions.

Now, 17 years later, Mr. Soderbergh is back with a movie that means to make amends. “I often think I would have been so happy to be Michael Curtiz,” Mr. Soderbergh said. Mr....