Fire early Saturday destroyed a historic North Side house designed by renowned architect Louis Sullivan, the third of his buildings brought down by flames this year in the city.

No one was inside the house and no injuries were reported, said Fire Department spokesman Kevin MacGregor.

The wood frame building had been undergoing renovation, he said.

More than 700 African-American Marines served on Iwo Jima in World War II, running ammunition to the front lines and burying the dead, among other harrowing duties.

These men, in addition to facing the Japanese, had to endure bitter racism from their white counterparts. When they came home they received no respect or honor for their sacrifice. These elderly warriors are asking why they are being made to feel the same neglect again.

Hollywood has made another movie, called Flags of Our Fathers, about the Iwo Jima battle. It's directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Eastwood, Steven Spielberg and Robert Lorenz.

Unlike Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, this movie shows a couple of African-American soldiers briefly in a cutaway shot on one of the ships heading toward Iwo Jima. At the end of the film, if you hang around long enough, you'll see one photograph that features a few black Marines in prayer.

Lorenz told me that blacks who are...

“Commune,” a breezy, informal history of the Black Bear Ranch, a long-running California commune begun in the summer of 1968 and still in existence, offers the fascinating spectacle of observing people then and now.

This loose-jointed collection of reminiscences by several dozen people who lived on the ranch — hippies and political idealists who “moved there to get away from America,” as one original member puts it — is crammed with pictures and old home movies. Juxtaposed with the vintage material are interviews with the same people today.

However weatherbeaten they appear, they still have a light in their eyes, and they exude the hardy spirit of pioneers who are older and wiser but unbowed. As they look back with pride, amusement and sadness, it is obvious that their experiences on the ranch profoundly shaped their lives. (Occupied today by a handful of younger people, the ranch is now a land trust owned communally by everyone who has spent a winter there.)

A classic "drip" picture by Jackson Pollock is believed to have become the world's
most expensive painting after it was sold in America by the Hollywood entertainment mogul David Geffen for $140 million (£75 million).  

In a private deal brokered by Sotheby's, the painting 'No.5, 1948', has been bought by David Martinez, a Mexican financier.

The price beats the recent record set by the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder who paid $135 million (then £73 million) also in a private sale for Gustav Klimt's portrait, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a German-Jewish sugar heiress, in June.

[Lloyd Billingsley is the author of Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s.]

The new film Catch a Fire centers on a campaign to blow up a South African oil refinery. Key to the operation is Patrick Chamusso, who joins the anti-apartheid fighters of the African National Congress (ANC) after being falsely accused of another attack, arrested and tortured. Patrick also has some family difficulties but things work out for him and his country. As the action fades, viewers see these words: For Joe Slovo, 1926-1995. The other credits indicate that Catch a Fire was produced by Robyn Slovo, Joe's daughter, and was written by Shawn Slovo, another of Joe's daughters. And Joe Slovo himself is in the film too, played by Malcolm Purkey an actor who looks so much like Joe Cocker one expects him to burst into “Feelin’ Alright.” (The real Joe Slovo actually looked more like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove.) For someone so important, Joe...

When the American artist David Smith began welding his vast works from steel, no one even considered them sculpture. But 100 years after he was born in the artistically unpromising environment of the Midwest, he is being honoured with an exhibition of his work at Tate Modern in London.

The show includes more than 70 works, starting with early experiments in the 1930s through to sculpture made not long before he was fatally injured in a car crash in 1965.

Robert Fagles, a retired professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, feels he has come to know the poet Virgil as well as anyone in history after spending 10 years translating his epic, The Aeneid. His hope now - shared by his publisher - is that many of us will want to share that familiarity.

Judging by Fagles' past success with two of the other great tomes of ancient literature - The Iliad and then The Odyssey - he can be excused his optimism. Both translations became unexpected best-sellers, helped greatly by audio-book versions narrated respectively by Derek Jacobi and Sir Ian McKellen.

Due to hit American book-shops tomorrow, Fagles' rendering of The Aeneid, the sweeping story of the toils of the warrior Aeneas, who goes on to found the Roman Empire after the fall of Troy, is expected to make a similar impact, replacing fustier versions that go all the way back to John Dryden's 17th-century version. Once more an audio version is in the...