The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow will be displaying for the first time the painting "Tarquin and Lucretia" by the great Flemish painter Peter Rubens.
      
After the victory over fascists the painting was exported from Germany to the USSR as a war trophy.
      
The owners of the canvas in Russia were non-connoisseurs who had no idea of the painting's great value and for decades it was kept in a roll in a usual Moscow flat. The painting needed serious restoration. Upon restoration the painting has been returned to the world heritage and can be seen by numerous visitors of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.

Four hundred years ago today the first known performance of one of William Shakespeare's most powerful and heart-rending plays was presented at the court of James I at Whitehall.

Richard Burbage, the greatest actor of the age, is believed to have performed the title role as King Lear, the monarch who divided his kingdom and went mad.

The subject was tailor-made for James, who had been king of Scotland for 36 years when he ascended to the English throne in 1603 on the death of Elizabeth I.

He was desperately trying to unite the parliaments of London and Edinburgh, so a cautionary tale of the perils of division must have been music to his ears.

But while the political ramifications of Lear would have been clear to the contemporary audience, it is the human drama that has resonated through centuries.

As the director Richard Eyre observes in a documentary about the play on Radio 4 today, while it might not seem festive, the...

Teachers waste a lot of breath attempting to make history come alive, when all they need do is deploy a team of special-effects wizards and costume designers. In the coyly hilarious "Night at the Museum,'' Tyrannosaurus rex roams the earth once more, Teddy Roosevelt rides anew, Attila the Hun returns to the warpath, Lewis and Clark retrace their famous expedition, and cowboys in a diorama spring to life to win the West again.

For all its dazzling computer-generated sequences, "Museum'' wouldn't be nearly the delight it is without the talents of some of the best comedians in the business. The Friars Club is about the only place you'd expect to find Mickey Rooney, Dick Van Dyke, Robin Williams, Owen Wilson and Britain's Steve Coogan and Ricky Gervais together.

But each does his shtick in support of star Ben Stiller as divorced dad Larry, who desperately needs to get on someone's payroll or risk losing joint custody of his son. Looks as if Stiller...

PRESIDENT Nixon was terrified of him. Secret police followed his every move. And he could gather the world's press simply by deciding to stay in bed.

Yesterday, after a 25-year freedom of information battle, an American historian has secured the release of the final surveillance documents held by the FBI on John Lennon.

What we learn from them is what we knew all along - that Lennon was a concerned, left-leaning musician who had ties to leftist and anti-war groups in the early 1970s. He was not a revolutionary. And he was only a threat to the world order insofar as he dared to imagine a world at peace.

So this is a story about the power and efficacy of art. About how those in power will lock their vaults and black out their documents in the face of a lone, visionary voice. The FBI was so worried about keeping Lennon's secrets they overlooked the fact that he didn't have any.

It also testifies to the devotion of an audience - for a...

The University of Oslo decided Wednesday to move Norway's famed Viking ships to a new museum to be built on Oslo's redeveloped waterfront.

The relocation is planned even though there are fears the move could damage the ancient wooden vessels, Oslo's Aftenposten newspaper reports.

The ships, dating from the eighth to 11th centuries, are to move to the new Museum of Cultural History planned for Bjorvika harbor, where the city's new Opera House is set to open in 2008.

On Wednesday night last week, Belgium's French-speaking public television network created a stir with a surprise 90-minute broadcast that began with a news flash that Flanders had declared independence and that the Belgian state was breaking apart. The broadcast was inspired by Orson Welles's 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds," but touched upon a possibility less fanciful than an invasion from Mars. For the reality is that Belgium's days as a united nation may indeed be numbered.

Belgium only became a nation in 1830 and its union of Dutch-speaking Flemings in the north and French-speaking Walloons in south was never a love match. Instead, it was a marriage arranged by the great powers bent on creating a neutral buffer state.

Although Flemings always outnumbered French- speakers, Francophone Belgians dominated the new country economically, culturally and politically. French was the sole official language. The Francophone Belgian...

There are certain assumptions that American audiences, perhaps without realizing it, are likely to bring to a movie about World War II. The combat picture has been a Hollywood staple for so long — since before the actual combat was over — that it can sometimes seem as if every possible story has already been told. Or else as if each individual story, from G.I. Joe to Private Ryan, is at bottom a variation on familiar themes: victory against the odds, brotherhood under fire, sacrifice for a noble cause.

But of course there are other, contrasting stories, a handful of which form the core of “Letters From Iwo Jima,” Clint Eastwood’s harrowing, contemplative new movie and the companion to his “Flags of Our Fathers,” which was released this fall. That film, partly about the famous photograph of American servicemen raising the flag on the barren volcanic island of Iwo Jima, complicated the standard Hollywood combat narrative in ways both subtle and overt. It exposed the heavy...

LONDON -- On the 400th anniversary of the departure of British colonists for America, Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine yesterday opened a Jamestown exhibit at a dockside museum near where their ships set sail.

Surrounded by American and British dignitaries at a museum in London's Docklands area and flanked by a Colonial color guard and Virginia Military Institute cadets, Mr. Kaine said the colonists' ideals and aspirations were born in England.

"The important things [that they brought] were not physical things, but were ideas and passions and experiences and philosophies," he said, crediting the English settlers with introducing the notion of equality before the law, freedom of religion and elected legislative leadership to the New World.
"Though the soil did not seem fertile, the seeds brought by those English settlers were powerful, and they've grown into a very powerful nation, a nation that we're proud to call friends of...

IWO JIMA -- By the time the guns had fallen silent at the end of one of the bloodiest battles in the history of modern warfare, Iwo Jima resembled the surface of the moon. The trees had been turned into scorched stumps and the hillsides flattened by relentless shelling from US gunboats.

Now, almost 62 years after its fall changed the course of the second world war, Iwo Jima's physical scars have healed. Seen from the air, it is a pretty, teardrop-shaped speck in the Pacific Ocean 1,200 miles south of Tokyo, a place of rare insects and wild chilli peppers where the peace is broken only by the roar of Japanese F-15s leaving base.

The base is a reminder of Iwo Jima's vital role in Japan's security. To its Japanese defenders it represented the first line of defence; for the Americans it was the ideal stopping-off point for squadrons of B-29 Superfortresses that would carpet-bomb Tokyo and other Japanese cities into submission in the final months of the war....