From the Dutch artist Vermeer, to British poet and artist William Blake, and now to a 19th century British fossil collector Mary Anning.

Author Tracy Chevalier, who won international acclaim in 2000 with her novel "Girl with a Pearl Earring" that was made into a successful film, said she is intrigued by historical figures with story ideas coming to her instinctively.

Her fifth book, "Burning Bright," tells the tale of Blake and the lives around him as he writes his famous "Songs of Innocence" in 1789.

Chevalier, 44, who was born in Washington D.C., majored in English literature at Oberlin College, Ohio, before moving to Britain where she took up work as a reference book editor - and met her English husband which whom she has an 8-year-old son.

She spoke to Reuters recently about her writing as she embarked on an eight-city tour of the United States:

Q: Why did you focus on Blake?

A:...

A new biography of Ingrid Bergman casts fresh light on the making of the 1942 classic Casablanca, in which none of its three stars wanted to appear. They never suspected that their roles would become the best-remembered of their careers.

In the newly published Ingrid, Charlotte Chandler tells of a lunch Bergman and Humphrey Bogart had before filming. She comments that “Ingrid remembered that the only subject they found in common was how much they both wanted to get out of Casablanca.”

Paul Henreid, newly arrived from Europe, also objected to his casting as Victor Laszlo, the underground leader and husband of Ilse, Bergman's character. He complained to his friend Bette Davis that his secondary role would harm his new career in Hollywood.

Chandler quotes Davis' reply: “You are wrong, wrong, wrong.” She went on to convince Henreid that Casablanca would be a step forward in his American career.

All three stars were concerned that the...

If there are any doubts about the deep longing we have to believe in heroes, to discover those with superior courage, vision and commitment, and then to celebrate their accomplishments, the new exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York should put those doubts to rest. “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War,” which opened yesterday, is in full celebration mode.

And why not? According to the show’s interpretation of that bloody conflict of the mid-1930s, which pitted political virtue against fascistic evil, the group of New Yorkers it focuses on — whose best-known members became famous as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade — were heroes indeed.

They were heroes first, the exhibition suggests, because they were among the 3,000 or so United States citizens (about a third from New York City) who defied the government’s prohibition and secretly went to Spain in 1937 to fight the forces of fascism. Some 800 lost their lives in an International Brigade...

Mel Gibson exchanged angry words with a university professor who challenged the accuracy of his film "Apocalypto" at an on-campus screening.

Gibson was answering questions from the crowd at California State University, Northridge, Thursday night when Alicia Estrada, an assistant professor of Central American studies, accused the actor-director of misrepresenting the Mayan culture in the movie.

Gibson directed an expletive at the woman, who was removed from the crowd.

"In no way was my question aggressive in the way that he responded to it," Estrada said. "These are questions that my peers, my colleagues, ask me every time I make a presentation. These are questions I pose to my students in the classroom."

Gibson's publicist, Alan Nierob, characterized the professor as "a heckler."

Crowds are flocking to see the film 300 about the ancient Spartans' last stand at the pass at Thermopylae against an invading Persian army. Yet many critics, in panning 300, have alleged that the film is essentially historically inaccurate. Are they right?

Here are some answers. But first two qualifiers. I wrote an introduction to a book about the making of 300 after being shown a rough cut of the movie in October. And, second, remember that 300 does not claim to follow exactly ancient accounts of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Instead, it is an impressionistic take on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, intended to entertain and shock first, and instruct second.

Indeed, at the real battle, there weren't rhinoceroses or elephants in the Persian army. Their king, Xerxes, was bearded and sat on a throne high above the battle; he wasn't, as in the movie, bald and sexually ambiguous, and he didn't prance around the killing field. And neither the traitor Ephialtes nor the...

WATERLOO, Ontario -- Caroline Falkner, a classics professor at Queen's University, did not dare brave the long queues at the movie theatre when the epic battle film 300 opened last weekend. But she plans to go with some colleagues very soon, because as it turns out, this ancient history expert considers the film required course material.

"Oh, I have to see it because I know my students will want to know more about it in the fall," Falkner said.

Falkner believes any interest generated in learning about ancient cultures is a positive thing, but said adaptations are often rife with historical inaccuracies that, left unexamined, can leave people with the wrong impression.

"Whenever I see these kinds of films, the history side of me is dissatisfied," Falkner said. "Sometimes it's the result of trying to compress so much into two or two-and-a-half hours. Sometimes it's an artistic thing - that's the nature of movie-making."...

LONDON — The way history has long been taught here, Britain’s abolition of the slave trade on March 25, 1807, allowed it to claim the moral high ground in the struggle to end slavery in the New World. Two centuries later, if a series of exhibitions planned for this year leave their mark, perceptions may be about to change.

Rather than dwelling on William Wilberforce, the feisty abolitionist who drove the reform through the British Parliament and is the subject of the film “Amazing Grace,” these shows are highlighting a far uglier back story: Britain’s deep engagement in the slave trade in earlier centuries and the fundamental role this played in forging the nation’s wealth and power.

With the support of the government and a $20 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, national museums and community groups across Britain have begun re-examining what a new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London calls these “Uncomfortable Truths.”

...

A film is to be made about a woman whom Italy's fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, tried to airbrush out of history. Ida Dalser and her son by Mussolini both died in mental institutions after she tried unsuccessfully to force the dictator to recognise their marriage and his son, also named Benito. "Not even Nero or Caligula would have done what you have done," she once wrote to him.

The story has considerable relevance because of efforts by the Italian right to rehabilitate the dictator and portray him as a good family man and an essentially harmless, if occasionally misguided, authoritarian. His political heirs are to be found in the "post-fascist" National Alliance, the second-biggest party in the coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi that governed Italy until last year.

Although it was known Mussolini had had a relationship with Dalser before World War I, the evidence for a marriage and the existence of their son was brought to...

How can a smell become extinct? A country, yes. East Germany, the Communist state named 'the German Democratic Republic', vanished from the atlas in 1990. Created out of what had been the Soviet occupation zone of Germany after Hitler's defeat, it became a heavily armed dictatorship but never looked as if it could survive without Soviet backing. And yet it did have its own authentic scent, a spicy reek brewed out of People's Cleaning Fluid, two-stroke petrol, brown-coal briquettes and cheap police tobacco.

Strange enough that the state has gone, with its flag and anthem and uniforms. But how can I accept that I will never again breathe that whiff which said: You are entering 'Stasiland', and nowhere else on earth? Can a republic of 17 million people, 300,000 secret policemen or informers and five million personal files melt away without leaving even a tang in the air?

But The Lives of Others, the masterly film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, is almost as...