Discovery Channel will air a special programme titled ‘Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen’ this Sunday, identifying a 3,500-year-old mummy through archaeological, forensic and scientific evidence.

Described as the most important find in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, the mummy being searched is of Hatshepsut, the queen who was the king of Egypt. Hatshepsut was no ordinary woman as she stole the throne from her young stepson, dressed herself as a man and in an unprecedented move declared herself pharaoh. Though her power stretched across Egypt and her reign was prosperous, Hatshepsut’s legacy was systematically wiped out from Egyptian history.

The two-hour programme follows a team of top forensic experts and archaeologists led by Dr. Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, as they for the first time ever use the full range of forensic technology to identify Hatshepsut.

Using knowledge of royal Egyptian mummification,...

No photograph of him has ever been published, but those who know Daniel Miller say that he resembles his father. Some say it's the nose, others the mischievous glimmer in the eyes when he smiles, but the most telling feature, the one that clearly identifies him as Arthur Miller's son, is his high forehead and identically receding hairline. He is almost 41 now, but it's impossible to say whether his father's friends would notice the resemblance, because the few who have ever seen Daniel have not laid eyes on him since he was a week old. When his father died, in February 2005, he was not at the funeral that took place near Arthur Miller's home, in Roxbury, Connecticut. Nor was he at the public memorial service that May, at Broadway's Majestic Theatre, where hundreds of admirers gathered to pay homage to his father, who was, if not the greatest American playwright of the last century, then certainly the most famous. In the days after his death, at the age of 89, Arthur Miller was...

The man born Andreas Cornelius van Kuijk may have been a thief. He may have been a swindler. He may have killed a woman. Whatever the case, he was without question a step ahead of the law when he hopped a ship from the Netherlands to America, where he then ran with the circus.

By 1929, a carny with a healthy disdain for the patsies who mobbed the midway, the fugitive bore the name Tom Parker. In time, he would add the honorific “Colonel” to the identity, a title awarded by Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis, who claimed—falsely, as it happens—to have written the song “You Are My Sunshine.”

Fifteen years later, Parker had set his sights on a different kind of mark. He became the country singer Eddy Arnold’s manager, writes Alanna Nash in The Colonel, and established a pattern that he would impose on other clients: that of total control. “All Eddy takes care of is his toothbrush and his drawers,” Parker said, and it was no exaggeration.

In 1955, when...

The best-selling novels of 1957 included “Peyton Place” by Grace Metalious and “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac.

Both were cultural touchstones: “Peyton Place” as a precursor of the modern soap opera and “On the Road” as a clarion call for the Beat generation and, later, as an underground bible of the 1960s and ’70s. Today “Peyton Place” is mostly regarded as a historical curiosity, but “On the Road,” celebrating the 50th anniversary of its publication, still has a vibrant life on college English course syllabuses and high school summer reading lists, and in young travelers’ backpacks.

“It’s a book that has aged well,” said Martin Sorensen, floor manager at Kepler’s Books and Magazines in Menlo Park, Calif. A “noticeable” number of copies are sold each year at the store, he said, “certainly more than the average 50-year-old book.”

The autobiographical, stream-of-consciousness “On the Road” follows Sal Paradise (a character based on Kerouac) and Dean...

When Jackson Pollock smashed his green Oldsmobile convertible into a tree in East Hampton, on New York's Long Island, 51 years ago this month, his violent death at the age of 44 only enhanced his mythic status as the iconic American renegade, who'd splattered—or dripped—his tortured psyche across his revolutionary canvases. Now firmly established as the most important American artist of the 20th century, Pollock still makes headlines—most of them containing dollar signs. Last November an early Pollock drip painting, "Number 5, 1948," was sold by David Geffen for a reported $140 million—the highest known price ever paid for a work of art. In September the headlines about a show of paintings that could be Pollocks will contain a different symbol: a question mark.

Back in 2002, more than two dozen small paintings labeled POLLOCK EXPERIMENTS were found at the Home Sweet Home moving company in East Hampton, in a storage locker belonging to the late photographer and...

Slated for 2008 summer release, ‘Valkyrie’, a United Artists Entertainment LDC production, will be shot at locations in Germany. The true story is being directed by Bryan Singer (‘The Usual Suspects,’ ‘Superman Returns’ and ‘X-Men’), while Christopher McQuarrie (‘The Usual Suspects,’ ‘The Way of the Gun’) has joined hands with Nathan Alexander for the screenplay.

The studio staged a coup by bagging Tom Cruise to play the lead, Colonel Claus Von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic German officer, who, disillusioned with Hitler, led the heroic attempt to bring down the Nazi regime and end the war by planting a bomb in Hitler’s bunker.

One of the most outstanding soldiers of the Reich, Colonel Stauffenberg, severely wounded on the African war front, returned home, and was persuaded to join the German resistance which believed that Germany, under Hitler, was fighting a hopeless war which had brought horrific suffering to its people. Operation ‘Valkyrie’ was the complex...

The setting is not Rick's Café in Nazi-controlled Morocco but a restaurant in southern India, and the conflict is not the Second World War but the current ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.

But fans of the movie Casablanca may recognise one or two similarities – the hard-bitten restaurateur who risks everything to help his former lover and her husband, the drama of smouldering human passion played out against a backdrop of senseless violence in which the problems of three people do not amount to a hill of beans.

The makeover of the 1942 classic is being undertaken by Indian filmmaker Rajeev Nath, who is remaking Casablanca as a Malayalam-language film. Filming is due to begin next month, with some of the scenes being shot in Sri Lanka, the location of a long and bloody civil war between government forces and Tamil separatists. Other parts of the movie will be filmed in Kerala in southern India.

THE story of “Bonnie and Clyde” has been told so many times that it has acquired the patina of legend. It’s the kind of historical fable that circulates to explain how the world once was and how it came to be the way it is now: a morality tale in which the wild energies of youth defeat the stale certainties of age, and freedom triumphs over repression.

I’m not talking about the adventures of the actual Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, who robbed and shot their way through Texas, Oklahoma and adjacent states in the bad old days of the Great Depression. Their exploits have been chronicled in books, ballads and motion pictures, never more famously than in the movie named after them, which first opened in New York 40 years ago this month. The notoriety of “Bonnie and Clyde,” directed by Arthur Penn from a long-gestating script by David Newman and Robert Benton and produced by Warren Beatty, who also played Clyde, has long since eclipsed that of its real-life models.
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Susan Meiselas is looking a bit shaken. She has just heard that her trip to Guinea, scheduled to start the next day, has been canceled; her driver there has been assaulted and is fleeing the country. She is working with Human Rights Watch photographing child domestic workers, and clearly someone didn’t like it....

“Part of what happens if you stay and take pictures is that you feel you will protect people just by standing there,” she said. “But you can’t stand there that long, and you can’t protect them.”

Taking photographs, she once said in an interview with Nicaraguan television, “is sometimes the least you can do.”

Much of what drives Ms. Meiselas’s work is a desire to step back through the looking glass to find the people she once photographed, to forge connections and return their pictures to them.

“We take pictures away and we don’t bring them back,” she said. “That became a central quest for me — relinking, revisiting, the...