Richmond | For Northerners, the history of the Civil War seems pretty much settled. We know that from the nation’s founding, economic and cultural differences — particularly those surrounding slavery — created tensions between the North and the South; that the elimination of slavery only fitfully became a Union goal during the war; and that it ultimately took a century for black Americans to glimpse the equality guaranteed by the nation’s ideals....

Things are interpreted more ambiguously here in what once was the capital of the Confederate States of America. Forty-three battles took place within 30 miles of the “White House of the Confederacy”: the pillared mansion where this self-declared nation housed its only president, Jefferson Davis, from 1861 to 1865. And while history may be typically written by the victors, here it seems to shape a looking-glass world in which perspectives are shifted and emphases altered, jarring emotions and assumptions.

In many...

For a blockbuster movie that claims to be the first to show the warts-and-all horror of what has been described as Germany's biggest post-war tragedy, the beginning of The Baader Meinhof Complex is disarmingly innocuous.

The film opens with shots of the idyllic playground of Germany's rich and famous, the North Sea holiday island of Sylt. It is the late 1960s and a newly married couple from a wealthy Hamburg background are shown cavorting about on the lawn of a luxury seaside home. The bride is Ulrike Meinhof, the woman whose name was soon to become synonymous with post-war Germany's radical, left-wing, Red Army Faction terrorist gang. Yet, at that stage in her career, she looks like a society debutante on her way to a coming out party.

Within minutes, the images switch to a scene on the streets of capitalist West Berlin in the early summer of 1967. Lying in the road is the student Benno Ohnesorg, an innocent bystander who was shot dead by police during...

"Each violin has its own story," said Amnon Weinstein, 69, who together with his son has spent more than a decade restoring the violins collected from across Europe.

Weinstein, a violin maker, said he received the instruments in various states of disrepair, many of them decorated with stars of David, a testimony to their former Jewish owners.

"By restoring their violins, their legacy is born again," said Weinstein, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust.

They were played together for the first time in a concert titled "Violins of Hope" by members of Israel's Raanana Symphonette and the Philharmonia Istanbul Orchestra.

Before an audience of thousands gathered under the spot-lit walls of Jerusalem's Old City, world-renowned Israeli virtuoso Shlomo Mintz played "Avinu Malkeinu" (Our Father, Our King), a central prayer from the Jewish Day of Penitence...

One of the most sensational and shocking images in European art, Edvard Munch's painting of a man locked in a vampire's tortured embrace – her molten-red hair running along his soft bare skin – created an instant outcry when unveiled a century ago.

Some believed the Norwegian artist's anguished 1894 masterpiece, Love and Pain – since known as Vampire – to be a reference to his illicit visits to prostitutes; others interpreted it as a macabre fantasy about the death of his favourite sister. Some years later, Nazi Germany condemned it as morally "degenerate".

Vampire has become one of Munch's most sought-after and reproduced images, despite remaining in the hands of a private collector for the past 70 years.

The painting will go on the open market, The Independent can reveal, and is anticipated to smash the $31m (£17m) auction record for a Munch work. Vampire, which is often seen as the sister of The Scream, completed just months earlier,...

A new technique promises to reveal hundreds of masterpieces hidden beneath later works. Harry de Quetteville reports

It amounts to the biggest single art find: a host of unseen works by masters old and new, from Rembrandt to Van Gogh and Picasso. But these works can't be seen on the walls of any gallery or museum. And they are hidden not in a safe or bank vault, but on canvases which the artists themselves painted over.

Now, however, scientists are employing a revolutionary technique to reveal these spectacular images. Using circular particle accelerators, hundreds of metres across, they fire Xrays 10,000 times more powerful than any hospital scan at the priceless paintings.

It is not the first time that art historians have employed science to peer beyond the façade of masterworks. Leonardo, Brueghel and Courbet are some of the many artists whose canvases are emerging as ultra-valuable palimpsests, where the original image has been muffled by over-...

The charcoal drawing, commissioned in the early 1800s, has been sitting in storage at Solihull Council since it bought it in the early 1990s.

Council chiefs refused to put it on public view in case it got damaged.

With mounting debts they put the drawing, a sketch of Malvern Hall, near Solihull, West Mids, up for auction.

The drawing was commissioned by the then owner of the hall, Henry Greswolde.

A priceless oil painting based on the sketch hangs in Tate Britain - but until now the original had not been seen.

Councillor Ken Meeson, the leader of Solihull Council, said cuts in Government funding had forced the sale.

Iranian filmmaker Khosro Sinaii received the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for his documentary “The Lost Requiem”.

President Lech Kaczynski presented the medal to director Sinaii in a ceremony held on the sidelines of the Polish Film Festival in the city of Gdynia last Saturday.

“The Lost Requiem” tells the story of the wartime exodus to Iran by thousands of Polish citizens after being released from the Soviet labor camps of Siberia during World War II.

During the two months of April and August 1942, leaky ships crammed with emaciated men, women and children began arriving at the Caspian port of Anzali. Their condition was desperate and within days of their arrival, thousands had died from malnutrition and typhus.

An Iranian combatant bids farewell to his martyred fellows in an undated photo taken at a frontline in western Iran during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. An exhibition of photos commemorating the 28th anniversary of the war is currently underway at Tehran’s Palestine Museum of Contemporary Art.

One of the most sensational and shocking images in European art, Edvard Munch's painting of a man locked in a vampire's tortured embrace – her molten-red hair running along his soft bare skin – created an instant outcry when unveiled a century ago.

Some believed the Norwegian artist's anguished 1894 masterpiece, Love and Pain – since known as Vampire – to be a reference to his illicit visits to prostitutes; others interpreted it as a macabre fantasy about the death of his favourite sister. Some years later, Nazi Germany condemned it as morally "degenerate".

Vampire has become one of Munch's most sought-after and reproduced images, despite remaining in the hands of a private collector for the past 70 years.

The painting will go on the open market, The Independent can reveal, and is anticipated to smash the $31m (£17m) auction record for a Munch work. Vampire, which is often seen as the sister of The Scream, completed just months earlier,...