Sir Peter Blake's portrait, based on a photograph taken by Lord Lichfield, is one of several works of art being auctioned on Tuesday in London, in aid of Macmillan Cancer Support.

It was originally painted for a reception held at the Royal Academy of Arts to celebrate the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002.

Sir Peter, famous for his rock album covers - from the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's to Stop the Clocks by Oasis - as well as his vivid paintings and collages of seemingly-everyday scenes and objects, was awarded a knighthood for his services to art in the same year...

Four years after it was last cleaned and repaired Michelangelo's statue of David in Florence is "at risk of collapse", according to a restoration expert.

Antonio Borri, professor of construction engineering at Perugia University and part of the team monitoring the statue's state of conservation, said that cracks which been repaired during a 2004 restoration marking the 500th anniversary of the statue's creation had re-appeared.

A seminar in Florence tomorrow will discuss the options for saving the statue, which is kept at the Galleria dell Accademia and attracts more than a million people a year. These include enclosing it in a protective covering to stop further deterioration and even closing it to the public altogether for a period.

Professor Borri, who is a Florentine, said that the cracks had "re-opened one by one. David is coming apart". He said the blame lay with traffic vibrations and the pressure of thousands of daily...

On Monday afternoon, Radio 4 launches one of its most ambitious history projects of recent years. America, Empire of Liberty will tell the story of the United States – from the times of the first settlements in the country back in 12,000 BC, through to the present day. It will consist of 90 fifteen-minute episodes, split into three runs of 30 episodes each. Among Radio 4’s history series, only the Nineties’ This Sceptred Isle, a history of Britain, and Neil MacGregor’s forthcoming history of the world illustrated by artefacts from the British Museum (slated for broadcast in 2010) will have been longer.

If Empire sounds like a lot to chew on, the series’ writer and presenter, Cambridge historian David Reynolds (the presenter of BBC4’s impressive Summits documentary series earlier this year), thinks not. “You can listen to a single programme and I hope get something out of it,” he says. Each programme will focus on a self-contained story, be it about the wife of US Founding...

In 1959, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev made a rare public appearance together at Moscow's newest landmark: the American National Exhibition. A few days before the opening, the two men strolled through the pavilions, bickering flirtatiously for the press, and pretending to admire US handiwork. When they entered the re-creation of a Long Island kitchen, however, the tone changed. Khrushchev averred that Russian kitchens were longer-lasting than American ones and that, in any case, he doubted the average US worker could afford what was on display. Nixon said they certainly could, and what became known as the Kitchen Debate gathered steam until the US vice-president thundered: "You must not be afraid of ideas!" Infuriatingly, the Russian president smiled and said: "That's what we're telling you - don't be afraid of ideas."

The man responsible for the kitchen and everything else on show that day was Jack Masey, now 84 and sitting in the office of his...

A French museum has found a previously unknown piece of music handwritten by Mozart, a researcher said Thursday. The 18th-century melody sketch is missing the harmony and instrumentation but was described as an important find.

Ulrich Leisinger, head of research at the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, Austria, said there is no doubt that the single sheet was written by the composer.

"This is absolutely new," Leisinger said in a telephone interview. "We have new music here."

"His handwriting is absolutely clearly identifiable," he added. "There's no doubt that this is an original piece handwritten by Mozart."

The work, described as the preliminary draft of a musical composition, was found by a library in Nantes in western France as staff were going through its archives. Leisinger says the library contacted his foundation for help authenticating the work.

The title of the documentary “Virtual J F K.: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived” pretty much says it all, though the movie itself says not nearly enough. Directed by Koji Masutani, this speculative, provocative, frustrating and finally unpersuasive historical gloss races quickly and all too lightly over the major political crises that John F. Kennedy faced during his aborted presidency — Laos, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam — in what may be the most aggressive big-screen shine job since Oliver Stone’s much derided 1991 hagiography, “J F K.”

Hinged partly on the British historian Niall Ferguson’s controversial notion of “virtual,” or “counterfactual,” history — crudely, it didn’t happen, but it could have — the documentary embraces a view of Kennedy as a president more inclined toward peace than toward war. Divided into sections and illustrated with a wealth of archival material, including some of Kennedy’s lively, sometimes combative press conferences, the movie zips through one crisis...

Linz is to be Europe's Capital of Culture in 2009. Before the Austrian city takes on that mantle it is showing an exhibition about how Hitler had wanted to make Linz a "Culture Capital for the Führer."

Linz is taking on a lot. On New Year's Eve the Austrian city will kick off a three-day opening festival with fireworks and drum rolls, to celebrate its year as Europe's 2009 Capital of Culture. Under the direction of Martin Heller, it's planning an intensive program of exhibitions, concerts, festivals, theater performances and readings.

There is almost as great a desire to deal with the city's past as to highlight its great cultural traditions. Composer Anton Bruckner was the organist at Linz Cathedral, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein went to school here and for 25 years ARS Electronica has been one of the most important festivals in the world for digital art.

However, there is also a dark side to the city's past. The idea of Linz as a...

How could German citizens claim, after the war, to have known nothing about the Holocaust? Ron Jones's attempt to answer this question as a new teacher in 1960s California led to a risky experiment in fascism that has intrigued successive generations ever since. It is the subject of a major new German film, Die Welle (The Wave), released this week.

Teachers dream of making a difference to their students' lives. It's part of the joy of teaching. Former students of Jones describe his experiment, known as The Wave, as a milestone in their lives.

During project week at Cubberley high school in northern California in April 1967, Jones began teaching his 10th-grade class the power of discipline, drilling them to sit properly and breathe correctly. He made them address him as Mr Jones, stand by their desks when answering questions, and chant slogans.

To his surprise, particularly against a backdrop of the "swinging sixties" and growing civil-...

Lying undisturbed for more than 40 years, audio tapes bearing the unmistakeable voice of Agatha Christie have been discovered that show how she modelled Miss Marple on her own grandmother.

Her grandson Mathew Prichard stumbled upon 27 of the half-hour long tapes in a dusty cardboard box as he cleaned out a storeroom in Greenway, the Georgian property overlooking the Dart estuary in Devon that Christie called "the loveliest place in the world".

The tapes, which nobody knew existed, are the raw material on which part of her autobiography was based.

Working alone at her own unhurried pace, the ageing Christie dictated the tapes on a Grundig Memorette machine in the mid 1960s.

Her rich, authoritative voice offers a wealth of insights into her life and how she developed her most beloved characters.

Among them is her description of Jane Marple - and how she partially based the genteel sleuth on her grandmother.