In Rimini there is a small square – the Piazza Ferrari. Here you can buy ice-creams, mooch under the linden trees, and peer down at 1,400-year-old Byzantine corpses. Excavations have just finished at the Surgeon’s House, discovered in 1989 when the piazza was being reland-scaped. Laid out on Gothic mosaics are the skeletons of a Christian community. The graves have been roughly gouged out of the tesserae, the bones are protected by crude roofing tiles. The Christians died during the turf wars of the 6th and 7th centuries – when the Goths and Byzantium both laid claim to Italian lands.

Rimini, just 40km (25 miles) along the coast from Ravenna (famous for its wonderful Byzantine decoration in the Church of San Vitale) reminds us that Byzantium – the subject of a major exhibition opening at the Royal Academy later this month – is not just about icons, gold mosaics and pretty churches – it represents a visceral civilisation, a world power whose tentacles stretched from...

London’s Bankside art complex and Kabul could not be farther apart in cultural terms. The Taleban banned all depictions of the human form during its rule, destroyed ancient works of art and blew up music shops.

But a former curator at Tate Modern yesterday took a step across the cultural chasm with the first contemporary art exhibition in Afghanistan.

The show opened as a surreal oasis of calm and culture in a tense and jittery city. Bodyguards followed many of the diplomats who came to view the works by leading Afghan, Pakistani and Iranian artists.

A car-bomb alert during the event prompted some to leave early. Two months ago a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the historic Babur Gardens where the show was held.

Even getting the 51 works into the country for the exhibition was a challenge for the show’s English director, Jemima Montagu. Works of art featuring text from the Koran could not be imported for fear that sniffer dogs...

A new exhibition of the work of William Holman Hunt, organised by the Art Gallery of Ontario and the first show of the artist's work in Britain for almost 40 years, opens at Manchester Art Gallery today. Some of the paintings will be old friends if you live in the city, where several of the artist's paintings have hung for many years.

The Light of the World (Christ with a Lantern Knocking on a Door) is there, not far from The Scapegoat (sin-heavy ruminant with Dead Sea, purple mountains and rainbow). So are The Shadow of Death (Christ in his Carpenter's Workshop Anticipating his Crucifixion) and The Hireling Shepherd (who is more interested in maiden seduction than sheep care). These are the familiar, richly emblematic works of Holman Hunt the fervent evangelical Christian, and one of the founding fathers of the pre-Raphaelite movement, who coloured his neurotic piety with brilliant colours and shimmering light.

The Light Of The World, which surprisingly ran...

Police were called to the Hertfordshire studios at Friday lunchtime to investigate the theft of the prop, believed to be worth £80,000.

The Man With The Golden Gun, which also starred Swedish star Britt Ekland as Bond's lover Mary Goodnight, was Moore's second outing as 007.

Christopher Lee played his enemy, Scaramanga, a three-nippled assassin who only ever needed one golden bullet fired from his golden gun to kill his target.

In the film Scaramanga played a game of cat-and-mouse with Bond, whom he had been contracted to kill for $1 million.

The impeccably mannered Scaramanga would carefully assemble the weapon in the film from a pen, a cigarette case and a lighter before dispatching his foes.

The gun was being cared for by Elstree Props, a tenant based at the studios...

Oliver Stone's long-awaited biopic of George W Bush is to be released next week, rushed to the cinema just 19 days before voters go to the polls in the 2008 US presidential election.

The $30 million (£17.2 million) film has been rushed out - production only began in May - and given Stone's track record for politically-charged fare and support for Barack Obama, much has been made of whether it will influence the outcome of next month's poll.

But with the first reviews in, critics granted an early peek at the biopic seem to agree it is unlikely to play a major role in deciding whether Republican John McCain or Democrat Senator Obama replaces Bush in the White House.

Instead, many comment that the film lacks depth and bite and is surprisingly even-handed in its treatment of a man deemed among the most unpopular presidents in US history.

The 'Picasso and the masters' exhibition, which has cost nearly £3.4 million and contains 200 paintings, opened in Paris this week and sets the Spanish painter alongside classical artists like Goya, Velazquez and Delacroix.

It was commissioned by Louvre president Henri Loyrette, who wanted to boost the museum's popularity with the general public.

But the move has upset some members of the Paris arts scene who have accused organisers of dumbing-down to attract the plebs.

Marc Dumaroli, chairman of the Society of Friends of the Louvre said the masses drawn to the museum were "a cancer"

"They visit the Louvre like they'd visit Chernobyl," he added.

Critics claim Mr Loyrette is turning his back on 200 years of history in an attempt to pull in visitors. The museum, a former royal French palace attracted 8.3 million people last year, 60 per cent more than in 2001...

John Lennon controversially declared they were bigger than Jesus, and the levels of fan hysteria and devotion they engendered made them synonymous with the youth culture of the swinging 60s. But a Cambridge University historian today argues that the Beatles were not heroes of the counter-culture but capitalists who cynically exploited youth culture for commercial gain. David Fowler claims: "They did about as much to represent the interests of the nation's young people as the Spice Girls did in the 1990s."

Fowler claims that many commentators during the 1960s saw youth culture as being all about the Beatles. But he says that just because they were fantastically popular - maybe bigger than Jesus, as John Lennon said in 1966 - it did not make them leaders of their generation.

Instead Fowler identifies a dreamy, folk-dancing rural revivalist Rolf Gardiner, the father of conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, as a true youth culture pioneer of 20th century...

A British artist who risked his life to draw intricate sketches of enemy front lines during the First World War was finally unmasked yesterday more than 30 years after his death.


Len Smith, a sapper and espionage expert with the Royal Engineers Special Branch, would hide in no man's land for days on end, sketching enemy positions with remarkable accuracy. Now a book of Sapper Smith's drawings has been released to the public. Armed with little more than a set of coloured pencils Mr Smith, who was from Essex, returned to no man's land day after day to create drawings of German troop positions.

In one of the most astonishing feats of counter-espionage Mr Smith crawled within metres of an enemy HQ and drew a battle-scarred tree so accurately that on his return to the trenches British Army chiefs were able to recreate a perfect, hollow steel replica. Without the Germans knowing, sappers replaced the real tree with the replica one in the dead of night....

It is a vast, disused funeral parlour once known as the "factory of grief", where all Paris's coffins were once made and black horse and carts were parked as the starting point for every Parisian's final journey.

Politicians are now hoping the capital's temple of death will inject some life into the city's ailing modern arts scene.

The former state funeral parlour at 104 rue d'Aubervilliers in north-east Paris will reopen this weekend after being transformed into the city's most daring modern arts centre.

The €100m (£78m) restoration of the massive 19th century funeral parlour is Paris's art event of the year. Not only are Parisians attracted by the macabre past of the building - known only by its street number Centquatre - the centre will also bring artists and tourists into the 19th arrondissement best known for its high-rises, poverty and gang culture...