The night of New Year’s Eve, 1958, began promisingly for the 33-year-old Magnum photographer Burt Glinn, who was at a black-tie party thrown by a New York Times reporter on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As the drink flowed, talk focused on the US-supported Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Word had it that he was on his way into exile. Glinn, who died in April this year, knew that Fidel Castro, the leader of the revolutionaries, was up in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra and would be reachable. Without a second thought, he was off: borrowing money, he caught the last shuttle to Miami and then begged his way on to a flight to Havana. He touched down at dawn.

“By the time I arrived,” he later wrote, “Batista had fled. Fidel was still hundreds of miles away, although nobody knew exactly where. Che Guevara was on his way to Havana and nobody seemed to be in charge… There was a lot of firing. You could not tell who was shooting at whom. People appeared in the streets...

The 1969 film ends with a gang of gold thieves hanging over a ravine in a bus. Every step they take towards the loot threatens to tip them into the abyss.

"Hang on lads, I've got a great idea," says Sir Michael's character, Charlie Croker... and then the credits roll.

The star says he would have saved them by "switching on the engine", burning off petrol until it righted itself.

"I crawl up, switch on the engine and stay there for four hours until all the petrol runs out," he said.

"The van bounces back up so we can all get out, but then the gold goes over."

"There are a load of Corsican Mafia at the bottom watching the whole thing with binoculars. They grab the gold, and then the sequel is us chasing it."

Sir Michael first revealed his version of the events in a BBC One documentary marking his 70th birthday, but gave fuller details at the 2008 Visit London...

A Matisse painting stolen by the Nazis from a wealthy German Jewish businessman and kept in France for nearly 60 years was returned Thursday to the rightful owner's heirs.

Culture Minister Christine Albanel presented "Le mur rose de l'hopital d'Ajaccio" (The Pink Wall at Ajaccio Hospital), painted by French master Henri Matisse in 1898, to the Israeli medical aid organisation Magen David Adom.

The organisation has been identified as the heir to the collection of Harry Fuld Jr, whose father Harry Fuld, owner of a telephone manufacturing company, purchased the painting in Frankfurt in 1914.

Fuld inherited the collection after his father died in 1932 but left it behind when he fled Germany in 1937.

Entitled “Van Gogh’s Ear”, the exhibition is displaying works in various art forms aimed at depicting some of the hardship in Van Gogh’s life, the 10 Gallery announced in a press release published by ISNA on Tuesday.

The idea for holding the exhibit was proposed to the artists a few months ago and they have assembled the works exclusively for the show.

Works by Abbas Kiarostami, Parviz Tanavoli, Parviz Kalantari, Gholam-Hossein Nami, Farideh Lashaii, Golnaz Fat’hi, Bahram Dabiri, Kurosh Shishegaran, and several other artists are among the items on display at the showcase.

A photo by Iran’s multimedia artist Kiarostami is one the fascinating works of the show. He has created a scene depicting Van Gogh putting brush strokes on a painting in the wheat field, wherein he is believed to have shot himself.

Kiarostami has used a kind of printing technique to make the photo resemble a painting.

The title of the exhibition refers...

For sheer number of innocent people exterminated under an infamous regime, Hitler is no match for Stalin. Yet our fascination with the fiery, scary Führer as "the incarnation of absolute evil," as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel once called him, far surpasses our interest in practically all other hateful villains in modern history. In his highly imaginative novel "Winnie and Wolf," prolific British novelist and historian A.N. Wilson has taken an intriguingly dispassionate look at Hitler's inner circle. The novel, which came out in the U.K. last year, was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Despite this high level of acclaim, readers may wonder why Wilson would bother taking a sober, realistic look at Hitler and thereby risk humanizing him. But among Wilson's 35 books is a biography of Jesus that is mostly about the impossibility of writing a biography of Jesus; Wilson is not one to back down from a challenge.

Hitler's legacy is so repugnant that even his...

While not up there in the annals of transformation with Robert De Niro’s poundage or Daniel Day-Lewis’s palsy, Sean Penn’s smile lines in Milk are a wonder. They’re not crinkles, they’re furrows; they seem to stretch all the way down to his soul. As the gay activist Harvey Milk, who was shot to death in 1978 along with the San Francisco mayor, George Moscone, the volatile Penn is unprecedentedly giddy. There’s anger in his Milk, but it never festers—it’s instantly channeled into political action. In the tedious remake of All the King’s Men, Penn went in for Method-y pauses in the scenes of Willie Stark finding his soapbox voice: He seemed too inward an actor to play a natural rabble-rouser. But as Milk, he shakes off Method self-attention the way Milk shook off the shame of being gay. As the personal becomes political, he opens all the windows and gets visibly high on the breeze.

Milk is a hagiography, but there’s nothing wrong with that if you believe, as director Gus Van...

Her name has gone down in history as a byword for murder and debauchery.

But Lucrezia Borgia’s face has always remained shrouded in myth and mystery. But an art historian has claimed to have solved the puzzle.

A painting owned by the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia has been identified as a portrait of the notorious Italian Renaissance noblewoman painted by the artist Dosso Dossi.

The National Gallery of Victoria paid £8,000 for the painting (right) in London in 1963. Back then it was known only as ‘Portrait of a Youth by an unknown northern Italian painter’.

Now, in the words of gallery director Gerard Vaughan, it is worth ‘many, many millions’.

It took two years of scientific analysis and research in Italy, Australia and the U.S. for the gallery’s art curator Carl Villis to confirm that the person gazing sullenly from the painting was Lucrezia Borgia, painted by Giovanni di Niccolo de Luteri, better known as Dosso...

THIS holiday season the multiplexes, the art houses and the glossy for-your-consideration ads in publications like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter will be overrun with Nazis.

A minor incursion of this sort is an annual Oscar-season tradition, but 2008 offers an abundance of peaked caps and riding breeches, lightning-bolt collar pins and swastika armbands, as an unusually large cadre of prominent actors assumes the burden of embodying the most profound and consequential evil of the recent past.

David Thewlis, playing a death camp commandant in “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” will be joined by Willem Dafoe, who takes on a similar role in “Adam Resurrected,” Paul Schrader’s new film. In “The Reader,” directed by Stephen Daldry and based on Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling novel of the same name, Kate Winslet plays a former concentration camp guard tried for war crimes. Tom Cruise, the star of Bryan Singer’s “Valkyrie,” wears the uniform of the Third Reich...

More than half a century ago, a prominent Egyptian archaeologist unearthed a stunning ancient mummy mask at the Saqqara pyramids near Cairo - the golden image of a noblewoman's face.

Mohammed Zakaria Ghoneim deposited the 3,200-year-old relic in a warehouse at Saqqara, where he meticulously documented his discovery. Seven years later, in 1959, Egyptian records show it was still in the same storeroom.

What happened to the burial mask of Ka Nefer Nefer in the four decades that followed is a mystery.

It resurfaced in 1998 when the St. Louis Art Museum in Missouri acquired it. And now it is at the center of an acrimonious fight in the antiquities world.

The case lays bare the complexities involved in growing efforts by Egypt and other countries to reclaim artifacts stolen or looted from their ancient civilizations...