An original sketch of favourite AA Milne character Winnie the Pooh, featuring Tigger and Piglet, is expected to fetch £20,000 at auction.

The pencil drawing of the bear dipping a paw in a honey pot is being sold at Bonhams auction rooms in London by the family of the artist, EH Shepard.

A specialist at Bonhams said it will appeal to five generations of readers.

The sale on Tuesday also includes a first sketch for Kenneth Grahame's story The Wind in the Willows.

The pencil drawing shows Rat and Mole having a picnic on a river bank, and is expected to make around £10,000...

LAS VEGAS — Sandy Hammargren is the definition of a patient, long-suffering wife, except when it comes to Big Bertha.

Her husband, Dr. Lonnie Hammargren, built Big Bertha, a black 10-foot-tall model locomotive, in their backyard from a disparate collection of parts: a rail car believed to have brought Howard Hughes to Las Vegas, part of a road girder, a piece of an 1890 steam tractor, a boiler “from something entirely different, I can’t remember what,” Dr. Hammargren said. The wheels were from castoff parts of old CAT scan machines.

“Oh, I just hate it,” Mrs. Hammargren said. “It’s awful to look at.”

That she wants Big Bertha gone is not surprising. What is astonishing is that Big Bertha is all that earns her wrath when nearly every inch of her vast home is overwhelmed by thousands of other bits of memorabilia, collections, bizarre shop projects and unadulterated junk.

The endless displays, which leave nary an inch of floor space inside...

Chevy Chase didn't look like Gerald Ford and didn't sound like Gerald Ford. But in the mid-1970s, when"Saturday Night Live" first went on the air, Chase -- then a writer and cast member of the show -- made his impression of the president, rife with pratfalls and slapstick, the talk of the country.

He also made the president a butt of jokes, which was intentional, Chase told CNN in an interview.

"[Ford] was a sweet man, a terrific man -- [we] became good friends after, but ... he just tripped over things a lot," he said."It's not that I can imitate him so much that I can do a lot of physical comedy and I just made it, I just went after him. And ... obviously my leanings were Democratic and I wanted [Jimmy] Carter in and I wanted [Ford] out, and I figured look, we're reaching millions of people every weekend, why not do it."

THE details don’t really matter. What matters is that a few years before his screenplays for “The Queen” and “The Last King of Scotland” propelled him to the head of the class, Peter Morgan was so fed up that he was ready to try anything — anything! — that wasn’t a film script.

He considered bungee jumping and mountain climbing, he said not long ago from his home in London. But he chose something even riskier. He wrote a play about the landmark 1977 television interviews that David Frost conducted with Richard M. Nixon. Relying on the accounts of participants and fictionalizing here and there for effect, he made sure to write it, he said, “in a way that breaks every single rule of screenwriting.”

“Frost/Nixon” was picked up by the small but prestigious Donmar Warehouse, where the director Michael Grandage and the designer Christopher Oram incorporated onstage video screens to allow close-ups of Michael Sheen’s unctuous, eager-beaver Frost and Frank Langella’s...

To hear Florence Nightingale pronounce her own name with such precise, emphatic enunciation — “Florence [dramatic pause] Nightingale” — takes you straight into her living presence and tells you in an instant what a powerfully self-possessed character she must have been. The speech she is giving, In Aid of the Light Brigade Relief Fund, recorded in 1890, is just one among the British Library’s unrivalled sound archives, running to a mind-boggling 1m discs and 200,000 tapes. The library has released two new three-CD sets, one of British and one of American writers, talking about life, literature and their work. They include EM Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Harold Pinter, Tennessee Williams, F Scott Fitzgerald, and a whisky-sozzled Raymond Chandler talking to Ian Fleming, and breaking into frequent snuffly giggles.

What is so enjoyable about the collection is its capacity to surprise. It includes the only known recording of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, talking a little about Holmes but...

Let me describe the first two scenes, and in fact the first two shots, of Israeli director Amos Gitai's new film "One Day You'll Understand." They should be shown to aspiring filmmakers, under the heading of "this is how much you have to learn." In the first shot, a 40ish man in a suit (it's the French actor Hippolyte Girardot) crosses a busy street in Paris and approaches some kind of large horizontal stone monument, evidently rather new. He appears to be looking for a particular name or names on the monument, but there is no dialogue or explanation.

In the next sequence, again filmed (as far as I can see) in a single shot, we see an older woman puttering about her apartment. (It's Jeanne Moreau, arguably the greatest of all French actresses.) She's cooking but grows distracted and looks out the window. Returning to the stove, she finds she has burned a pot of beans, scalds her hand on the pot and mutters about it. She has the radio on, and it's...