One of the best things about old movies is that they’re, well, old. Among other pleasures, they offer a unique form of time travel, immersing us in bygone styles of dress and speech, quaint habits and notions. Hollywood classics in particular provide glimpses of a very different America by showing us the culture and physical environments our grandparents and parents lived in, and by acquainting us with some of their fantasies and dreams.

But lately, when I’ve sought escape from the daily flood of cultural novelty (and the daily grind of economic bad news) by slipping an old favorite into the DVD player, I’ve been confronted with a disconcerting jolt of reality. Those silvery images don’t seem to belong to the past, but to the scary here and now. On my recent, more or less annual viewing of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” I was stopped in my tracks by the run on the building-and-loan company of the hero, George Bailey, as the panicked citizens of Bedford Falls try to rescue their...

A woman's place has never been just in the home — not even in ancient Greece.

The proof is in an exhibit titled "Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens" — a collection of artifacts that correct the cliched idea of Athenian women as passive, homebound nurturers of men and children.

In the display covering Greek life, art and religion, women play important, vibrant roles, as do their goddesses — from lover to priestess to political peacemaker to protagonist of public festivals.

"Today's woman has more in common with the woman of ancient Athens than one imagines," said curator Stella Chryssoulaki. She pointed to a vase showing a group of women who escaped city life, getting together in the countryside for a three-day festival honoring their beloved god Dionysius. They talked and shared lots of wine, leaving their husbands behind.

In 2001, novelist Francois Ceresa published the follow-ups to the acclaimed 19th-Century classic.

But Hugo's family objected to the books - Cosette and the Time of Illusions and Marius or The Fugitive - arguing they were an insult to the original work.

The Paris High Court ruled they did not constitute a threat to the integrity of the original novel.

Hugo's heirs - including his great, great grandson Pierre Hugo - filed a suit in 2001 demanding 685,000 euros (£636,181) in damages from Ceresa, who wrote the novels using the characters and style of Les Miserables.

They also sought to ban the two books...

For decades, toy replicas of British warplanes like the Spitfire, Hurricane and Lancaster have outsold those of their Nazi foes, but now kit sales of Second World War German aircraft have overtaken those of the Allied forces.

Sales of German tanks and ships have also outstripped those of the Allies.

Analysis by the model maker Airfix has revealed that this year, German kits have made up around 55 per cent of the sales of all kits relating to the conflict. Around 1.4 million German replicas were sold, compared to 1.1 million Allied kits.

Experts and modellers say the rise in sales of the Nazi war machines reflects an interest in the more experimental technologies developed by the Germans and the engineering superiority of many of their vehicles.

Erwin Rommel, probably the best-known German soldier of the Second World War, was considered to be a chivalrous and humane general, even by the Allied forces who fought him.p But a new exhibition in Stuttgart calls into question the true nature of the man known as the"Desert Fox".

"The Rommel Myth" strips away the legends that surround the man who faced off against Britain's Desert Rats in North Africa and who committed suicide after being implicated in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler, the Daily Mail reports.

A spokesman for the History House, the foundation which is staging the exhibition, said:"Rommel was a fabrication of Nazi propaganda."

He cited a diary entry by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in 1941 that said:"I would strongly advise that now, as soon as the battle for North Africa has been decided, Rommel be elevated to a kind of popular hero."

Germans have traditionally been taught that Rommel was a good man, surrounded by evil.

But Gestapo...

The Head of Amenhotep III, a pharaoh who died in 1375BC, was stolen 18 years ago by a British smuggler.

Jonathan Tokeley-Parry disguised the stone head as a souvenir, coating it in plastic and painting it black to make it appear to be a tacky copy of a historical artefact.

The antiques restorer, renowned in the art world for his skill, later removed the plastic with acetone.

Now, more than 10 years after Tokeley-Parry was jailed for his activities, the head is be returned to Egypt at a ceremony at the country's London embassy.

The sculpture's removal from Egypt in 1990 breached the country's law banning the export of antiques more than 100 years old...

... I blinked, though, at seeing that Madoff's own sons turned him in. Early last year I sat in the off-Broadway Atlantic Theater in lower Manhattan and watched that same story unfold in "The Voysey Inheritance," a 1914 British play by Harley Granville-Barker as adapted by David Mamet, who with actor William H. Macy founded the Atlantic. It figures. David Mamet and Tom Wolfe are about the only serious writers in our time who see literature in the mechanics of money.

Mr. Voysey is an investment adviser in Edwardian England. He invests money for wealthy Londoners but also for the vicar of his church. His partner in the business is his son, Edward, an innocent who discovers in the ledgers that his father is a crook.

The scene in which Edward confronts his father over a life fleecing friends and clients is compelling, a torrent of talk about investment vehicles, mortgages, bonds, wealth, moral dilemmas, trust, friendship and principle.

This...

Three sketches very likely to be drawn by Leonardo da Vinci have been discovered on the back of one of the Florentine master's major works, the Louvre museum has announced.

The drawings, barely visible to the naked eye, were found on the flip side of Virgin And Child With St Anne (1519) during routine examination of the oil painting in the Louvre laboratory.

"When taking down the work, an oil on wood, a curator from the paintings department noticed two barely visible sketches on the back, representing a horse's head and half a skull," the Louvre said.

Deeper examination revealed a third sketch, a Baby Jesus and Lamb.

"This is an exceptional discovery as sketches on backs of works are very rare and there is no known example of one from Leonardo to this day," it added.

The drawings, barely visible to the naked eye, were found on the flip side of Virgin And Child With St Anne (1519) during routine examination of the oil painting in the Louvre laboratory.

"When taking down the work, an oil on wood, a curator from the paintings department noticed two barely visible sketches on the back, representing a horse's head and half a skull," the Louvre said.

Deeper examination revealed a third sketch, a Baby Jesus and Lamb.

"This is an exceptional discovery as sketches on backs of works are very rare and there is no known example of one from Leonardo to this day," it added.

"These were very probably drawn by Leonardo given the highly similar techniques used and the presence of a horse's head similar to ones found in his other works," a Louvre spokesman told The Telegraph...