Heroic efforts to make the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History a more lovable building have been made, and the building has just as determinedly resisted them.

The renovated space that opened on Nov. 21 after an $85 million overhaul is an improvement in many obvious ways. Light flows in. The wings of the building connect with each other and a central core more logically. There will soon be a cafe with windows facing onto Constitution Avenue, linking the building to the city, and there are new restrooms, information centers, and an elegant stairway that ties the whole space together. On a purely architectural level: Mission accomplished.

But this building's will to ugliness is profound. It will not give up the fight easily.

When it opened in 1964, it was dubbed the Museum of History and Technology, and it is more the spirit of machines and science than of history that defines the space. From its hard edges and boxy shape to...

Warren M. Robbins, whose $15 purchase of a carved-wood figure of a man and woman representing the Yoruba people of Nigeria became the seed of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, died on Dec. 4 in Washington. He was 85 and lived in Washington.

His death was confirmed by Kimberly Mayfield, a spokeswoman for the museum.

Mr. Robbins was a cultural attaché for the State Department when he bought that statue, but not in Africa. He was wandering the streets of Hamburg, Germany, one day in the late 1950s when he stepped into an antiques shop and was smitten by the carved figure. A year later, for $1,000, he bought 32 other pieces of African art — masks, textiles and other figures — at another Hamburg shop.

It's not surprising that the movie Frost/Nixon is receiving rave reviews. Like the eponymous smash play it's based on, it tells a dramatic story of a clash of two interesting figures (one of them absolutely riveting), with two richly talented actors, Frank Langella as Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost. The film is even more powerful than the play because of the effects of motion-picture techniques - size, penetrating close-ups, film clips, variegated scenery, and simply more action. But mainly size: everyone and everything is bigger - even eyeballs. Moreover, the movie is set against the backdrop of one of the most dramatic, frightening, and significant episodes in American history -- "Watergate" is inadequate shorthand for the constitutional crisis this country went through (often misinterpreted as simply a series of crimes on the part of the president and his top aides), ending in Nixon's being the first (and as yet only) president to be forced to leave office...

It was, Ian Hamilton calmly acknowledges, the moment of no return. ''You sort of know that when you take a crowbar to a side door of Westminster Abbey and jemmy the lock that there isn't really any going back, don't you?'' he says philosophically. ''Not when you know that the next thing you are going to do is steal one of the ancient relics inside.''

Hamilton is lost in reverie for a moment. A wry smile crosses his face and then a thought strikes him. ''Not,'' he says urgently, ''that it was stealing. It was a liberation. A returning of a venerable relic to its rightful ownership.''

Hamilton stretches out his legs and turns his gaze to the slate gray waters of Loch Lomond. ''Of course back then I didn't realise the scale of the thing. That it would become an international incident,'' he says, with the air of a man who has been describing something no more outrageous than picking the lock of his own front door after forgetting the key.

Hamilton...

EARLY in the film “Waltz With Bashir,” Ari Folman, the filmmaker and main character, looks at a photograph of himself as an Israeli soldier in the 1982 Lebanon war and cannot recognize his younger incarnation. The boy in the uniform may as well be a stranger.

Last month, sitting in his studio in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv, discussing the movie — an animated documentary that has drawn praise in Israel and Europe and opens Dec. 26 in New York — Mr. Folman, 45, said things had changed. “Now I see the picture and I say, ‘Yes that’s me.’ ”

His journey of self-recognition, from suppression to acceptance of his role in a despised war and traumatic massacre, may or may not echo a similar process in Israeli society at large. But it has struck a chord. Israelis are seeing the film in large numbers and praising its frank portrayal of life in uniform in a country that has tended to dismiss the psychic damage that can result from being a soldier in war.

In an interview with the intellectual journal Prospect, Sir Paul said that he persuaded Lennon to oppose the war in Vietnam.

He claimed the group's politicisation began after he met the philosopher Bertrand Russell in London in the mid-1960s.

But Sir Paul's critics see his comments as a further attempt to revise the history of the Beatles, casting himself in a better light.

"We sort of stumbled into things," Sir Paul told Prospect magazine.

"For instance, Vietnam. Just when we were getting to be well known, someone said to me: 'Bertrand Russell is living not far from here in Chelsea, why don't you go and see him?' and so I just took a taxi down there and knocked on the door."

He added:"He was fabulous. He told me about the Vietnam war – most of us didn't know about it, it wasn't yet in the papers – and also that it was a very bad war.

"I remember going back to the studio either that evening or the next day and telling the guys, particularly John [Lennon], about...

FOX News airs the fourth in its five-part series on how television shaped the most powerful office in the world, and in turn changed the course of history. "Television and the Presidency" airs Sunday at 3 p.m. EST.

###

"If the other guy is coming at you with a negative, you have to be ready for it," said Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, explaining the role of television ads in the 1988 election. "And if you don't, you're going to get killed. That's the lesson of 1988."

It's a lesson Dukakis learned the hard way after a series of cutting clips made mincemeat of his presidential aspirations.

Developments abroad during the late 1980s were beamed home, and just two years after President Reagan demanded the end of the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the Cold-War split between East and West finally came down.

Down at the end of a dead-end street here, there's an exhibition hall where a famous and politically correct notion about one of the world's real mysteries is getting a rough ride.

In an era of lowered expectations, the exposition about Easter Island is worth a look.

It comes for free, certainly the right price these days, and in a low-toned, less than riveting way goes after what it says is a myth about man's irrepressible self-destructiveness - a parable forced on what's rather gently suggested is an overdrawn link between the island's extraordinary statues and its civilization's downfall.

Since Paris at recession's precipice is not offering enormous new extravagance - give or take a magazine ad pitching limited edition men's perfume in 100 milliliter snail-shaped bottles at €800, or $1,070, a throw - you could do worse than wandering at no cost into a slice of controversy.

The exhibition hall belongs to the foundation of Électricité de France, the country's...

Britain's conquest of a quarter of the world has long been a near-taboo subject for public discussion. Now a museum is to confront visitors to the capital with the darkest moments as well as the high points of the imperial past.

The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum, currently housed in Bristol, is the favourite to win a contest for a new cultural institution to be built on a three-acre site on the south bank of the Thames opposite the Tower of London.

The project is likely to be controversial – when the museum was first set up at a cost of £8m in 2002, it was attacked from the left for promoting empire “nostalgia”, and from the right for “Marxist bias”.

Organisers hope that by relocating to the heart of multicultural London, the museum will help Britons “face up to” the most contentious period of their history. They claim the museum, intended to open in 2010 or 2011, will be “ideologically neutral”, showcasing the empire’s achievements,...