Madame Tussauds is to let American tourists in free of charge to mark the inauguration of Barack Obama as US President.

The London attraction will waive its entrance fee, which starts at £12.23, to American citizens on January 20, to celebrate the debut of its wax figure of the president-elect.

Visitors can get up close and personal with the world's most powerful man in a recreation of the Oval office.

They can stand behind the Resolute desk used by presidents since 1880 and pace the American eagle-patterned carpet...

Enter the British Museum's new Egyptian gallery and you will be struck by a line of painted panels of unexpectedly rich colouring and extravagant composition. On one panel, a pair of naked female dancers, their fingers interlaced, glide sinuously before a crowd at a banquet. Beside them, a flute player stares out from the painting, her hair shimmering as if she is swaying to the music. Each figure is distinct, individual and freely drawn, their proportions and detail captured perfectly.

Wander further along the main wall and you will find other exuberant depictions of everyday life in 18th Dynasty Egypt: a boy driving cattle along a road; geese, stored in baskets, ready for the market; a farmer, stooped and balding, checking his fields, and a hunt through reed beds that burst with creatures - shrike, wagtails and pintail ducks - easily identifiable still.

These are the tomb paintings that once belonged to Nebamun, a court official who lived almost 3,500 years...

Decades after the success of The Dam Busters and The Colditz Story, a spate of new films about the Nazis are capturing the attention of viewers just as it looked like the genre may die out.

Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as a German officer who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, has made more than $60 million in two weeks in the United States, while Kate Winslet's performance as an SS guard in The Reader has made the film an Oscar favourite.

The lesser-known war film Defiance has also enjoyed unexpected Box Office success in the US, and Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, about Jewish-American resistance to the Nazis in occupied France is due for release later this year.

Critics and film experts say that the popularity of these war epics stems in part from the public's wish to seek escape in films about topics that are now safely in the past, particularly a conflict in which the "villains" were obvious and the reasons for fighting...

A major exhibition at the Royal Academy celebrates the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio this Spring. His reliance on Roman heritage may have been misguided.

In 1816 Colonel Isaac A. Coles described his conversations with the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. They had" conversed at length on the subject of architecture". Palladio, Jefferson had said,"was the Bible – you should get it and stick close to it".

Thomas Jefferson was an exceptional man, a founding father of the United States, as well as being an amateur architect. His views about the art of building, however, were conventional for an English-speaking gentleman of the 18th century. He thought that subject had been summed up for all time by Andrea Palladio over two centuries before.

Palladio (1508-80), was, as the art historian James Ackerman roundly put it,"the most imitated architect in history". This spring the 500th anniversary of his birth is celebrated by a major exhibition at the...

Fine china and glasswork maker Waterford Wedgwood plc has called in a receiver -– the British equivalent of bankruptcy. The company said its receiver will be the international accounting firm Deloitte, and added it will announce later Monday which of its Irish and UK subsidiaries will be put into administration.

The National Portrait Gallery has retained a 19th-century portrait of a famous black nurse thanks to £96,200 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). The only known painting of Mary Seacole, a nurse in the Crimean War and contemporary of Florence Nightingale, shows her wearing medals awarded for service. The oil picture, by Albert Challen in 1869, has been on loan to the Gallery in London since 2004 after being discoverd by historian Helen Rappaport. It was uncovered at a car boot sale in Oxfordshire in 2003 and will now be on permanent display at the Gallery after being purchased for £130,000.

Wesley Kerr, Chairman of the Heritage Lottery Fund Committee for London, said: 'This is a moving and powerful painting that brings to life the courage, compassion and determination of an important figure in British history. As a woman and as a West Indian of mixed race she broke many barriers to make a huge contribution to Victorian society.'..

The last survivor of Operation Valkyrie on his plot to kill Hitler A SHORT phone call from his brother was to change Baron Philip von Boeselager's life for ever. The conversation between the two senior Nazis was to launch World War Two's most audacious plot to kill the German leader Adolf Hitler.

Philip, who was the last survivor of the plotters, said:"My brother George called and said, 'They want explosives'. I knew exactly what for."

Philip was one of the lucky ones. In Hitler's bloodbath of revenge, most of the plotters died, some by firing squad or suicide but many suffered the grotesque and painfully slow death of being hanged by piano wire.

Now the story of their doomed assassination attempt is being told in a documentary DVD.

It is released to coincide with Valkyrie, the block buster starring Tom Cruise as plot ringleader Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Growing up in Brooklyn, Robert Bielsky heard the story at the dinner table about how his father and uncles fought the Nazis and saved more than 1,200 fellow Jews by hiding in the woods.

Now that tale is a Hollywood movie called “Defiance” and Bielsky is still reeling from the surreal experience of seeing the newest James Bond play his father, Tuvia Bielski, on the big screen.

“Daniel Craig kinda looks like my dad,” said Bielsky, 50, who changed the spelling of his last name.

Bielsky, who lives on Long Island, said it was even stranger seeing his 22-year-old son Jordan playing a Nazi collaborator in the movie.

The Sound of Music may have immortalised the von Trapps as a cheerful and harmonious brood but for years the real-life family was plagued by sibling discord over their alpine ski lodge in the mountains of Vermont.

Now, however, the US-born grandson of Maria, the singing governess played by Julie Andrews, is persuading his family to embrace a film that many relatives have long viewed as more of a curse than a blessing.

Sam von Trapp, 36, a dashing former Ralph Lauren model who once appeared on People magazine's most eligible bachelors list and has just taken over the family business, starred in a television commercial advertising the 2,400-acre resort during last week's annual US broadcast of the 1965 film. It was the first time the Trapp Family Lodge had been promoted directly on the back of the film.

Sam intends to bring back family sing-alongs at the lodge later this year. And he is in talks with two television production companies about a possible reality show based...