JERUSALEM — He occupies the driver’s seat with an air of insouciance, a blue helmet atop his head, two proud white steeds under his command and a sly smile across his lips. Bruno Schulz looks out at the world from his painting as if he owns it. But like much else in his life, cut short by a Nazi bullet, this is pure fantasy.

The work and story of Schulz, a Jewish writer and painter in Poland who was forced to illustrate a children’s playroom in a Nazi officer’s home and then killed, have long attracted literary attention. There was something about his humility, talent and fate that captivated writers like Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth and David Grossman, who all made him a character in their works.

Yet until the wall drawings for children were discovered in 2001 by a documentary filmmaker, fading and peeling like ancient Roman frescoes, they were thought to have been destroyed. Spirited out of Schulz’s hometown in what is now Ukraine under contested circumstances...

BOOKS do not sell themselves: that is what films are for. “The Reader”, the book that inspired the Oscar-winning film, has shot up the bestseller lists. Another recent publishing success, however, has had more help from Washington, DC, than Hollywood. That book is Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”.

Reviled in some circles and mocked in others, Rand’s 1957 novel of embattled capitalism is a favourite of libertarians and college students. Lately, though, its appeal has been growing. According to data from TitleZ, a firm that tracks bestseller rankings on Amazon, an online retailer, the book’s 30-day average Amazon rank was 127 on February 21st, well above its average over the past two years of 542. On January 13th the book’s ranking was 33, briefly besting President Barack Obama’s popular tome, “The Audacity of Hope”.

Tellingly, the spikes in the novel’s sales coincide with the news (see chart). The first jump, in September 2007, followed dramatic interest-rate cuts by...

An unpublished play by Ted Hughes that had escaped the notice of scholars will be performed for the first time, after the discovery of the manuscript in a university library.

Hughes, who died in 1998, wrote The Story of Vasco in the late 1960s, but his version of the play was never performed because it was intended to be adapted into a libretto for an opera.

The play is an adaptation of a French drama by Georges Schehadé, but Hughes infused it with his own language and imagery.

The opera, also called The Story of Vasco, was performed at Sadler’s Wells in 1974, but Hughes’s source material was heavily cut, according to Gordon Crosse, who wrote the music...

In times of gloom and doom, there is often a need for the charismatic energy of great ideas. Back in 1919 German architect Walter Gropius regarded the miserable period following the end of the World War I as a "catastrophe of world history." His response was a bold and yet surprisingly pragmatic utopian vision -- the Bauhaus. By establishing this new kind of art school he managed to create a cultural wonder that continues to have a profound impact to this day.

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of the school and a series of events and exhibitions are about to remind us once again that without Gropius the world of architecture and design would look very different today.

Gropius, who was 35 at the time, had made it his principle to turn his back on tradition and yet, in a thoroughly old-fashioned way, he was also determined to assume social responsibility. On March 20, 1919, he submitted an application to establish an academy in the...

For medieval Christians, Jerusalem was the omphalos of the world--the navel. It was there that this world was connected to the world to come. Dante parodied this spiritualized geography in his Divine Comedy, where the descent into and beyond the bottomless pit of Inferno inverted into the mountain of purgatory whence the ascent to paradise could begin. On the Bebelplatz in Berlin, between the opera house and the old university, the Nazis celebrated their ascendency by burning the books of Jews and other degenerates in 1933. Visitors since 1995 can peer through a small glass porthole into a room carved into this ground by the Israeli artist Micha Ullman. It is a square white room filled floor to ceiling with shelves. But the shelves are empty. The books are gone, buried in the air.

If one were able to descend into that room, and if that room were as bottomless as the agonies for which it stands, and if our universe were shaped like Dante's, we would re-emerge from the...

History has announced plans to launch Great and Telling Tales with Timothy Dickinson, the network’s first original series for the Web

The upcoming 12-Webisode History.com exclusive will feature the historian Timothy Dickenson, who is known for his love of strange or unexpected stories. For example, episodes of the series have been titled Great Moon Hoax and Jimmy Carter vs. The Killer Rabbit.

Besides Dickenson’s commentary, episodes of the new broadband original will incorporate animation aimed at brining the bizarre tales to life, said officials.

What are the arts worth?

In straitened times it’s easy to mistake cost for value. You might also say it’s the difference between cash and culture, the price of something and what’s ultimately priceless.

Romanians, it seems, have been prone to confuse the two since even before the revolution that overthrew the country’s Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and executed him and his wife, Elena, nearly 20 years ago.

That’s one explanation, at least, for why, when the courts here recently ruled that some art formerly in the possession of the Ceausescu family should be returned to Nicolae’s only surviving child, Valentin, Romanians hardly blinked.

The art is mostly Romanian paintings, but also some Goya prints. That ruling was not quite an equivalent to German courts handing art formerly at Berchtesgaden over to Hitler’s relatives. But it was close.

A soft-spoken 60-year-old physicist who never helped run his father’s regime,...

SPIT FLIES FROM the wounded soldier’s mouth and his face pulses, red. “Death! Where are you?” roars Philoctetes, played by the actor Paul Giamatti. “Why, after all these years of calling, have you not appeared?” About 200 military mental-health experts watched him spiral into despair as they worked their way through box lunches, squeezed into a suburban-D.C. hotel conference room. “Earth, swallow this body whole, receive me just as I am, for I can’t stand it any longer,” he moans, breathless. “I am wretched, afflicted, and alone.”

Sophocles wrote these words 2,400 years ago when he inventoried the maladies of combat veterans in his plays Philoctetes and Ajax, which recount two Greek soldiers’ anguish during the Trojan War. Now the Theater of War project has revived these ancient stories, with a plain message for today’s veterans: your experiences are timeless. For as long as men have fought one another, they surely have been psychologically damaged by it. The diagnosis has...

The Shaw Theatre is to stage a two-week run of Maggie's End, a play by Ed Waugh and Trevor Wood, that begins with the state funeral of the former prime minister and is funded by trade unions including the NUM, which led the miners' strike in the 1980s.

"There's little doubt that most Labour supporters would see a state funeral for Margaret Thatcher as the ultimate betrayal by their party and that to acknowledge her in this way would reopen many of the sores of the 1980s," says Wood. "We wanted to explore what the repercussions of this could be, particularly in the north of England, where many communities were decimated during the Thatcher years."..