Editor’s Note: The three-part television series WWII Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West, (described in the news article, “New Film on Secret Meetings of World War II Will Premiere on PBS in May”) juxtaposes conventional documentary elements with dramatic recreations to offer viewers a new perspective on the war through the prism of hidden meetings of Stalin—first with the Nazis and then with Roosevelt and Churchill. The film premieres on PBS on May 6. The award-winning filmmaker Laurence Rees (Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State), historian and author, Robert Dallek, who served as one of the academic advisers on the film, and producers from KCET Los Angeles, which co-produced the film with the BBC, talked about the making of the film, and a transcript of their conversation is reproduced below:

KCET: What does the series offer that is new?

REES: The series offers something new in a number of respects. Huge elements of the series were only made...

But the biopic, Coco Avant Chanel, has been criticised for "ignoring" her affair with the Nazi officer, Hans Gunther von Dincklage.

Instead the film focuses on what its director calls the miserable, "pure Balzac" early years of Gabrielle Chanel, nicknamed "Coco" during her failed attempt to launch a singing career.

The film sees her move from poverty to high society, from young hat-maker to her first catwalk show.

But it stops short of the darker period in her life - her affair with the Nazi officer at Paris's Ritz hotel during the Occupation.

It also fails to mention that Chanel tried to use the law banning Jews from owning businesses to wrest control of her perfume manufacturing from the Wertheimer family who ran it at that time.

The movie is the first of two feature films about the fashion house founder to open in 2009...

In the small village of Urft just south of Bonn, a single-family home on the edge of town gives few clues to the concrete and steel chambers below. But sure enough, a dank stairway hidden behind the garage leads to a secret underground bunker.

This was West Germany's James-Bond-style answer to the atomic bomb.

The shelter had room for 200 state officials to manage the government during a nuclear war. Nearby in Ahrweiler-Bad Neuenahr, another bunker was built to house 3,000 federal officials for up to 30 days. Tour groups started exploring the pair just last month.

"We didn't have any illusions," said Joerg Diester, the author of a book on the bunker's history. If the Cold War escalated, "we Germans would have been the first to be punished for it" by the Soviet Union.

The government took precautions, and built the bunkers in the early 1960s. Both facilities were kept secret until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in...

WHEN the world’s finest male golfers find themselves struggling to break par at this year’s United States Open at Bethpage State Park in June, chances are they won’t blame their plight on stimulus spending. But perhaps they should. After all, the rolling hills of the Bethpage Black golf course in Nassau County are a legacy of government efforts to create jobs and public works projects during the Great Depression.

And when young professionals in search of housing tour a lovely Art Deco apartment complex in Jersey City with a magnificent view of lower Manhattan, they probably won’t reflect on the vision of the city’s fabled mayor, Frank Hague. But they ought to, because Hague put up the buildings in the 1930s, albeit for use as a medical center, not as a condominium project.

Bethpage State Park and the old Jersey City Medical Center were expanded with labor provided by the Works Progress Administration, one of the vaunted New Deal programs that put millions of...

Not just in the hearts of revolutionaries, Marxist insurgents and rebellious teenagers, but on T-shirts, watches, sneakers, key chains, cigarette lighters, coffee mugs, wallets, backpacks, mouse pads, beach towels and condoms. He’s not only been used by politicians like the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, to promote their own agendas, but he’s also been employed by merchants to sell air fresheners in Peru, snowboards in Switzerland and wine in Italy.

The supermodel Gisele Bündchen pranced down a runway in a Che bikini. A men’s wear company brought out a Che action figure, complete with fatigues, a beret, a gun and a cigar. And an Australian company produced a “cherry Guevara” ice cream line, describing the eating experience like this: “The revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of chocolate. May their memory live on in your mouth!”

As Michael Casey, the Buenos Aires bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswires,...

One of the country's most eminent art historians has branded as "codswallop" claims that a portrait, which will go on display in Stratford-upon-Avon this week, is of Shakespeare.

Comments by Sir Roy Strong, a former director of the Victoria and Albert museum and the National Portrait Gallery, have stoked the furious row among Shakespeare scholars, who disagree about the true identity of the man in the controversial "Cobbe portrait".

Organisers of the Shakespeare Found exhibition, who will unveil the portrait to the public on Wednesday to mark the playwright's birthday, continue to insist that the painting is of England's greatest literary hero. But Strong disagrees and has ridiculed distinguished academic Professor Stanley Wells, saying he is wrong to support the controversial identification.

"It is codswallop, isn't it?" said Strong. "I don't know why Stanley Wells has gone off on this fantasy journey."...

Happy 400th anniversary to Shakespeare's sonnets. They are still going strong. You can buy dozens of different editions, ranging from pocket keepsakes for lovers to hefty hardbacks with hundreds of pages of scholarly explanations. Last summer you could hear Simon Callow recite the whole sequence of 154 at the Edinburgh Festival. And this month in Berlin the avant-garde American stage director Robert Wilson has teamed up with the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright to turn 24 of them into cross-dressed theatrical dreamscapes. So what is the source of their enduring power?

On May 20, 1609, a publisher called Thomas Thorpe entered in the Stationers' Register his right to publish “a booke called Shakespeares sonnettes”. A few weeks later, browsing the bookstalls in the yard of St Paul's, you could have found the little volume and purchased it for sixpence.

Probably the greatest love poems in English literature (though John Donne runs them close), the sonnets...

Protesters attended a candlelit vigil at outside the EMD Cinema in Walthamstow, east London, where Hitchcock saw his first movies.

Images of the filmmaker were projected on to the outside of the building and demonstrators wore Hitchcock masks on Sunday night.

The cinema, which first opened as a dance hall in 1887, closed its doors to the public in 2003 when it was purchased by Brazil-based religious organisation the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG).

The group's initial plans to turn the Grade II listed building into a church were rejected, but it is expected to submit new proposals to Waltham Forest Council.

The McGuffin Film Society wants the council to offer UCKG ownership of an empty building next to the cinema, allowing the popular EMD to be sold to operators who would reopen it.

Blackadder star Robinson said: "The cinema is an exotic masterpiece. It's where my teenage eyes were opened to the great jazz...

He never sang to the feds, but it turns out Al Capone had a song in his heart. All it took was a stint in Alcatraz to bring it out.

Now, more than 70 years later, the tender love song that the ruthless crime boss penned while sitting in the pen is being recorded and released on CD. And an inscribed copy of the music and lyrics to "Madonna Mia" is up for sale at $65,000.

"It's a beautiful song, a tearjerker," said Rich Larsen of Caponefanclub.com, who helped line up musicians and singers to record it.