[Ms. Jonnes is the author of "Eiffel's Tower" just out from Viking Press.]

On May 15, the Eiffel Tower, the world's most celebrated monument and the iconic symbol of Paris, celebrates its 120th anniversary. Strikingly, the fame and allure of this improbable wrought-iron masterpiece have only grown with the passing decades. The tower, built by railway-bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel, has become a ubiquitous global image connoting modernity and glamour, while visitors who experience it firsthand are still amazed by the tower's potent mixture of spare elegance, immensity and complexity. And when the Eiffel Tower opens to its adoring public each day, the structure comes to life as crowds gaily clamber up and down its stairs, eating, drinking and flirting on the three platforms high in the sky. Open to the elements, enveloped in Eiffel's distinctive design, visitors can see and touch parts of the 18,038 pieces of iron (welded together with 2.5 million rivets) as they...

Biocides used in recent years to treat the growth of a black fungus on the cave-art-festooned walls of France’s Lascaux cave have eradicated some populations of human-introduced bacteria and fungi. However, those that remain — including some related to known human pathogens — are becoming biocide-resistant, researchers report in an upcoming issue of Naturwissenschaften.

The new findings come from analyses of around a dozen samples taken from several areas in the cave between April 2006 and January 2007, says Claude Alabouvette, a microbiologist at the University of Bourgogne in Dijon, France. Some of the samples came from areas that were obviously infested with fungal colonies, and others were taken from cave walls that lacked such infestations, he notes.

Human presence has caused problems in Lascaux almost since its discovery in 1940. Lights added so tourists could see the cave art, images of bulls and other creatures believed to be painted more than 17,000...

An archaeologist claims someone has been secretly cleaning a Utah tourist attraction. If so, the mysterious high-pressure washes may be damaging world-famous rock art in Nine Mile Canyon. A tourist-friendly development was just completed near the rock art. Fence-rails were put up, a pedestrian walkway was created, and the gravel road was moved further away from ancient Indian art called The Great Hunt Panel. It was a collaborative effort by government, industry and archeology lovers to preserve and protect. "Basically, a beautification project around the panel, which is a very well known, world-class rock art panel," explained Lavonne J. Garrison, with the School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration. Archaeologist Pam Miller, with the Nine Mile Canyon Coalition at the College of Eastern Utah, said, "The net effect is that it says that somebody is taking care of this place and it means something."

But that spirit of cooperation is harder to...

A HUMAN skull will be the first of three sets of remains returned to the Australian nation by National Museums Liverpool this year.

It will be handed over to representatives of the Ngarrindjeri indigenous people in a traditional ceremony held at World Museum Liverpool tomorrow.

The event, which follows a private commemoration, involves rituals including a smoking ceremony using smouldering eucalyptus leaves in a bowl.

Dates for returning the remains of two further people, also believed to be of mixed Australian and European ancestry, will be fixed during consultations with the indigenous communities from the areas of their origin.

NML director Dr David Fleming, who will be attending the ceremonies, said: “The remains entered our collections many years ago and it is fitting that they are being returned to their homeland.

“The repatriation of cultural items to their countries of origin is a complex, emotive and sensitive issue...

Arriving in London for the first time many years ago, I hadn't shaken off my jet lag before heading directly to London Bridge, where I walked with the morning crowds ("so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many"), and, fixing my eyes before my feet, "flowed up the hill and down King William Street, / to where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine." Following in the footsteps of T.S. Eliot's dreary commute to his tedious job at Lloyds Bank, a path memorialized in the lines of The Waste Land, I engaged in what has since become a part of all my travels: literary tourism.

That visit felt like Anna Quindlen's account in Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City (National Geographic, 2004), in which she marvels at the city's array of literary sites: "I had been to them all in my imagination before I ever set foot in England. So that by the time I actually visited London ... for...

They own him and disown him. “My brother was in his class at school,” one might tell you. “Why did he tell those lies about us in that book” another will ask. The ageing Shanghai British, solipsistic to the last, and acutely sensitive still about their history, were thrilled to have spawned a novelist (as they were a ballet dancer, Margot Fonteyn), but they were mostly bewildered by his work in general, and angry in particular at his book about them, 1994’s Empire of the Sun. But that book is not about them, of course, and it is not about Shanghai and is not about the war, although it uses all of these. In his autobiographically-derived fiction, the late J.G. Ballard pungently recreated the smell and flavour of the world they shared with him, weaving its strange way around the fixed points of their cityscape and their experiences, the Cathedral School, the Hongqiao road mansions, the internment camps at Longhua. This was a vivid recreation of their vanished lives, but as they saw...

Although it took place more than 70 years ago, it is still remembered with anger in China, and continues to taint the country's relationship with Japan.

Chinese director Lu Chuan hopes his new film about the incident, called City of Life and Death, will help heal some of those wounds.

But the making of the film, and the subsequent public reaction, has revealed just how difficult it will be for the movie to achieve that goal.

While it was being filmed, there were disagreements between the Chinese and Japanese actors - and a fight.

And since its release the director has received a death threat and a storm of unfavourable comments from angry Chinese film-goers.

Wartime aggression

The movie, filmed completely in black and white, is already being seen as a box-office success, despite not opening until the end of last month.

It took 120 million yuan ($17.6m, £11.7m) in its first 10 days and has been...

A North Carolina woman who returned a chunk of ancient Rome to Italian authorities 25 years after her husband pocketed it said Thursday she never felt comfortable keeping the terra cotta fragment, but her eldest son's death prompted her to set things right.

"Whenever I looked at it, I'd feel bad about it," said Janice Johnsen, 52, of Greensboro. "Then, a little over a year ago, our oldest son was killed suddenly. Since then, we've been struggling with some hard things."

The pocketed fragment "kept nagging at me," she said. She decided "if we get in trouble, we get in trouble, but I need to return it."

Johnsen didn't tell her husband, Mike, about her decision until after she had returned the artifact. She mailed it anonymously, but put her return address on the package.

The couple was visiting Italy about 25 years ago while on a trip for Mike's new job. He bent over and picked up the fist-sized...

... When it was created by Gene Roddenberry in 1966, “Star Trek” was meant to expand the notions of what a unified world could achieve — a mission that was deeply complicated by the turmoil of the era. And the newest incarnation of “Star Trek” arrives at a moment when the country again finds itself teetering between limitless potential and peril, yearning to boldly go in all directions but potentially stuck in neutral.

The original “Star Trek” imagined the futuristic fulfillment of John F. Kennedy’s inspirational oratory, in which his New Frontier became “the final frontier.” The budget surpluses and budding space program of the early 1960s gave rise, in the 23rd century, to the utopian United Federation of Planets. On the Starship Enterprise, men and women, blacks and whites, Americans, Russians and Asians — with names like Uhura, Chekov and Sulu — worked side by side, reflecting Mr. Roddenberry’s belief that “when human beings get over the silly little problems of racism...