The looping handwriting on the yellowing scrap of paper does not appear to be of any importance, at first glance. The eight-line work is littered with grammatical errors and the last line seems to have been rushed.

However, because the 67 words were written by the late George Harrison it means that, from today, the modest composition will be on permanent display at the British Library.

The unrecorded lyrics were written by Harrison as the Beatles were reaching the height of their creative output. The song, for which no music survives, has emerged after Hunter Davies, the band’s biographer, rediscovered it in his archive of Beatles material. He has lent it to the library indefinitely and told The Times that he intends to leave it to the nation in his will...

A "conversation piece" is an informal group portrait in which the sitters are shown at full length on a scale much smaller than life. The advantage of this format is that it allows the painter to place the sitters in a domestic setting – usually their own home or garden – surrounded by property and possessions to indicate their social status or financial success.

Unlike straightforward portraiture, therefore, the painter of conversation pieces must be able to paint interiors, still lifes, flowers and landscapes. A direct outgrowth of Dutch 17th-century domestic portraiture, the genre became fashionable in England in the 1720s and '30s, when Hogarth, to take one example, painted more than two dozen such group portraits.

There was a revival of interest in the conversation piece in the 1760s, in part because of the new King George III's taste for family portraits by the German painter Johann Zoffany, but also because the English artist Nathaniel Dance...

A full-scale model of a Lancaster bomber has already been built, as has a replica of the famous bouncing bomb. But producers of a remake of The Dam Busters have yet to resolve one question: what on earth are they to do about a dog called Nigger?

The anachronistically-named black Labrador was the faithful companion of RAF Wing Commander Guy Gibson, who led the British mission to destroy German dams in 1943. The dog is central to the plot: not only was he the mascot of Gibson's 617 Squadron, but after he was killed in a car accident, his name became a codeword for the bombers' prime target.

While the name was still acceptable when the original movie was made in 1954, that is no longer the case. So the film-makers, who include New Zealander Peter Jackson, director of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, are faced with an unenviable choice: ditch historical accuracy or risk widespread offence.

The executive producer, Sir David Frost, asked the actor...

The British artist tirelessly reinterpreted works by old masters and contemporaries to show just how good his own paintings were, according to the curators of the exhibition, Turner and the Masters.

It will bring together dozens of his works to be displayed alongside paintings by those who influenced him, including Canaletto, Claude, Lorrain, Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens, Ruisdael, and van de Velde.

Professor David Solkin, co-curator, said: "Every artist learns from artists who come before. But nobody else does it with so many."

He said at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries London was "flooded with Old Masters" and major exhibitions, opening up the eyes of British painters and "overwhelming" a lot of them.

"But Turner thinks, 'I can do what they did even better," said Prof Solkin

Among the paintings to be shown together will be Turner's The Deluge (1805-13), which he painted as a...

Shut your eyes and picture the great American West. What do you see? The boggling maze of the Grand Canyon, the sun streaming down on Yosemite, the pueblos at Canyon de Chelly, a moonrise over a sleeping New Mexican town, the mitten rock at Monument Valley, the sad profile of an Indian chief, a migrant mother with a worried face, a tornado in Kansas, a geyser in Wyoming, a gusher in Texas, a Marlboro Man on the range, Marilyn Monroe as a misfit, an open road, an endless sky, a surreal suburb, an empty parking lot?

You may be the victim of a great Western fantasy. Whatever image you chose, you can blame photography, which has done more than anything to construct our vision of the West, whether it's cowboys and Indians or parking lots and strip malls. If you have any doubt about this, check out "Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West," an exhibition at MoMA.

As the show's curator, Eva Respini, notes in her catalog essay, photography...

In the year 79 C.E., Mount Vesuvius erupted, famously burying the ancient city of Pompeii under volcanic ash, where it lay unknown and undisturbed until the eighteenth century. But once the city was opened up to the light of day, first by accident and then by a frenzy of treasure-hunting, the horrifying drama of that apocalyptic event proved irresistible, even if some of the finds were judged disappointing. The terrible fate of the city's residents as they tried to escape, the beauty of the interior decoration of the more opulent houses, the temples and shrines, and the exhilarating obscenities that turned up frequently in both public and private places conspired to evoke a thriving pagan community. This was a community wiped out at the very moment that Christianity was beginning to make itself known in the Roman Empire. The city's apparently wanton lifestyle and the violence of its sudden end came to serve as a symbol of the inexorable rise of the new religion in the face of...

Rome's underground Christian, Jewish and pagan burial sites, the Catacombs, date back to the 2nd Century AD.

There are more than 40 of them stretching over 170km (105 miles).

But, until now, they have never been fully documented, their vast scale only recorded with handmade maps.

That is now changing, following a three-year project to create the first fully comprehensive three-dimensional image using laser scanners.

He is known as the tortured genius who cut off his own ear as he struggled with mental illness after the breakdown of his friendship with a fellow artist.

But a new study claims Vincent Van Gogh may have made up the story to protect painter Paul Gauguin who actually lopped it off with a sword during an argument.

German art historians say the true version of events never surfaced as the two men both kept a "pact of silence" – Gauguin to avoid prosecution and Van Gogh in a vain attempt to keep a friend with whom he was hopelessly infatuated.

At the entrance of the British Museum’s new gallery of Chinese ceramics, from the Sir Percival David Collection, is a pair of Yuan-dynasty blue-and-white temple vases known as the David vases. These 63cm-tall vessels are often cited as the most important pieces of Chinese porcelain anywhere. Their significance lies in the inscription on their necks, which tells us a man called Zhang Wenjin presented them to a Daoist temple in 1351. Because of this unique dating, they have become a kind of Rosetta Stone for Chinese porcelain.

I felt conflicted. I have great respect for the scholarship of people like Sir Percival, but, as a vase-lover, I found these incredibly important pots, well, a bit ugly.

Don’t get me wrong: these are magnificent examples of ceramic art, made with a sophistication of technique that potters in Europe were unable to match for 350 years. But I can’t help thinking that maybe scholars rate them not because they are particularly beautiful, but...