Edmond Rostand, who was feted as a French William Shakespeare when he brought out Cyrano in 1897, was appalled by his first play after it was panned by critics as "indecent" and "insane".

The Red Glove, a vaudeville comedy written a decade before Cyrano and when the author was just 20, was pulled after 17 performances.

Rostand was so ashamed of the work after the success of Cyrano that he paid a theatre not to put it on and the manuscript was thought to have been lost forever.

The convoluted first act takes place in the Musée Grevin, Paris' Madame Tussauds, in which characters pretend to be waxworks then jump out to seduce female onlookers. They are looking for love letters hidden in a shop sign in the shape of a red glove.

Critics slammed the play – co-written by his fiancee's half-brother – as unseemly. In one scene an actress appears in "a short skirt and corset" and in another men are in underclothes....

Last Thursday, July 23rd, the manuscript memoir of Anthony Blunt became available for study in the Manuscripts Reading Room at the British Library. The manuscript was given to the British Library in July 1984, just over a year after Blunt’s death, by a donor who wished to remain anonymous and on the condition that the manuscript be withheld from public access for 25 years. Anthony Blunt began to write his memoir in 1979, after his public exposure as a spy.

Anthony Frederick Blunt (1907-1983) studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was named Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and oversaw the opening of the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace in 1961. He was Professor of History of Art at the University of London and Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art from 1947 to 1974. During the Second World War and until 1951, he worked for MI5 and was knighted in 1956 for his work.

Blunt was also a Russian spy. He joined the Communist Party at Cambridge and was...

Mrs. Dina Babbitt, who fought unsuccessfully for more than three decades for the return of portraits that she painted in Auschwitz, passed away on Wednesday, at age 85, in Felton, California. She had suffered from cancer for several years.

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which has been leading the fight for the return of Mrs. Babbitt's paintings, will continue its efforts to persuade Poland's Auschwitz State Museum to return the paintings to the Babbitt family.

Renowned comic book artist Neal Adams, who together with Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff recently created a comic strip about Mrs. Babbitt, said:

"Dina Babbitt's passing is a double tragedy--a tragedy for Dina and her family, that she passed away without ever regaining the paintings that saved her life in Auschwitz; and a tragedy for the art world, that a museum has cruelly trampled the principle of an artist's right to her artwork. It is a tragic example...

Jason Bourne is getting historical. Matt Damon, star of the "The Bourne Identity" and other action films, dropped by the TV press tour in Pasadena on Wednesday to promote his longtime passion project. And there weren't any spy chases or high-tech gizmos in sight.

Damon is an executive producer of "The People Speak," an unusual History documentary that features Damon, Marisa Tomei and other celebrities performing selections from diaries, speeches and other primary sources related to American history.

The show is adapted from Howard Zinn's controversial "A People's History of the United States," which narrated the story of Americans' struggle for social justice through the eyes of ordinary people. The book has sold an estimated 2 million copies.

Despite that success, Damon and his partners struggled for a decade to get the project produced for the small screen.

"From the moment we had any influence in...

Huge reproductions of paintings by El Greco, Picasso and Murillo, in mocked-up antique Spanish frames, hang on the outside walls of the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. The sun and rain beat down on them. El Greco's Lady in a Fur Wrap looks bemused; Picasso's Weeping Woman is at the end of her tether. When you've already seen some of the best things in the gallery's new exhibition, The Discovery of Spain, larger than life on the Edinburgh streets, why would you pay £8 to go inside?

This show is intended as the highlight of the National Galleries of Scotland's summer programme. The exhibition's most significant Spanish works are usually dispersed in public UK collections. Bringing them together in a single show might be appealing, but it is a bit thin as an idea (and no museum was likely to deplete itself of all its Spanish masterpieces). The gallery's solution has been to include British artists who travelled or worked in Spain in the 19th and earlier 20th centuries...

The cast of characters: from the left Victoria Bynum, who wrote the first book, the filmmaker Gary Ross; John Stauffer and Sally Jenkins, who wrote the second book, published on June 23.

History repeats itself. But sometimes it needs a little polishing up from Hollywood.

Over the last few weeks, the writers of a pair of Civil War-era histories about the anti-Confederate inhabitants of Jones County, Miss., have been trading barbs in an unusual public spat. It began when the author of one book, rights to which had been sold to Universal Pictures and the filmmaker Gary Ross, discovered that Mr. Ross had spurred the publication of a new and somewhat sexier work on the same subject.

The encounter has created unexpected bad blood over incidents that occurred — or not — more than 100 years ago. And it offers a glimpse of the way that show business and its values have become entwined with the academic book world and its decision-making process.

On June 23 Doubleday...

From October 1, 2009, to February 7, 2010, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will host the largest-ever retrospective of works by the celebrated British artist John William Waterhouse (1849-1917). J. W. Waterhouse: Garden of Enchantment is the first large-scale monographic exhibition on Waterhouse’s work since 1978 and the first to feature his entire artistic career. This retrospective features some eighty paintings that are among the finest and most spectacular of the artist’s production, on loan from public and private collections in Australia, England, Ireland, Taiwan, the United States and Canada. It will also present many of the artist’s attractive studies in oil, chalk and pencil. Several of these works have not been exhibited since Waterhouse’s lifetime. The exhibitionhas been organized by the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands, with the collaboration of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition, which premiered at the Groninger...

[elin o’Hara slavick is a Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA in poetry, photography and art history from Sarah Lawrence College. Slavick has exhibited her work in Hong Kong, Canada, France, Italy, Scotland, England, Cuba, the Netherlands and across the United States. She is the author of Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography, (Charta, 2007).]

On August 6, 1945, the United States of America dropped an atomic bomb fueled by enriched uranium on the city of Hiroshima. 70,000 people died instantly. Another 70,000 died by the end of 1945 as a result of exposure to radiation and other related injuries. Scores of thousands would continue to die from the effects of the bomb over subsequent decades. Despite the fact that the U.S. is the only nation to have used atomic weapons against another nation, Americans have had little access to the visual...

A Swedish author who has written a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye is carrying his fight to publish the work to a higher court.

Fredrik Colting asked a federal appeals court in Manhattan on Thursday to reverse a lower court ruling that prevented him publishing the book.

Colting claims his 60 Years Later; Coming Through the Rye is a commentary on J.D. Salinger's perennial bestseller about adolescent angst.

"Colting is not a pirate," his lawyers wrote in the appeals claim. The new book uses "only the minimum amount of copyrighted material necessary to make his criticism and commentary," they said.