Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier debut as directors at this year's Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, opening on July 25. They're out to brighten up a festival that has a rather dark past.
The winds have changed in Bayreuth - and this new wind is conspicuously tall, blond and good-looking. Thirty-one-year-old Katharina Wagner, great-granddaughter of the composer Richard Wagner, has taken over from her father Wolfgang after his more than half-century reign as festival director.

Once again, the Green Hill will stage a great show - even before the curtain opens. Every year, the arrival of the rich, famous and powerful is the true highlight of opening night.

But Bayreuth's celebrity opera-goers don't just add to the luster of it all - they are also representative of the dilemma that the festival finds itself in. After all, prior to the Second World War, Bayreuth's most prominent guest was Adolf Hitler. He was a passionate Wagnerian and good friend of the...

Scientific police photographs are very rarely presented to the public, remaining stored for many years in confidential files because they transgress taboos when their subjects are violent death and crime. These pictures, taken almost a hundred years ago by Rodolphe Archibald Reiss, founder of the l’Institut de police scientifique of the Université de Lausanne, reveal their entire aesthetic dimension while retaining their intense emotional strength. As a forensic science pioneer, Reiss shows photographic skills which are unequalled in this field.

As the investigators’ artificial memory, the photographs were taken in a very formal style to document crime scenes and clues discovered as unemotionally as possible. They are all associated with Reiss’s teaching or expert evaluations. They allow us to see unusual sites and environments and, paradoxically, are often formally very abstract.

The boundary between reality and the imaginary remains unbroken here. Situated...

It could be the making of a revolution in one of Germany’s most hallowed cultural shrines.

The two great-granddaughters of the composer Richard Wagner held their first Bayreuth Festival this weekend — and have promised to reveal the Wagner family’s link to the Nazis.They even want to tackle the question of whether their grandmother, Winifred Wagner, slept with Hitler.

Eva Pasquier-Wagner, 64, and Katharina Wagner, 31, took over the festival from their ailing father, Wolfgang, and are committed to making the event, which is a high point in the classical music calendar, modern.

The aim is to make it less elitist and less secretive. There are shortened children’s versions of Wagnerian classics, live-streaming of performances on the internet, open-air public viewing, new programme notes and an introduction to each performance.

Wagner was Hitler’s favourite composer, but how close were the family to him? “I was repeatedly confronted with...

It was 40 years ago (almost) today that the Beatles took the short jaunt, hastily captured on film, that spawned one of the most famous and celebrated record covers of all time.

More than 12 million album sales later, Abbey Road's famous cover picture (and indeed some of its songs) has – as you can see here – spawned dozens of imitations around the world.

Beatles fans are preparing to celebrate the album, with thousands expected to make a pilgrimage to the zebra crossing that John, Paul, George and Ringo bestrode outside the Abbey Road recording studios on 8 August 1969.

It's hardly a long and winding road: more a few yards of black and white tarmac in a nondescript north London high street. Photographer Ian Macmillan, who died in 2006, recalled that he had spent only 10 minutes up a stepladder snatching a handful of pictures of the band...

Very sadly, then, it's a fake. Hokey. A gammon, a sham, a queer, a snide. Seventy-three years later, this is still very bad news indeed.

A few weeks ago, we reported on an academic study which revived doubts, which have niggled for more than half a century, over the authenticity of "The Falling Soldier", Robert Capa's famous Spanish Civil War photograph of a Republican militiaman at the moment of death. A Spanish newspaper has now further proved, with pictures, far beyond reasonable doubt, that the fledgling, Hungarian-born star, who went on to cofound the revered Magnum agency, got his big photographic break through trickery: stuck too far from the action, he persuaded bored soldiers in a distant village to act out their deaths to make a point. No one wanted it to be a fake. No one had reason to lie. The evidence is sadly compelling.

And my first thought, my thought any time I've seen this picture, was: does it matter? It is still an astonishing...

The New York Public Library celebrates Henry Hudson and Dutch acumen with Mapping New York's Shoreline, 1609-2009, a comprehensive exhibition featuring rare and extraordinary maps, atlases, books, journals, broadsides, manuscripts, prints, and an animation superimposing historical maps on a three-dimensional Google Earth model drawn primarily from the Library’s Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, and from other New York Public Library collections. Mapping New York’s Shoreline will be on view at The New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street from September 25, 2009 to June 26, 2010. Admission is free. In conjunction with the exhibition, performances, lectures, classes, workshops and film/video screenings will be presented at locations throughout The New York Public Library.

In September 1609, Henry Hudson sailed into New York Harbor and up the river that would later be named in his honor, performing detailed...

Two very rare gold coins of the little known Roman emperor Carausius (AD 286-93), found in the North Midlands in 2007, have been acquired by the British Museum and Derby Museum and Art Gallery. Both feature an image of the emperor Carausius, who lead a breakaway 'mini-empire' of Britain and Gaul in the late third century.

The first coin is a unique piece struck in London which has been acquired by the British Museum thanks to the generosity of funders including £43,500 from independent charity The Art Fund, the British Museum Friends and the Bottoms Bequest. The second coin was struck early in Carausius’ reign at Rouen and has been acquired by Derby Museum and Art Gallery, once again with grants from The Art Fund (£30,000) as well as the Victoria and Albert Fund, the Headley Trust, the Friends of Derby Museum and Art Gallery and Enlightenment – Collecting Cultures. The British Museum coin is on display in the Roman Britain gallery (Room 49, Case 14); the Derby coin will...

In 1845 when the National Gallery bought a forged painting after mistaking it for a Holbein, its director was forced to resign amid establishment uproar. Now, nearly two centuries after the blunder, the gallery's current director, Nicholas Penny, reckons self-respecting art institutions should be proud to have a few fakes in their illustrious collections.

Yesterday he announced the gallery's first ever exhibition of 40 fakes, copies and imitations in the gallery's own permanent collection, saying: "It's not a bad idea to have duds and fakes". He added: "I wish we had more fakes, I'm not worried about the reputation of the institution. It's important to know how clever forgers can be. The National Gallery is a place where we show great masterpieces but it's also a place where you can study the history of art.

"It would be very naïve for people to think it's something we should be ashamed of, or something that we should get rid of."...

It may not be the best page-to-stage adaptation ever to have graced the National Theatre. It may not even offer the full satisfaction of a thoroughly gripping yarn. But The Black Album, Hanif Kureishi’s new dramatisation of his 1995 novel, has one ace up its sleeve: it’s about a subject that matters - the rise of radical Islam in the UK.

Kureishi identified, before many other writers, the toxic fundamentalism bubbling away in Britain’s multicultural melting-pot. In revisiting his follow-up to The Buddha of Suburbia, which placed that debut novel’s coming-of-age trajectory within the perturbing context of growing extremism, he might be accused of reheating old arguments. Yet if we’re to understand where we are today, we need to rewind to the crucible year of 1989, Kureishi suggests, and Jatinder Verma’s lively production - saturated with period sounds - underlines this by concluding with a foretaste of the home-grown jihadist attacks of 2005.

To its credit,...