Kader Attia likes messing with your head. The Algerian artist is nothing if not audacious, creating in-your-face talking points at key art world international events. Attia first shook up the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in 2004 with his Illegal Studio Hallal installation, a replica sweatshop with Hispanic seamstresses toiling in a sweltering and distinctly un-airconditioned container placed on the Florida beach.

Then came his 2005 Art Basel piece, The Loop, a vast tent packed with whirling dervishes and spinning breakdancers, which symbolised the clash between traditional Islamic culture and Muslim youth. But with an installation made up entirely of empty plastic bags raising eyebrows at the TLV 09 Biennale in Tel Aviv (to 26 September), Attia insists he is no provocateur. "The word provocative has spectacular implications," he says. "I believe only in poetry."

Attia's background partly accounts for his incendiary approach. Born in 1970 to...

The film, by director Samuel Maoz, is shot almost entirely inside an Israeli tank against the backdrop of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

The award for best director went to Iranian-born Shirin Neshat for the film Women Without Men.

Britain's Colin Firth won Best Actor prize for A Single Man, in which he plays a mourning professor.

The BBC's David Willey in Italy says this year's winners all sent strong political or social messages.

Lebanon has been described by the leading US entertainment magazine Variety as "the boldest and best" of recent films from Israel about the country's wars in Lebanon...

[Robert Nedelkoff, a resident of Silver Spring, MD, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville and his Juris Doctor degree from Monterey College of Law in 1996. From 1997 until March 2009, he worked on behalf of the Richard Nixon Foundation at the National Archives in College Park, MD. He has published articles in several magazines, including GQ and McSweeney’s.]

As I write, either on TV Land or the Hallmark Channel, the inevitable strains of Johnny Mandel’s “Suicide Is Painless” are beginning, the chopper is coming down, and the men and women of the 4077th are getting ready for another session of OR drama and off-hours hijinks. Sooner or later Cpl. Klinger will be showing up in his heels and skirt, dog tags clinking around his neck in lieu of pearls. (There’s plenty of M*A*S*H* trivia on Wikipedia so I’ll just limit myself to mentioning that Jamie Farr, who played Klinger, really served in the Army in Korea, albeit a few years after the end of the...

MOSCOW — Detsky Mir, a landmark here in the heart of Russia’s capital, was once one of the largest children’s stores in Europe, with a central atrium that had elegant balustrades, columns and elevator shafts.

Generations of Muscovites and visitors have adored Detsky Mir, which means “children’s world” in Russian. Everything from baby clothes to toys to bobby pins has been sold in the store. Located not far from the Kremlin, Detsky Mir opened in 1957 and became a symbol not only of Soviet architecture but also of the Soviet era itself.

But the store is now closed while it undergoes an estimated $200 million renovation to its interior. The project is raising concerns among preservationists that it could become the latest of the city’s architectural treasures to fall victim to commercial pressures.

Over the summer, the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society released a report asserting that in recent years numerous historically significant buildings,...

On a perfect August afternoon, some of the nation’s wealthiest and most philanthropically generous citizens gathered on the porch of David Rockefeller Jr.’s home here, but neither the crowd nor the view of the sparkling Atlantic Ocean was the attraction. Instead they had come to grab (they hoped) a few minutes of chitchat with the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who for the occasion had reluctantly put on a blue blazer to go with his ever-present jeans.

In recent years Mr. Burns, whose patented blend of original photographs, celebrity readings and articulate historians has captivated the television documentary audience with programs like “The Civil War,” “Baseball” and “Jazz,” has suffered some setbacks. His last project, with Lynn Novick, the 15-hour 2007 World War II history “The War,” received a couple of particularly dismissive reviews, and he has lost his guaranteed financing from the struggling General Motors, forcing him to spend more time hustling for support......

Lori sez, "UT Austin's Ransom Center has digitized their Edgar Allan Poe collection, and it's pretty cool. I especially like the copies of his books, with his notes in them."

Oh, there's tons of Poe treasure here. I'm in hog heaven.

The digital collection incorporates images of all Poe manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center with a selection of related archival materials, two books by Poe annotated by the author, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Ransom Center collections. Poe's manuscripts and letters are linked to transcriptions on the website of the Poe Society of Baltimore.

An elderly Holocaust survivor from San Diego, California can continue his legal battle against a Spanish museum to reclaim a valuable painting he says was taken from his grandmother by the Nazis, a US federal appeals court ruled yesterday.

The ninth US circuit court of appeals ruled that 88-year-old Claude Cassirer's case against the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid and the Spanish government can go forward.

Cassirer claimed his grandmother was forced to sell the 1897 painting by French impressionist Camille Pissarro for what was then $360 (£217) to get a visa to escape from Nazi Germany in 1939. He filed suit in California's central district in Los Angeles in 2005, and the defendants appealed in June 2006.

The painting, Rue St-Honore, Apres-Midi, Effet de Pluie, depicts a Parisian boulevard lined with dark carriages, a few bare trees and a scattering of people braving the weather. Its value is estimated at $20m.

The painting...

History is not dead. It is alive,” says Tadeusz Slobodzianek. We are sitting in a train as it rattles north-east out of Warsaw, talking about the previous day’s ceremony in Gdansk that marked the outbreak of the Second World War, and how Vladimir Putin acknowledged the suffering caused to Poles by the Nazis without recognising the suffering caused to Poles by the Soviet Union. “No one apologised,” observes Slobodzianek.

One of Poland’s leading playwrights, Slobodzianek is the son of a Roman Catholic father and Russian Orthodox mother who, like countless other Poles, were deported by the Soviets to Siberia, where their son was born. Today in Warsaw he runs the Laboratorium Dramatu, a theatre with a reputation for new writing that is the Polish equivalent of the Royal Court in London.

By the time we reach our destination the talk has turned to Polish suffering in the remote northeastern borderlands — the subject of Slobodzianek’s play Our Class, which receives...

More than 6.5 million copies have been printed of the highly anticipated sequel to the 2003 mega hit, as book stores around the world brace themselves for an unprecedented stampede from hungry fans.

As well as being one of the largest first print runs in publishing history, an electronic version of the novel, which took Brown five years to write, will be released on the same day.

It is also already at the top of Amazon’s best seller list.

“The Lost Symbol” features the star of the series Robert Langdon, the Harvard University professor, returning to solve another, as yet disclosed, mystery.

Experts say the latest book, to be published in Britain by Random House, is the most sought after novel since the last Harry Potter book.

Despite savage reviews, with critics including Salman Rushdie saying the books were an example of appalling writing, the series has became a worldwide phenomenon, with more than 81m copies in print...