It would be difficult to find a more visually ravishing show than this one in the whole of London. The objects – from palm leaf fronds on the end of tapering silver stems to cool an emperor's brow, to the silver accoutrements of an elephant; from gorgeous Indian miniatures showing shapely young female royals depending, languorously, from the end of a kite, to paintings of tremendous royal processions that seem to go on and on and on, at such a languid pace, until we run out of wall space – are dazzling, and the setting, from first to last, coyly razzmatazz.

The exhibition is all about the unbridled royal splendour of India from about the time of the collapse of the Mughal Empire in the 18th century to independence day. So we are talking about a period of approximately 250 years, years when Europe was beginning to turn its collective mind towards a future of mechanised industrialisation and, ultimately, democracy.

Seen within that ideological context, this...

Shepard Fairey, the artist whose “Hope” poster of Barack Obama became an iconic emblem of the presidential campaign, has admitted that he lied about which photograph from The Associated Press he used as his source, and that he then covered up evidence to conceal his lie.

Fairey’s admission, which he made public on Friday, threw his legal battle with the news agency into disarray.

The AP claimed in January that Fairey owed it credit and compensation for using the photograph. But in February Fairey sued the AP, seeking a declaratory judgment that the poster did not infringe on the agency’s copyrights and that he was entitled to the image under the “fair use” exception of the copyright law. The AP countersued in March, saying Fairey had misappropriated the photograph.

Fairey told the agency — and his own lawyers — that he had used a photograph from an April 27, 2006 event about Darfur at the National Press Club in Washington where Obama was seated...

FAME is fleeting, of course, but certain forms of it are stickier than others. More than seven decades after her death the aviatrix Amelia Earhart still fascinates. Called Lady Lindy for her willingness to attempt ill-advised, even foolhardy feats, she has been the subject of more than 100 books, and her name is plastered on bridges, Navy ships, museums and festivals throughout the United States and points beyond. Now she is the subject of a biopic, “Amelia,” directed by Mira Nair, starring Hilary Swank and opening Friday, which reverently portrays a celebrity who remained remarkably irreverent and curiously humble until her death while trying to circumnavigate the globe.

Her disappearance in 1937 and its attendant mystery account for some of the ongoing allure, but she endures because she was a pioneer whose adventures went beyond personal aggrandizement. Earhart took on the laws of nature (humans were not meant to fly) and the conventions of the time (adventure was a man...

For sixty-six years, much of the historic Neues Museum, Berlin's equivalent to the Louvre, was a bombed-out ruin in the heart of the city. Today it will reopen for visitors with a bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti taking pride of place, after a €212m (£193m) restoration masterminded by leading British architect David Chipperfield.

The museum was officially reinaugurated yesterday by Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, who lives opposite the cultural complex in the city's revamped centre. The renaissance of the museum, which contains 9,000 exhibits and artefacts ranging from a 700,000-year-old Stone Age shaped flint to a piece of barbed wire taken from the Berlin Wall, marks the return of one of Germany's most important cultural landmarks to the reunited city.

The event was described as a second miracle for Berlin after the fall of the dividing wall two decades ago. Michael Eissenhauer, general director of the city's museums, said the occasion was thrilling...

New York, NY, September 15, 2009 – When John Brown led his now-legendary raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, hoping to secure weapons for a slave insurrection, he failed in his immediate goal but succeeded in raising tensions to a fever pitch between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces. The conflict he had intensified, and which he had now come to symbolize, would lead by 1861 to secession and civil war.

One hundred and fifty years after John Brown’s raid, the New-York Historical Society in partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History presents the exhibition John Brown: The Abolitionist and His Legacy, exploring the beliefs, activities and continuing significance of this critical figure, vilified by some as a murderer and venerated by others as a martyr.

On view from September 15, 2009 through March 25, 2010, this exhibition of rare materials from the Gilder Lehrman Collection and the New-York Historical Society...

‘Beatles to Bowie: The 60s Exposed’ opens tomorrow at the National Portrait Gallery to mark the 50th anniversary of the start of the 60s, next year. Showcasing over 150 portraits of the leading pop personalities of the 1960s and a range of memorabilia including record covers and magazines, the exhibition explores the pop scene of ‘Swinging London’. The display is divided into ten sections covering each year of the decade and includes classic images of bands such as The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks and The Who, as well as previously unseen images.

The evolution of the art scene over the decade is striking: the style and techniques of photography changed, as well as, and almost in parallel with, pop music and culture. Most fascinating is the interaction between photography and the pop scene. To what extent did they evolve independently; how far did the two influence one another?

Photography evolved from static black and white portraits to dynamic and...

He reimagined Elizabeth I as a flirtatious young princess and upset David Starkey with a hedonistic Henry VIII who looks more like a male model than Holbein’s florid monarch.

Now the creator of the hit television series The Tudors is training his gaze on another English ruler: Henry V.

Michael Hirst, who also wrote Elizabeth, the film that made a star of Cate Blanchett, has signed up to write the screenplay for Agincourt.

This €30 million (£28 million) British film will explore the battle in 1415 where a bedraggled English task force — fronted by skilful longbowmen — pulled off one of the most celebrated military victories in history against a much larger French Army.

A rare piece of World War One history has been donated to the new Museum of Liverpool, to commemorate the role of brave Liverpool soldiers in the conflict.

The Victoria Cross (VC), is the highest order of military decoration awarded to members of the British armed forces for gallantry and bravery.

This example of the medal was presented to Sergeant David Jones of the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment on 3 September 1916 for his actions at the Battle of the Somme.

His actions were described in by the London Gazette, dated 24 October 1916:

"For most conspicuous bravery, devotion to duty, and ability displayed in the handling of his platoon.

"The platoon to which he belonged was ordered to a forward position, and during the advance came under heavy machine gun fire, the officer being killed and the platoon suffering heavy losses Sgt Jones led-forward the remainder, occupied the position, and held it for two days and two...

IN a subterranean space far below the swarms of tourists crowding the Louvre’s famed pyramid are remnants of a medieval fortress. Here, along a 12th-century sandstone passage, the American artist Joseph Kosuth is about to suspend 15 sentences in giant white neon tubing. The show, “Neither Appearance Nor Illusion,” which opens this month, is a first for the 64-year-old Mr. Kosuth. “You only get to do something at the Louvre once in a lifetime,” he said, explaining that he picked the museum’s catacombs rather than a conventional gallery because “it’s a place I’ve always loved, it gets a lot of traffic and has never been used for contemporary art before.”

Neither has the 16th-century Salle des Bronzes, which will soon be famous not just for its magnificent collection of ancient bronzes but for its ceiling, which is about to painted by another celebrated figure of American art: Cy Twombly.

“I’m really not doing something new,” Henri Loyrette, the Louvre’s director...