David Cornwell was steeped in secrecy throughout his life – long before he took on the nom de plume John le Carré, long before his first novel, Call for the Dead, was published in June 1961, and long before he became one of the UK’s most critically acclaimed, bestselling spy …

Van Gogh has studiously swapped in these windows and drawn curtains for a pair of formidable, 1st-Century Corinthian columns, complete with intricate capitals and cornice, and a striking fragment of a pediment, salvaged from the ruins of a Roman temple that adjoined the ancient forum and inserted into the façade …

The Traitor of Sherwood Forest centres on the fictional Jane, a peasant who falls for Robin Hood’s legend. She swoons over him and becomes part of his outlaw band, but begins to wonder if his heroic image and the seductive Robin himself have led her astray. Kaufman’s Robin, neither hero …

Still, maybe it was decided that without some extraneous silliness, Bonnie’s anguish would be too much for viewers to take – too much for grown-up viewers, that is. What we’re left with is a fascinating failure. Toy Story 5 is one of Pixar’s messier films, and it can’t bring itself …

It also reveals much about the British attitude to class. Richard John Bingham, the seventh Earl of Lucan, married Veronica, a former model and secretary, in 1963. He was an Eton-educated professional gambler, who despite his “Lucky” nickname had run up debts and was facing bankruptcy at the time of …

Though A Bigger Splash appears, on its surface, to be a meticulously observed moment in time, it was, in fact, a fusion of personal and borrowed experience. The painting owes its most immediate origin to the artist’s chance discovery of a technical manual about swimming pool construction. A photograph of …

Did German painter Max Beckmann’s Variety Show foreshadow the rise of Nazism? BBC News

This othering of Cady is further amplified through the Santeria faith he adopts in prison. This Afro-Caribbean-Yoruba religion, developed by enslaved people in Cuba, involves the worship of deities called Orishas. “Max’s Orisha is of thunder, justice and vengeance, so that’s very appropriate to his character, his needs and motivations,” …

It captures the nuance of how those who were there might have felt, beyond descriptions of military strategies or commanders’ decisions. So too do her descriptions of the jokes shared by those on the beach. “One of the soldiers remarked that they had a nice foxhole about 50 yards inland …

Josh O’Connor stars as Daniel, a cyber-security boffin who works for a powerful organisation called Wardex. The organisation was set up to keep information about aliens secret – so, yes, on one level Disclosure Day is a rehash of Men in Black, except without the jokes. Daniel decides to reveal …

Indeed, once Reiniger accepted the proposition, she took on just a handful of staff. This included a few animators, an assistant to track the frames shot, and Reiniger’s husband, who controlled the camera. As well as directing, Reiniger constructed the silhouette puppets herself, cutting characters from cardboard and lead, before …

What else do Gen-Z audiences want from the cinema? Judging by the discourse on social media, teenage and twentysomething viewers want a film they can discuss and dissect. Take, for example, The Drama, which is reported to have cost $28m (£21m) and raked in about $100m (£75m) more than that. …

At 09:45 on January 18, 2010, the first episode of this ambitious series began on BBC Radio 4, presented by Neil MacGregor, an art historian who was then director of the British Museum. It began as an audio show, later leading to a worldwide touring exhibition, and it explored two …

A two-hour drive from São Paulo finds you in the municipality of Guarujá, the gateway to Brazil’s vast Atlantic tropical rainforest, home to sloths, parrots and the Canopy House. A multi-generational family summer home created by Studio MK27, it is built on concrete columns. On the first floor, five bedrooms …

Steven Spielberg’s 1977 classic tapped into ever-present anxieties about UFOs BBC News

A photo taken in February at the Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Japan, of Punch, a baby Japanese macaque, gazing affectionately into the oversized eyes of a stuffed orangutan sitting beside him, was among the more affecting images captured so far this year. The intensity of Punch’s soulful, unrequited stare …

July, 1962. A woman poses on Santa Monica beach, her unmistakeable “blonde bombshell” features somehow softened, hair ruffled by the sea breeze. She appears radiant and playful, draping her body in a green towel or cosy knitwear. In the final photo of the shoot, she is snuggled on the sand, …

On his inauguration day, in 1961, John F Kennedy asked the outgoing president, Dwight D Eisenhower, what had given him the advantage over the Nazis on D-Day, when Eisenhower was Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces. “We had better meteorologists than the Germans,” Eisenhower said. That anecdote is cited at …

“I pondered what two cultural titans may have talked about,” he explains of what drew him to the premise,”and what they found so intriguing and recognisable in each other”. He adds that the setting of ’00s London, which is evoked in montages of fashion shows, backstage parties and paparazzi pictures …

Steven Spielberg may be the master of every conceivable genre, but he is especially keen on films about alien visitors. They appeared in Firelight, the film he made as a teenager in 1964, and he has returned to the subject in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. The Extra …