IHT.com: Arts & Leisure

'The Book of Unholy Mischief" turns out to be an unexpected hybrid, a highly flavored and faintly preposterous romp that is also a meditation on food, ideas and the importance of keeping hold of the principles of free thought in a world oppressed by censorship. ...

"How to Live," Henry Alford ventures forth to cull wisdom from books fat and thin, from Google, but primarily from informants over 70 years old. ...

The weekly chess column. ...

In the flat romantic comedy "New in Town," Renée Zellweger plays a corporate shark in spike heels whose frozen heart is thawed with tapioca, home baking and handmade valentines. ...

Samuel Johnson, who acknowledged that most writers "perceive no particular summons to composition except the sound of the clock," would have been the first to understand why a tercentenary calls for two more retellings. ...

With giddiness and glee, musicians tested the acoustics of Alice Tully Hall less than a month before it will reopen after a $159 million, 22-month upgrade. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

In "Lewis Carroll in Numberland," Robin Wilson has filled a perceived gap in the writings about Carroll by describing in a straightforward, jabberwocky-free fashion the author's mathematical accomplishments, both professional and popular. ...

With "Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East," Martin Indyk has written a timely and valuable history of his years as one of the Clinton administration's top Middle East specialists. ...

Adrian Desmond and James Moore argue that Darwin's opposition to slavery shaped the formation of his views on slavery; For Adam Gopnik, Darwin and Lincoln invented ‘‘a new kind of eloquence.’’ ...

"Good design" mean different things to different people, and it changes at different times and in different contexts. ...

The director of "Watchmen," a film adaptation of a graphic novel about troubled superheroes, knew that he was taking on more than 20 years of unfulfilled expectations. ...

Ken Kwapis, who has been working as a filmmaker in Hollywood for 25 years, tends to stick to human-size themes. ...

William L. Iggiagruk Hensley's often harrowing new memoir is set in northern Alaska within the Arctic Circle. The French novelist Annie Ernaux has written a book in the space between memoir and fiction. ...

The first important auctions held since the New Year at Christie's and Sotheby's showed a healthy, vibrant market. ...

Few musicians anywhere consummate symbolic occasions and mass events better than Bruce Springsteen. He played at the opening ceremony and concert for President Barack Obama's Inauguration, and will perform at the Super Bowl on Sunday. ...

Films about personal triumphs resonate with viewers during awards season. ...

Some psychologists argue that the origins of art should be sought about 1.6 million years ago, when our ancestors may have evolved the instincts that led eventually to the works of Bach, Rembrandt and Proust. "Darwinian aesthetics" is what Denis Dutton, the author of "The Art Instinct," calls this idea, ...

Cheech & Chong, those lovable lowlifes of comedy who broke up in 1985 to pursue solo opportunities and get away from each other, are together again. ...

Through Steve Martin's many incarnations, a banjo has never been far from his reach, whether the instrument was an integral part of his act or a tool to help him unwind in private. ...

'The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York combines strangeness and beauty. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news ...

Erika Wennerstrom, the stubbornly shy 31-year-old behind the twangy garage rock tri the Heartless Bastards, says she was "born to sing and play guitar." ...

Bruce Springsteen's tweaks were gentle and safe, poking fun at the event itself, and possibly at himself for participating in it. ...

Some of Hollywood's most prominent players are privately grumbling that the rituals of Oscar night have outlived any real sense of excitement about the event. ...

In Baghdad their practice space was bombed. Now Acrassicauda, an Iraqi heavy metal band, has found refuge in America. ...

As a philosopher dies, so he has lived and believed. And from the manner of his dying we can understand his thinking, or so the philosopher Simon Critchley seems to be saying in his "Book of Dead Philosophers." ...

With his new play"Terre Haute" Edmund White is gaining traction as a legitimate dramatist ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

The raw material for the video artist Ryan Trecartin's new work is what is happening to the world economy as financial institutions implode and the mechanisms of capitalism and credit falter. ...

A sculpture by French Impressionist Edgar Degas sold for 13.3 million pounds ($19 million) Tuesday at Sotheby's auction house in London. ...

Christian Bale is heard in newly surfaced audio delivering a long, profanity-laced verbal thrashing to a cinematographer on the set of the upcoming "Terminator Salvation." ...

Amy Winehouse's spokesman says the singer's home in north London was broken into while she was on vacation in the Caribbean. ...

Tom Jones is taking his show on the road again. ...

In a weakening entertainment economy, movie sales came slowly, but did not halt, at the usually far more exuberant Sundance Film Festival, which ended over the weekend in Park City, Utah. ...

Tyler Angle joined the New York City Ballet in 2004 and was promoted to soloist in December 2007. ...

As the Obama administration tackles the challenge of shoring up the U.S. economy through infusions of capital and job creation, cultural leaders are urging the president not to forget arts institutions. ...

Every teenager's mind is a haunted house. That's why the strange girls, friendless everywhere else, feel so at home in horror films like "Uninvited." ...

"We Live in Public," a documentary that won a grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, offers a portrait of a moment in the culture when everything changed. ...

That the director Ian Rickson is responsible for one of the worst revivals I have ever, ever seen has me flummoxed. ...

Until the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx came along to tame and shape his country's exuberant flora, his countrymen had mostly disdained the natural riches that, often literally, flourished in their own backyards. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

John Grisham's new novel grabs the reader quickly, becomes impossible to put down, stays that way through most of its story, and then escalates into plotting so crazily far-fetched that it defies resolution. ...

Joe Torre provides a lively chronicle of that historic era and the Yankees's depressing slide after 2001. ...

Epix, the Paramount Pictures, MGM and Lionsgate-backed premium movie channel, will launch online in May, having not yet found a television distribution deal. ...

This year, the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival in India highlighted the works of promising Pakistani writers. ...

Some shows, it seems, don't really ever close; they simply go on hiatus. So it is with "Oliver!," the perennial British musical favorite that is back in London with Rowan Atkinson as its star. ...

"Freshwater" is a light comic lark that, in this New York production, is played as if it were a laugh riot. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

The author T.C. Boyle recreates the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, and Inman Majors has quasi-invented siblings as his central characters in his novel based in Tennessee. ...

Companies that charge writers and photographers to publish are growing at a time when many mainstream publishers are losing ground. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

The image of the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño as a hard-living literary outlaw is being challenged by his widow, Carolina López and the American agent she recently hired , Andrew Wylie . ...

In their drive to become the Next Big Thing in teenage entertainment, the Clique Girlz have had more opportunities than most. ...

Lynn Nottage traveled to Africa to research the brutalities and damage Congolese women had suffered in their country's civil conflict, and incorporate her findings into an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's play "Mother Courage and Her Children". She ended up writing a new work, "Ruin." ...

Updike's vast and protean body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism earned him comparisons with Henry James and Edmund Wilson among American men of letters. ...

For older and low-income viewers who still use set-top rabbit ears or rooftop antennae, the switchover to digital television has often proven a bewildering and cumbersome task. ...

Steven Johnson's book, "The Invention of Air," shows its genre-mixing in its subtitle; it uses Joseph Priestley as the fulcrum for a story that blends "science, faith, revolution and the birth of America." ...

In New York, Christie's was selling on Tuesday a motley collection of works of art from the late collector Julius Held. ...

An overview of some of John Updike's most notable books. ...

The strength of the market was epitomized on Wednesday at Christie's by the stupendous performance of a sketch by the 16th-century Italian master from Urbino, Federico Barocci. It sold for $1,762,500. ...

Endowed with a journalist's eye and a poet's gift for metaphor, John Updike was an all-around man of letters. ...

The house where author Cormac McCarthy grew up has been destroyed by a fire. ...

One visit to Beyonce's dressing room was all it took for Justin Timberlake to ease her concerns about a television comedy skit featuring the two of them. ...

Glasgow City Council is taking steps to keep music bands, ashtray makers and poster artists from using the city's Salvador Dali painting of Christ's crucifixion without authorization. ...

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" dominated the nominations for the Academy Awards, picking up 13 nominations including best picture. ...

Complete list of 81st annual Academy Award nominations announced Thursday: ...

The sociologist Dalton Conley looks at how Americans can only be "convinced that they're in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time, when they're on their way to the next destination." In her novel Kim Barnes focuses on the Easterner gone West. seeking rebirth in a ...

The actor Akshay Kumar, India's superstar Everyman, is coming to America in "Chandni Chowk to China." ...

Hortense Calisher, a prize-winning writer and former president of PEN known for her dense, unskimmable prose in such works of fiction as "False Entry" and "In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks," has died. She was 97. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

A food and wine expert said that she was paid to write a cookbook that was published listing Ruth Madoff as a co-author. ...

The critic, art historian and artist was known for the colorful public sculptures she created around the world with her husband, the artist Claes Oldenburg. ...

This is the alchemy of great fiction: the fantastic dream that's created in "Lark and Termite" is one the reader enters without ever looking back. ...

What makes up a person's cultural identity? Is it intrinsic, a matter of blood and genealogy, or is it in the eye of the beholder, be that beholder a parent or a partner or the state? In the Irish writer Hugo Hamilton's new novel, a man struggles to establish the ...

Montalban, perhaps best known for his role on "Fantasy Island," embodied stereotypes, fought them and transcended them in his years in show business. ...

Claire Berlinki's book 'There Is No Alternative' is part biography, part travelogue, part Economics 101 study guide and part history. ...

The weekly chess column. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

In "Land of Marvels" — and particularly in this final scene — Unsworth succeeds in summoning the demons and the angels of Iraq's present and past. Not bad for a volume you could read in an afternoon. ...

"The Piano Teacher" is laced with intrigue concerning a hoard of Chinese artifacts that went missing during the war, but readers will be more enthralled by Lee's depiction of the relationships between enigmatic Englishman, Will Truesdale and his two lovers. ...

The movie may not be an authorized biography of Biggie S,malls, but it is if anything less critical, less ambivalent, than some of Biggie's own semi-autobiographical lyrics. ...

A British judge has sentenced former Culture Club frontman Boy George to 15 months in jail after he was convicted of falsely imprisoning a male escort. ...

'A Long Time Coming,' 'The Plan,' 'Obamanomics' and 'Obama's Challenge' all offer a portrait of how liberals have come prospectively to envision the Obama presidency as a transformative moment in American history. ...

The fantasies of black heroism that have pervaded American popular culture give some sense of what the country hopes for in Barack Obama, whose burden differs from the one taken up by the 42 white men who preceded him. ...

A project in London for caring for people with multiple sclerosis showed how the young, increasingly fashionable discipline of service design can work by tackling a serious social problem. ...

Adam Cohen focuses on FDR's first hundred days in office. Burt Solomon looks at Roosevelt's failed 1937 gambit to expand the Supreme Court with friendly justices ...

The financial crisis that managements are endeavouring to forestall by reducing overheads is the inevitable consequence of the metamorphosis undergone by auction houses over the last four decades. ...

The German director Doris Dörrie is a practicing Buddhist, an identity that increasingly informs the geographical and philosophical landscapes of her films. ...

With a worsening economic climate and freezing weather that makes lingering in the Centquatre's inner hall unappealing, how is Paris's controversial new arts center faring? ...

SCHROEDER'S (AND SCHULZ'S) MUSE Musicologists and art curators have learned that there was much more than a punch line to Charles Schulz's invocation of Beethoven's music in his "Peanuts" strips. ...

A controversial artwork, supposed to have been produced by artists from each of the European Union's 27 member states, was in fact created by one person, the Czech deputy prime minister said Tuesday. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

The project allows users of Google Earth to zoom in on high-resolution images of the works, scouring the canvas for details that would barely be visible to a museum visitor standing behind a velvet cordon. ...

The Screen Actors Guild appeared determined to go ahead with a strike authorization vote after a group of board members failed in an attempt to oust the union's lead contract negotiator. ...

MSNBC will simulcast its coverage in movie theaters and Starbucks stores, and other screenings are being planned across the United States. ...

Welty's early camerawork, now on view at the Museum of the City of New York, is a compelling record of Depression-era life. ...

The Hollywood foreign press lived up to its name on Sunday and paid frantic tribute to the compelling idiosyncrasies of far-flung independent cinema. ...

The Broadway star Mandy Patinkin is in concert at the Duke of York's Theatre; Joe Orton's "Loot" has been revived at the Tricycle Theatre, and Joe DiPietro's "F***ing Men" is playing at the King's Head. ...

A nude photo of Madonna, taken before erotic songs and risque costumes catapulted her to superstardom, is expected to sell for at least $10,000, Christie's auction house says. ...

Bulgaria as a toilet? Romania as a Dracula-themed amusement park? Europeans find little amusement in an art installation intended to celebrate a unified Europe. ...

Hollywood put aside a dismal economy and the threat of an actors' strike to focus on the 66th annual Golden Globe Awards. ...

Barack Obama's wax doppelganger took office in several European capitals Thursday — five days before the real-life Obama takes over in Washington. ...

A tabloid newspaper has apologized to Sharon Osbourne for a story that falsely accused her of overworking her rock star husband Ozzy. ...

"The Informers," a film of Bret Easton Ellis stories, swims against the tide. ...

Italian police have recovered 10 masterpieces, including a painting attributed to an artist who worked on the Sistine Chapel, that were stolen in 2004 from an ancient religious complex in Rome, officials said Tuesday. ...

Berri was, by and large, a filmmaker of mainstream sensibility who favored stories of either quirky charm - many drawn from his own life - or grand sweep. ...

By taking risks, trusting his instincts and continually supporting new work, Alistair Spalding has transformed the Sadler's Wells theater in London into what may well be the most important dance house in the world. ...

The opening night of Samuel Barber's "Antony and Cleopatra' at the Met in 1966 was a fiasco. A revival by the New York City Opera will be performed this week. ...

The ceremony had yet to begin, but this arrivals line felt more like an afterparty. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

Gabriel Collins, the narrator of Stacey D’Erasmo’s new novel, ‘‘The Sky Below,’’ imagines his life as a series of containers. ...

The opera has served up homemade productions for 60 years in basement theaters, always under the loving care of Anthony Amato. ...

Hollywood has more than 30 pictures on the way that rely on the technology, but without expensive upgrades to projection equipment at theatres, mass-market 3-D releases are not tenable. ...

The National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed. ...

The hero of Michel Faber's "The Fire Gospel" has stumbled upon a fifth Gospel. In "Beat the Reaper," his first novel, Josh Bazell writes engagingly about a former hit man for the Mafia. ...

People in the newspaper business can't be blamed for hoping that someone comes along and convinces the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on Web sites that it is time to pay up. ...

Ben Gazzara will be honored with the 2009 Harvey Award by the museum dedicated to Jimmy Stewart. ...

French President Nicolas Sarkozy says the country's national museums and monuments will soon stop charging admission to visitors under 25. ...

Complete list of winners at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards: ...

Motion picture and television nominees and winners for the 65th annual Golden Globe Awards. ...

The producers for the 81st Academy Awards ceremony, set for Feb. 22, are Laurence Mark and Bill Condon, both New York-raised Hollywood transplants bitten long ago by the movie bug. ...

Amid an economic downturn, stylists expect celebrities this year to take their cues from stars popular during the golden age of Hollywood, edging toward classic looks and away from any trend that smacks of ostentatious consumerism. ...

As Hollywood heads into the heart of its awards season, movie stars and their handlers have a decision to make: to preen or not to preen. ...

Amid a relentless string of layoffs and pay-freeze announcements, book publishers are clamping down on some of the business's most glittery and cozy traditions. ...

Few of the arts benefited from the late economic boom more than design, but a little austerity could give designers a new sense of relevance. ...

Introspective and fragile, the British album-cover designer Barney Bubbles shunned publicity during his life. Now his work is being celebrated in "Reasons to be Cheerful," a book by Paul Gorman. ...

Google's book search may allow writers to make money from titles that had been out of commercial circulation for years. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news ...

This novel is the writer Charlie Huston's almost entirely successful leap into crime fiction's mainstream. ...

She was best known as a teacher later in her life at the Juilliard School but a new CD set of her Chopin interpretations has revived interest in her early career as a concert pianist. ...

It's Top Ten time again, and like everyone else Stanley Fish has a list, in his case a list of the 10 best American movies ever. ...

Whitney Port, star of the MTV series "The City," a spinoff from "The Hills," tries the Manhattan fashion scene after an early career in Hollywood. ...

CURTAIN CALLS There is a sense of heavy reckoning on Broadway after nine productions, including "Hairspray," took their final bow on Sunday night. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

Fabrice Luchini is among the Frenchest of French performers, an actor who can move easily from popular films to stand-up comedy and back, but who is only vaguely known outside France. ...

In her memoir Robin Romm grapples with her anguish over the impending death of her mother from breast cancer, and in his novel Chuck Klosterman writes about a fictional Everytown of Owl, North Dakota. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

Do Hollywood studio executives think that women have a gene for tulle? Neural receptors just for Vera Wang? I wondered this as I was watching "Bride Wars." ...

For many people, the holidays were spent with family and away from work. But for others, it was a time to play chess. ...

The photographer Gisèle Freund, whose work is on display in two different exhibitions in Berlin, wasn't a great photojournalist, but she was a gifted pioneer. ...

The day's roundup of celebrity news ...

Schocken Books, which has been the main publisher of Kafka's works since the 1930s, hopes to reintroduce his first novel to the world with a new translation, by Mark Harman. ...

James Bamford's latest book on the secretive National Security Administration after 9/11 shows a staggering volume of private communications in the United States and abroad. ...

An attempt to use the instruments of 20th-century literature to depict the dislocations of spirit and consciousness caused by the genocide against the Jews, Adler's style in 'The Journey' could be called Holocaust modernism, an improbable formulation ...

Taylor's deglamorizing approach to the youth of the 1920s and '30s focuses on the tension beneath the willful gaiety. ...

All eyes are trained on Sunday night, when the Golden Globes will winnow the herd. ...

The last-chance syndrome accounts for the otherwise inexplicable performance of some works of art observed on the auction scene from New York to Paris as the economic outlook kept darkening last fall. ...

Anne Hathaway, playing the central character in "Rachel Getting Married," gives a brave performance that doesn't ask to be liked; only to be believed. ...

'The Letters of Allen Ginsberg' and 'The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder' are both edited by Bill Morgan and give an intimate look at the poet's life. ...

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says CBS News anchor Katie Couric and comic actress Tina Fey have been "exploiting" her. ...

The day's roundup of celebrity news. ...

What fascinates Gamper is the process of making things, and he's as interested in how other designers do that as in doing it himself. ...

Though some black directors have met or exceeded most of the critical expectations shown in their debuts in the 1990s, they have had mixed-to-sporadic success in getting their subsequent projects into theaters. ...

The further the Holocaust recedes into the past, the more it's being exploited to create a narrative of redemption. ...

Jennifer Baszile writes about the churning emotions and hidden drama of a black family living in an exclusive white suburb, while Ann M. Martin and Laura Godwin chronicle the adventures of two living dolls who flee the family home to save another doll. ...

The film "Marley & Me" follows the relationship between Marley, an unruly Labrador retriever, and his suburban owners John and Jenny Grogan (Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston). ...

"The 66th Annual Golden Globe Awards" would be sure to tower over last year's telecast, even without trying. And executive producer Barry Adelman is trying. ...

Angelina Jolie, who has been lying low since the birth of her 5-month-old twins, is thinking about a brief return to film, but very brief. ...

The world economy is in dire straits, but you sure wouldn't know it from the red carpet at the 20th-annual Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala. ...

If the Oscars aren't a reliable guide to artistic accomplishment, they provide an infallible index to how the leaders of the motion picture industry want their business to be seen in any given year. ...

Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and his orchestra of Arab and Israeli musicians have canceled performances in the Middle East this weekend because of fighting between Israel and Hamas, he said Tuesday. ...

Actor Rip Torn has pleaded not guilty to drunken driving charges in Connecticut, nearly two years after being fined and losing his license for similar charges in New York. ...

Funeral services were held for Majel Barrett Roddenberry, "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry's widow who played Nurse Christine Chapel in the original sci-fi TV series. ...

Seeing all the films that may receive Oscar nods this season requires a single-mindedness bordering on mania. ...

In "Martial's Epigrams," the scholar Garry Wills provides enthusiastic verse translations of Marcus Valerius Martialis, Rome's most anatomically explicit poet. ...

While controversy surrounded the publication of Jones' novel, which is told from the point of view of Muhammad's third and youngest wife, A'isha, the book itself is merely a badly written example of that subspecies of genre fiction, "historical romance." ...

In the substantive and lively book "Sun in a Bottle" Charles Seife looks at nuclear fusion - the process which, after decades of experiments and numberless careers, still doesn't work but still nobody quits. ...

'The Lost Art of Walking" is not a travel book so much as an omnium-gatherum for those who like to ride what was once called "the marrow bone coach." It is perfect for the armchair walker. ...

Steven Soderbergh's film walks its sanctified hero through the stations of his martyrdom. ...

Conor Foley in 'The Thin Blue Line' laments the transformation of humanitarianism into an aspect of politics, while Gareth Evans, in 'The Responsiblity to Protect,' argues for something like its institutionalization. ...

A Rome exhibition of the work of Giovanni Bellini shows how the Venician artist absorbed influences yet remained supremely and unmistakably himself. ...

Page appeared in men's magazines in the 1950s, setting the stage for the sexual revolution of the '60s. ...

Modestly proportioned, this new book by Annie Leibovitz is trim-sized more for the nightstand than the coffee table. ...

ARCHITECTURE I.M. Pei's aim in designing the Museum of Islamic Art was to integrate the values of an earlier era into today's culture - to capture, as he put it, the "essence of Islamic architecture." ...

Britain, which had balked at a proposal to extend the EU copyright on musical recordings to 95 years from the current 50 years, has offered a compromise of 70 years. ...

While the recession is pushing down the artificial inflation of recent years, sales of antiquities this week at Christie's and Sotheby's in New York were strong. ...

Marjorie Garber's latest academic treatise on the Bard is out to assert that "Shakespeare makes modern culture, and the latest novel by Benjamin Markovits imagines the life of Lord Byron from the viewpoint of his young wife. ...

The designer of a new double-decker bus is to be announced before Christmas. Is it possible for the new bus to become as popular as the original? ...

The novel was improbable as a big Hollywood movie, especially one starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in their first post-"Titanic" outing together. ...

'Gran Torino' has brought talk of a best-actor award for Eastwood. But when asked whom he makes films for, he says, "You're looking at him." ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

"Panic," edited by Michael Lewis, carries the cautionary message that the wisdom brought by a financial collapse is wisdom that rarely sticks. ...

"Shrek" is not bad. But it does not avoid the watery fate that commonly befalls good cartoons that are dragged into the third dimension. ...

A best-of compilation of Comedy Central's "Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist," a forerunner to the popular "South Park" show, was released this month. ...

No one has had a greater influence on photography in the last half century than the Swiss-born Robert Frank, especially through his book "The Americans." In January a comprehensive publication, "Looking In: Robert Frank's 'The Americans,"' will accompany a major exhibition in Washington. ...

A "Saturday Night Live" skit portraying New York's blind governor as a bumbling leader didn't get a laugh from Gov. David Paterson. ...

Fans of the skintight purple suit rejoice: the Phantom is back. ...

By putting art ahead of the bottom line, the the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has suffered financially and is now being audited by the state's attorney general. ...

The newest unboxing of the Bob Dylan archives is a series of 23 poems he wrote in the early 1960s to accompany a collection of Hollywood photographs by Barry Feinstein. Either half of this collaboration would be worth having, but combined, they add up to one of the oddest coffee-table ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

The lavish, lively picture-book history "You Must Remember This" tells the story of Rin Tin Tin, a pup rescued from the German trenches at the end of World War I, who repaid that act of kindness by bringing riches to Warner Brothers, a near-insolvent movie studio in the early 1920s. ...

The new Museum of Islamic Art opened this week in Doha, Qatar ...

In his book Les Standiford admits that the public's embrace of Dickens's short novel is but one evidence of the 19th century's changing attitude toward Christmas. ...

In his book "Le Corbusier" Witold Nicholas Fox Weber has written an admiring biography; "Le Corbusier Le Grand," a 20-pound tome put together by the editors at Phaidon, is a giant scrapbook of the architect's life and work. ...

Soderbergh's ambitious new film 'Che' is set in Cuba for the Castro revolution and then in Bolivia where he hoped to begin the revolution for all of Latin America. What's missing is the period of governing that followed. ...

Lurie's film, starring Kate Beckinsale, will remind some viewers of the real-life travails of Judith Miller, the former reporter for The New York Times, who went to jail to protect a source. ...

The design process known as visualization, which uses advanced software to illustrate the complex data that is increasingly bombarding us, is becoming one of the most exciting areas of design. ...

"The Clash" is mostly drawn from interviews with Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon; Marty Stuart's book is a love letter to country music. ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

The first recession in luxury-goods sales in nearly 20 years has forced companies like Bulgari and Cartier to economize. ...

Martha (Sunny) von Bülow, the American heiress whose second husband, Claus von Bülow, was convicted and later acquitted of twice trying to kill her with injections of insulin, died Saturday in Manhattan after having been in a coma for nearly 28 years. ...

The Mexican artist Daniel Guzmán has a new show in New York until Jan. 10 that focuses more pointedly on Aztec imagery than his previous work and also looks at contemporary violence. ...

The trouble with book clubs often has little to do with books, or Oprah. ...

The playwright Shanley has directed the film 'Doubt,' about a nun concerned whether a priest whose interest in a school's first black pupil is altogether wholesome. ...

Gabriel Roth has spent more than a decade on the margins of the music industry, trying to recreate the urgent, brassy sound of the obscure old R&B 45s he loves. Suddenly, people are listening. ...

Stefan Kanfer's new biography of actor Marlon Brando is an antidote of sorts to the unsavory and voyeuristic 1994 biography written by Peter Manso, who focused on the actor's personal difficulties. ...

In a year of musical misfires, two shows stand out as successes: "Carousel" at the Savoy Theatre and "A Little Night Music" at the Menier Chocolate Factory. ...

Stéphane Braunschweig's new production of Verdi's "Don Carlo" went on as scheduled on Dec. 7, the traditional opening night of La Scala, after an accord was reached with a union that had threatened to prevent the performance. ...

On a fateful Monday in July, the press discovered that Philip Marshall, a grandson of the society doyenne Brooke Astor, had filed an application to usurp guardianship of his 104-year-old grandmother from Anthony Marshall, Philip's father and Astor's son. The author Meryl Gordon looks at the miseries and indignities that ...

A roundup of the day's celebrity news. ...

More than a century before Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson's right breast at the Super Bowl halftime show, the opera world had its own "wardrobe malfunction" — a scandal that gave rise to the mystique that surrounds Jules Massenet's "Thais" to this day. ...

The Duke of Sutherland has offered to sell Titian's "Diana and Actaeon" and "Diana and Callisto" to the National Galleries of Scotland, along with the National Gallery in London, for £100 million and the museum is cautiously optimistic that its campaign to raise the money will succeed. ...

The brother of actor Mark Ruffalo has died a week after he was shot in the head, police said Tuesday. ...

The members of Britpop band Blur announced Tuesday they are reuniting to play a concert in London next summer. ...

Madonna won a court battle Monday against a British tabloid that published pictures recently of her wedding eight years ago. ...

When the going gets tough, the most powerful woman in Hollywood turns to macaroni and cheese. ...

The exhibition "Beyond Boundaries" appears to be about contacts between different cultures, although this is not spelled out in so many words. ...

Police are seeking two people they want to question about the shooting of actor Mark Ruffalo's brother. ...

Hafsia Herzi is the fast-talking, pint-size revelation of Abdel Kechiche's "La graine et le mulet" (The Secret of the Grain), a surprising hit about a dynasty of Maghrebian workers in the French fishing town of Sète. ...