Nepenthe

Karl Marx's Das Kapital is a ground-breaking work of economic analysis. But, argues Francis Wheen, it is also an unfinished literary masterpiece which, with its multi-layered structure, can be read as a Gothic novel, a Victorian melodrama, a Greek tragedy or a Swiftian satire . Next: Christopher Hitchens on Paine's Rights of Man

O Gulbenkian Prize for Museum of the Year, no valor de 100 mil libras (cerca 150 mil euros), é uma iniciativa da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, apoiada pelo governo britânico e por várias organizações do sector, concedido anualmente a um museu ou galeria de arte no Reino Unido, independentemente da sua dimensão. O prémio procura distinguir projectos ou programas inovadores de animação, lançados no ano anterior por aquelas entidades. Os concorrentes devem demonstrar a aceitação e entusiasmo com que tais projectos foram recebidos pelo público, bem como o seu valor revelante para o futuro. Criado em 2003, é o maior prémio de artes no Reino Unido. Dos vários candidatos, são seleccionados um grupo de finalistas por um júri representativo das várias áreas artísticas e académicas. Em 2005, o vencedor do prémio foi o Big Pit: the National Mining Museum of Wales. Winner: The Gulbenkian Prize for Museum of the Year 2006 - the Biggest Arts Prize in the U.K. for the Brunel's SS Great Britai...

Ninety years ago, Allied commanders launched the World War I offensive lastingly remembered as the Battle of the Somme. At 7.30am on 1 July 1916, officers blew their whistles to signal the start of the attack. As 11 British divisions clambered out of their trenches and walked slowly towards the enemy lines, German machine guns opened fire, causing wholesale carnage. The first day of that battle was the bloodiest in the whole history of the British Army. By the end of the day, the British had suffered 60,000 casualties; almost 20,000 were dead, including 60% of all the officers involved. One of those who survived that horrific first assault, and who endured the prolonged ghastliness of the months of fighting that followed, was the young JRR Tolkien. The Allied plan had been to launch a coordinated Anglo-French assault. The British would at...

Joe Boyd - one of the pivotal figures of the 1960s rock scene - offers his memories of Pink Floyd founding member Syd Barrett, who has died aged 60. I was in London in 1966, working for Electra Records, and I was also involved in an organisation called the London Free School, a radical attempt to help revolutionise west London. That organisation ended up kick-starting the Notting Hill Carnival in 1966. But the carnival didn't raise any money, so there was an attempt to do so by putting on concerts at a church hall in Palace Square. The key figure in the London Free School was Peter Jenner. He knew this group from Cambridge called Pink Floyd who were in London looking for work. He convinced them to do a gig as a benefit concert as it would be good publicity for them. It worked, it was great. Th...

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell, blue skies from pain. Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? A smile from a veil? Do you think you can tell? And did they get you trade your heroes for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze? Cold comfort for change? And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? How I wish, how I wish you were here. We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year, running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears, wish you were here.

Salvador Dali never set foot in St. Petersburg, Fla., where the dominant art form is the watercolor beachscape. But in a strange twist worthy of one of the Spanish Surrealist master's paintings, St. Petersburg will soon be home to a $30-million museum to house the world's most comprehensive collection of Dali's work. St. Petersburg snatched up the private Dali collection in 1982 when more likely locales, such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, balked at its owner's strict conditions. Ohio philanthropists A. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse were charmed by the city's eclectic offer of an old boat warehouse to display their collection. Like a lot of things in Florida these days, a 14-year-old plan to build a more fitting — and sturdy — home for the collection was kicked into high gear by the hyperactive hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005. "Right from the start, it was the safety of the collection that was motivating thinking about this," said Hank ...

Die they do, violently and often eagerly. But old soldiers never just fade away in the world of William Shakespeare. They fall from the skies of their martial glory with the dazzle of Roman candles — blazing, sputtering, ripping the air with noise. These are the flashiest roles in the canon for actors between the ages of Hamlet and Lear. And led by Patrick Stewart, as a Mark Antony surprised by age in the Royal Shakespeare Company's "Antony and Cleopatra" in Stratford-upon-Avon, their fiery death throes are casting fierce light and mortal shadows over this year's summer of Shakespeare in England. In addition to Mr. Stewart's expert study in waning virility, set off by Harriet Walter's devilishly crafty Cleopatra, the season offers two very different versions of Shakespeare's grisliest portrait of a war-making lion in winter, "Titus Andronicus": a stark, glacial tone poem of a production from the Ninagawa Company of Tokyo, which visited Stratford ...

From Lord Byron to Sid Vicious, artists have lived fast, sparked outrage and died young. A new exhibition at Britain's National Gallery traces the image of the artist as rebellious loner from its Romantic roots through works by Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Edgar Degas and others. Co-curator Alexander Sturgis says "Rebels and Martyrs" explores "the romantic myth of the genius suffering artist" that arose in the early 19th Century and is still going strong 200 years later. The unmade bed that bears the corpse of boy-poet Thomas Chatterton -- a suicide at 17 -- in Henry Wallis' 19th Century portrait prefigures the messy-bed installation that made Brit art star Tracy Emin famous in the 1990s. The pale skin, disheveled hair and staring eyes in self-portraits by Gustave Courbet and Alexandre Abel de Pujol are echoed in elegantly wasted rock stars from Keith Richards to Pete Doherty. In art, everyone loves a bad boy -- or a wild woman. The show demonstrate...

Most videos available to be seen online, Franz Ferdinand, Goldfrapp, Kaiser Chiefs and many mo'

Before an emergency joint session of Congress yesterday, President Clinton announced U.S. plans to deploy over 75,000 vowels to the war-torn region of Bosnia. The deployment, the largest of its kind in American history, will provide the region with the critically needed letters A, E, I, O and U, and is hoped to render countless Bosnian names more pronounceable "For six years, we have stood by while names like Ygrjvslhv and Tzlynhr and Glrm have been horribly butchered by millions around the world," Clinton said. "Today, the United States must finally stand up and say, 'Enough.' It is time the people of Bosnia finally had some vowels in their incomprehensible words. The U.S. is proud to lead the crusade in this noble endeavor." The deployment, dubbed Operation Vowel Storm by the State Department, is set for early next week, with the Adriatic port cities of Sjlbvdnzv and Grzny slated to be the first recipients. Two C-130 transport planes, each carrying over 50...

An established map dealer pled guilty on June 22 to stealing 97 antique maps, valued at over $3,000,000, from renowned libraries in the U.S. and England, including eight maps from Harvard’s Houghton Library. E. Forbes Smiley III’s practice of visiting libraries, cutting maps out of rare books, and selling them to dealers around the world came to an end when he dropped an Exacto knife blade in Yale’s Beinecke Library last June. According to documents filed by the Department of Justice, the library employee who found the knife became suspicious because such blades are often used to remove and steal pages from rare books. When she found a man looking at books of rare maps in the reading room, she checked the library’s register and identified the individual as E. Forbes Smiley. An Internet search by the employee found that Smiley was a rare maps dealer, and when a detective confronted Smiley after he left the library, Smiley was found to have several maps in his possession which belonged t...

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As I wash dishes at the kitchen sink, my husband paces behind me, irritated. "Have you seen my keys?" he snarls, then huffs out a loud sigh and stomps from the room with our dog, Dixie, at his heels, anxious over her favourite human's upset. In the past I would have been right behind Dixie. I would have turned off the tap and joined the hunt while trying to soothe my husband with bromides such as, "Don't worry, they'll turn up." But that only made him angrier, and a simple case of missing keys soon would become a full-blown, angst-ridden drama starring the two of us and our poor nervous dog. Now, I focus on the wet dish in my hands. I do not turn around. I do not say a word. I am using a technique I learned from a dolphin trainer. I love my husband. He is well read, adventurous and does a hysterical rendition of a northern Vermont accent that still cracks me up after 12 years of marriage. But he also tends to be forgetful, and is often tardy and mercuri...

1. Humpback whale 10 ft [+ 3 m] 2. Elephant 5-6 ft [1,50 - 1,80 m] 3. Bull 3 ft [92 cm] 4. Stallion 2 ft 6 in. [80 cm] 5. Rhinoceros 2 ft [61 cm] 6. Pig 18-20 in. [45 - 50 cm] 7. Man 6 in. [15 cm] 8. Gorilla 2 in. [5 cm] 9. Cat ¾ in. 10. Mosquito 1/100 in.

Key texts Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe Classics Revisited by Kenneth Rexroth "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg Poems by Pier Paolo Pasolini Paintings by JMW Turner Lawrence Ferlinghetti was in the small audience at the Six Gallery in San Francisco when Allen Ginsberg gave the first reading of his epic poem "Howl". Immediately afterwards Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a note saying, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." It was the same phrase Emerson had written to Walt Whitman after receiving the first copy of Leaves of Grass. "But I added a line," recalls Ferlinghetti. "I also said, 'When do I get the manuscript'?" It arrived soon enough and 50 years ago this year City Lights Books, the tiny publishing arm of the tiny radical bookshop Ferlinghetti and his partner Peter Martin had founded in 1953, published the first edition of "Howl". Such is its landmark status in post-war literature that an anniversary a...