Berlin is rolling out the red carpet for the longtime partner of late British-born author Christopher Isherwood, whose writings inspired "Cabaret" about the swinging city on the brink of Nazi terror.

This week Don Bachardy, 80, is making his first extended trip to the German capital, where Isherwood moved in 1929 to escape a stifling life among England's monied class and join his friend W.H. Auden in indulging in its uninhibited gay scene.

An unreconstructed libertine who made debauchery into high art or a vile pornographer who tried to justify rape, murder and paedophilia?

From Flaubert to Baudelaire, the influence of the Marquis de Sade on writers is well documented, but a new exhibition in Paris sets out to explore how the 18th-century nobleman has also influenced artists over the past two centuries.

A British team that helped find the remains of late king Richard III in 2012 on Tuesday turned their attention to the presumed burial site of the last royal of the Anglo-Saxon era.

Stratascan, which uses ground-penetrating radar technology, said it was carrying out a scan at Waltham Abbey north of London where king Harold II is believed to have been laid to rest.

Australian novelist Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday for his book "The Narrow Road to the Deep North", inspired by his father's experience as a prisoner of war.

The book tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, a surgeon imprisoned in a Japanese work camp on the Thailand-Burma railway.

More than 82 million people in China still live on less than about $1 a day, a senior official said, despite a decades-long boom that made it the world's second-largest economy.

China's official poverty standard is an annual income of 2,300 yuan ($375), close to the long-used benchmark of $1 a day.

Tugging ropes and bellowing chants, five men hoist from the water a huge spidery frame gripping a web of fishing net -- a centuries-old custom on the southern Indian coast.

Two of the team bound down a rickety platform to scoop up the catch, which is once again meagre: a few silvery fish tangled in weed and a scuttling small crab.

An extraordinary exhibition into the later works of Rembrandt opened at the National Gallery in London on Wednesday, revealing the energy, innovation and empathy of the Dutch master right up to his death.

Featuring about 40 paintings, 20 drawings and 30 prints loaned from collections around the world, "Rembrandt: The Late Works" is the first in-depth exploration into the final stage of the artist's career.

Austria's interior ministry is appealing to other ministries to take over Hitler's birthplace in Braunau, amid a years-long debate over what should become of the building.

The interior ministry has rented the large pale yellow house where the future Nazi leader was born since 1972 and variously sublet it to a technical institute and an aid organization.

A Chinese painter's son who sued his 95-year-old mother over the estimated $300 million artistic treasure trove left by his father has lost the case, state-run media reported Tuesday.

The legal action brought by Xu Huayi is reminiscent of high-profile trust fund disputes in the West, and the family feud is a far cry from long-held Chinese ideals of filial piety.

Growing up in California in the 1950s, Merilyn Phillips Hodgson lived in awe of her big brother, a strapping young American adventurer on the trail of the biblical Queen of Sheba.

Wendell Phillips was still in his mid-20s when he spearheaded his own expedition into the desert of what is today Yemen, searching its shifting sands for relics of a civilization that thrived 2,500 years before.