One of the finest cubist collections in the world, painstakingly pieced together by a U.S. billionaire and pledged to the Metropolitan Museum in New York opens to the public on October 20.

Featuring 81 works of art by four artists, the museum says it will be the most important exhibition dedicated to the pioneers of the early 20th century avant-garde art movement in more than 30 years.

An imposing mosaic uncovered in the largest antique tomb ever discovered in Greece depicts the myth of the abduction of Persephone, Zeus's daughter who became goddess of the underworld, the Greek culture ministry said Thursday.

The 4.5 meter by three meter (15 foot by 10 foot) floor mosaic was discovered in a huge tomb that was discovered in August in Amphipolis, a northern Greek town. It dates back to the fourth century BC.

Sherlock Holmes never existed but his fictional address of 221B Baker Street still receives a steady flow of letters addressed to the famously intuitive detective.

The latest tribute comes in the form of a Museum of London exhibition opening Thursday entitled "The Man Who Never Lives and Will Never Die" and billed as the biggest in 60 years.

Despite sparse resources and limited institutional support, the world will soon wake up to Africa's ingenious new artists, according to some of the continent's leading exponents taking part in London's Contemporary African Art Fair.

The four-day event -- the largest such fair outside Africa -- opens on Thursday and showcases the work of over 120 artists in the grand setting of Somerset House in the heart of the British capital in a bid to reach a global market.

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.