Glintingly glamorous ... a suit of armour in the Grand Master's Palace in Malta. Photograph: Philippe Renault/Hemis/Corbis The artist Willem de Kooning once said oil painting was invented in order to portray flesh. He might just as well have said it was created to convey the metallic gleam of armour.
Men regularly wore metal in the 15th century, when oil painting first came into its own, and some of the greatest European painters were fascinated by the strange sartorial splendour of the battlefield and tournament.
Piero della Francesca's Brera altarpiece includes a portrait of the man who commissioned it, the cultured mercenary Federico da Montefeltro, kneeling in full plate armour that is as clearly reflective as a mirror. He looks as if he were wearing glass – the polished metal suggests his purity, his piety. Federico's reflective shine is that of a perfect knight. He looks like he could win the holy grail.
By contrast, in Giorgione's enigmatic painting of a young man in armour in the National Gallery of Scotland, the metal glints darkly, its burnished shadows sinister. A similar effect is used by Titian to convey both masculine power and inner anxiety in his portrait of Francesco Maria della Rovere in the Uffizi. Here, Titian uses the hardness of the battle gear to mirror the soul.
You don't have to content yourself with looking at paintings of armour, of course; wonderful examples survive. There is a sumptuous display of it in the V&A's new Medieval and Renaissance galleries. Other great places include the Wallace Collection and Tower of London in the capital, the Royal Armouries in Leeds, and the majestic armour galleries at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
War is hell. But armour can be heavenly.
Jonathan Jones

Un article dans the Guardian écrit par Alan Travis :

John Stonehouse on his way to court to face 21 charges, including fraud, in 1975. Photograph: Ken Towner / Evening News / Rex Margaret Thatcher agreed to a cover-up when information from a Czech defector confirmed in 1980 that John Stonehouse, the former Labour minister who "did a Reggie Perrin", had been a spy.
At a Downing Street meeting on 6 October 1980 with her home secretary, William Whitelaw, and attorney-general Sir Michael Havers, Thatcher agreed that Stonehouse should not be confronted with the new information nor prosecuted.
The decision to keep secret Stonehouse's espionage followed hard on the heels of the exposure in 1979 of Sir Anthony Blunt, the surveyor of the Queen's pictures, as a Soviet spy.
The confirmation that Stonehouse was a paid spy for the Czechs also makes him the only British politician to have acted as a foreign agent while a minister.
He served in Harold Wilson's government in the 1960s. In 1974, faced with serious business problems, he abandoned his wife, faked suicide by leaving his clothes on a beach and disappeared with his mistress to Australia.
The Stonehouse affair coincided with the first television series of Reggie Perrin, who also disappeared by running into the sea, and helped the phrase "doing a Reggie Perrin" into the language. Stonehouse was later tracked down and sentenced to seven years for theft and fraud.
Downing Street papers show that Havers told Thatcher that "he was sure that Mr Stonehouse had been a spy for the Czechoslovaks but he had no evidence which he could put before the jury".
He said Stonehouse had twice denied the allegations when they were put to him in the late 1960s and had since then served his prison sentence and had undergone open heart surgery. "If he was interviewed again and confronted with further evidence, it was quite likely he would make a public fuss and claim that he was being persecuted by the government," said Havers, adding that MI5 did not think there was anything to gain by confronting him.
A confidential minute from the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, said the Czech defector claimed to have been Stonehouse's controller in the late 1960s. The defector said a Czech security file stated that Stonehouse was a "conscious paid agent from about 1962" and had "after taking office in 1964 provided information about government plans and policies and about technological subjects including aircraft, and had been paid over the years about £5,000 in all".
This goes further than recent disclosures about Stonehouse, an aviation minister and postmaster general, which suggested that he was useful to the Czechs only as a backbench MP.
In the Downing Street meeting, Armstrong told Thatcher that the case for confronting Stonehouse turned on the possibility of a leak from the unnamed defector who was then in the United States "and of subsequent accusations against the government that there had been another cover-up to save people in high places. Just as there had been in the Blunt case. It would obviously helpful to be able to say that Stonehouse had been confronted with the new information in an attempt to get him to confess."
Armstrong conceded that, unlike the Blunt case, there was no question of offering Stonehouse immunity from prosecution and, if the story leaked, the government would have to say there wasn't sufficient evidence to prosecute him.
The Downing Street file records that Thatcher said that since the defector had not provided information which could be used as evidence, she agreed he could not be prosecuted. "Moreover, the balance of argument was against interviewing him and confronting him with the new information. Matters should therefore be left as they were." Stonehouse died on 14 April 1988 without the spy rumours being publicly confirmed.

Très intéressante émission sur la BBC radio 4 concernant un explorateur britannique, Wilfred Thesiger.


This year is the centenary of photographer and traveller Wilfred Thesiger, whose 38000 photographs of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula are celebrated in a new exhibition at Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum. BBC Security correspondent Frank Gardner, who was encouraged by Thesiger to learn Arabic, looks back on his fascinating life and reflects how it is through Thesiger's work that we currently have such an understanding of the North African and Arab world. Thesiger lived among the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, and he also became famous for crossing the Rub' al Khali, the "Empty Quarter" of Saudi Arabia, surviving on less than a pint of water a day.
Gardner talks to Christopher Morton of the Pitt Rivers about Thesiger's work, and what it reveals of past ways of life, and he also speaks to the curator of the exhibition, Philip N Grover about ways of interpreting the graphic imagery of the photographs. Thesiger's biographer Alexander Maitland tells the story of his wartime service with the SAS and SOE, and explorer Benedict Allen assesses the importance of Thesiger's travels and writing. Despite Thesiger's keen appreciation of desert peoples and their way of life, he hated modern society. The only modern invention he valued was the camera. We hear his voice in historic broadcasts from the 1940s and 50s, his elegant prose recalling his travels in what is now a lost age.
From Wikipedia :

Après la guerre, Wilfred Thesiger prend conscience que le monde barbare et splendide des nomades, qu'il admire tant, va disparaître, et décide de consacrer entièrement sa vie à sauver leur mémoire de l'oubli. Pendant cinq ans, il va parcourir le désert du sud de l'Arabie saoudite en compagnie des Bédouins et va rapporter cette expérience dans son premier livre Le Désert des Déserts.
Il part ensuite pour l'Irak découvrir le mode de vie immémorial des Arabes des marais, tribus vivant dans le sud du pays, dans les immenses marais entre les fleuves Tigre et l'Euphrate. Parallèlement, il effectue aussi plusieurs voyages dans les montagnes d'Asie centrale, où il en profite pour chasser l'ours et le mouflon. Il sillonne des régions alors inconnues comme le Kurdistan, le Chitral, l'Hazaradjat et le Nouristan, connues aujourd'hui sous le terme de « zones tribales » du Pakistan.
Wilfred Thesiger s'intéresse moins aux paysages qu'aux tribus qui ont conservé leurs mœurs et pratiques originelles. Ni ethnologue, ni sociologue professionnel, il se contente souvent seulement d'observer et de rapporter, mais surtout savoure le plaisir d'être un des premiers et peut-être un des derniers à côtoyer un univers millénaire mais qu'il sait menacé. Il accompagne ses écrits de nombreuses cartes et de nombreuses photos en noir et blanc, lesquelles constituent autant de témoignages uniques et exceptionnels, tels les voyageurs Kirghizes à dos de yack, les villageois du Nouristan ou les bergers Tadjiks sur les sentiers d'Asie centrale.
Il a « toujours été attiré par les montagnes », mais « cherche la voie la plus facile pour les franchir ou pour les contourner, afin de voir ce qu'il y a de l'autre côté ». et ne s'encombre pas de matériel sophistiqué : « ... quelques vêtements de rechange, deux couvertures pour le cas où nous dormirions à la belle étoile, une poignée de médicaments, un livre ou deux, un appareil photographique et ma carabine 275 Rigby ». Il considère chaque jour de voyage passé dans une automobile comme une journée de perdue, et en quelques mois de voyage au Kurdistan irakien, en 1950 et 1951, il dit avoir visité ainsi à peu près tous les villages et gravi à peu près toutes les montagnes.
Dès la fin des années 1950, il se sait rattrapé par le monde moderne, lorsqu'il croise sur son chemin un mollah afghan à Chitrâl ou un marchand mongol en route pour Kashgar. Avec le recul, il reconnaît qu'il « aurait donné cher » pour les accompagner, mais peu à peu les frontières, jusqu'alors, libres, se ferment même pour lui, et son dernier voyage au Nouristan en 1965, semble comme un nostalgique adieu à un monde qui disparaît et qu'il a tant aimé : « Mais les temps avaient changé, et les frontières de notre monde s'étaient fermées. (...) À présent la grand-route est construite, les camions grondent dans les deux sens; les caravanes de chameaux ont disparu, leurs clochettes se sont tues pour toujours. »
Il revint s'installer en Angleterre dans les années 1990 et fut élevé à la dignité de Chevalier en 1995. Il a légué sa vaste collection de 25 000 négatifs au Pitt Rivers Museum d'Oxford. Wilfred Thesiger n'aimait pas trop la culture américaine et a dit à son sujet : "L'effet à long terme de la culture américaine telle qu'elle s'insinue dans le moindre recoin de tous les déserts, vallées et montagnes du monde sera la fin des civilisations. Notre avarice extraordinaire pour les possessions matérielles, les manières dont nous nourrissons cette avarice, le manque d'équilibre de nos vies, et notre arrogance culturelle amènera à notre perte d'ici un siècle à moins que nous apprenions à nous arrêter et à penser. Mais peut-être est-il déjà trop tard ?"

Ian Black

Muammar Gaddafi, the veteran Libyan leader, is a "mercurial and eccentric" figure who suffers from severe phobias, enjoys flamenco dancing and horse-racing, acts on his whims and irritates friends and enemies alike, according to US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.
Gaddafi has often been ridiculed in the west, but he is regarded with fear and mistrust in parts of Africa, with leaders and officials expressing anger about his plans for a United States of Africa, the documents show. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda even worried about a possible Libyan attack on his aircraft.
Perhaps more than most world figures, Gaddafi appears to be the object of both political and personal fascination, not least because of the Lockerbie affair and his past support for terrorism. Now 68, and in power since 1969, he has an intense dislike or fear of staying on upper floors, and prefers not to fly over water, the US ambassador to Tripoli reported before Gaddafi made a controversial visit to the UN in New York in September 2009.
Protocol staff initially balked at supplying the regulation size photograph for his visa application for the trip, "noting that his photo was displayed throughout the city [Tripoli] and that any one of hundreds of billboards could be photographed and shrunken to fit the criteria".
Libyan officials also tried to find accommodation with room to pitch Gaddafi's Bedouin tent, his preferred location for receiving visitors and conducting meetings "as it offers him a non-verbal way of communicating that he is a man close to his cultural roots". Seeking to iron out complications before the trip, a Libyan diplomat was described in a cable as being "painfully aware that Gaddafi's personal whims could scuttle the ministry of foreign affairs' efforts".
Gene Cretz, the US envoy, found him "almost obsessively dependent on a small core of trusted personnel", including a senior aide who speaks to him on a special red phone. He also cited "Gaddafi's well-known predilection for changing his mind".
Visitors should be prepared for surprises, Cretz warned Hillary Clinton before she flew to Tripoli in August 2008. "Muammar al-Gaddafi is notoriously mercurial. He often avoids making eye contact during the initial portion of meetings, and there may be long, uncomfortable periods of silence. Alternatively, he can be an engaging and charming interlocutor … a self-styled intellectual and philosopher, he has been eagerly anticipating for several years the opportunity to share with you his views on global affairs.
"Intellectually curious and a voracious consumer of news - trusted advisers are tasked with summarising in Arabic important books and articles printed in other languages."
Writing about last year's celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the Libyan revolution, the envoy focused on Gaddafi's preferences for dancing and cultural performances. He had "appeared particularly enthralled by Tuareg horse racing … clapping and smiling throughout. Flamenco dancers appeared to spark a similar interest." Gaddafi planned to stop in Seville on his way to Libya from Venezuela to attend a flamenco performance.
A US embassy informant spoke of an unflashy lifestyle in "modest quarters, with prefabricated walls and floors that creak. The walls are white and do not feature any artwork."
Another report described how his Bab al-Azizia compound in central Tripoli has facilities for banquets and other public events, "but is not lavish in any way compared with the ostentation of the Gulf oil state families or [the] Hariri clan [in Lebanon]."
House staff dress in street clothes rather than uniforms, while Gaddafi normally wears jogging suits to meet one regular guest, a consultant who described the leader as "paranoid about those around him, including his interpreters". He apparently did not even have his own bank account.
Gaddafi was reportedly pleased with his performance at the UN general assembly in 2009, when he spoke for 96 minutes instead of the allotted 15. The leader had "kept many things bottled up" for 30 years and was able to express them on the world stage, the embassy recorded. Gaddafi "felt he needed to speak his mind and express his frustration with issues that had been weighing on him – including his thoughts on the assassination of President John F Kennedy".
The informant called his attitude to the US "childlike", quoting him asking: "How much of New York … will I get to see?" and "Is Washington far from New York? Do you think I might have time to visit?"
US diplomats report extensively on Gaddafi's family, especially his sons Saif al-Islam and Muatassim. But, one cable notes, "since the family keeps a tight control on the media and most of the Gaddafi children's spending excesses take place outside Libya, there is not much public reaction to the coffers of Gaddafi Inc".
Family issues came to the fore when another son, Hannibal, became embroiled in a huge row over claims about allegedly beating a servant during a visit to Switzerland, triggering a severe diplomatic crisis between Tripoli and Berne whose resolution depended on whether the "notoriously ill-behaved and capricious first family changes its mind". No claim was ever pursued by the Swiss.
Reports from US embassies elsewhere in Africa provide copious evidence of high levels of mistrust. In addition to worrying about having his plane shot down, Uganda's Museveni complained of Libyan approaches to other leaders. "Gaddafi is trying to buy them off or intimidate them by destabilising their countries unless they agree with union," he said.
Press and independent sources reported that during a visit to the Guinean capital Conakry, Gaddafi gave a bulletproof Nissan vehicle to President Moussa Dadis Camara. A "sensitive source" told the US embassy that he also gave the president a large sum of cash.
On the subject of the African Union a Swazi diplomat mentioned his amusement at receiving a diplomatic note with Gaddafi's new title as "King of Culture".
Still, the US cables do show evidence of Gaddafi's mellowing over the years. "Every time we put out a fire in Africa, another one breaks out," he told the visiting US General William Ward of the US Africa Command. "We used to say this was a US conspiracy, but not anymore."
For the American ambassador to Tripoli, the conclusion about where US interests lie was clear: "While it is tempting to dismiss his many eccentricities as signs of instability, Gaddafi is a complicated individual who has managed to stay in power for 40 years through a skilful balancing of interests and realpolitik methods. Continued engagement with Gaddafi and his inner circle is important."

Julian Assange's lawyers have confirmed their client is behind bars in Wandsworth Prison.

Wandsworth Prison

John Hooper in Rome


Police and protesters tonight clashed violently outside La Scala, as the conductor Daniel Barenboim also took advantage of the Milan opera house's gala first night to protest against cuts in Italy's culture budget.
At least 10 police officers and an unknown number of demonstrators were taken to hospital after the skirmishes in which two home-made bombs were detonated. Smoke bombs and teargas were used during the clash.
Police in riot gear charged about 100 protesters – some wearing helmets, others Santa Claus hats – after they tried to break through crowd barriers penning them into different parts of the square outside Milan's most celebrated theatre.
The first night of La Scala's season of operas and ballets is often accompanied by demonstrations that have nothing to do with the arts. But on this occasion many protesters were demonstrating against cuts in culture spending in the 2011 budget drawn up by Silvio Berlusconi's government, which was being voted on in Rome as the premiere got under way.
Drama students joined opera-house workers from all around Italy to protest against a planned 37% reduction in performing arts subsidies.
Other demonstrators were protesting at a university reform bill that reduces student grants and cuts spending on research, but which the government has defended as promoting meritocratic values in higher eduction.
Barenboim was made principal guest conductor of La Scala four years ago, with the title of maestro scaligero. Before raising his baton at the start of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the Israeli conductor turned to Italy's president, Giorgio Napolitano, who was in the audience, and said: "For that title, and also in the names of the colleagues who play, sing, dance and work, not only here but in all theatres, I am here to tell you we are deeply worried for the future of culture in the country and in Europe."
He then read out the ninth article of the Italian constitution, which says that the republic promotes "the development of culture and scientific and technical research". The same article also promises that governments will safeguard the country's "historical and artistic heritage". The audience broke into applause, with Napolitano joining in.
The production, staged by the Belgian director Guy Cassiers, uses video – an innovation that has reportedly upset some of the singers. Cassiers said his aim was to bring all disciplines and technologies together "to create a universe". Die Walküre stars soprano Nina Stemme, mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier and tenor Simon O'Neill.

John Naughton

Screen shot of a browser showing WikiLeaks' home page and Julian Assange after the move to a Swiss host. REUTERS/Valentin Flauraud 'Never waste a good crisis" used to be the catchphrase of the Obama team in the runup to the presidential election. In that spirit, let us see what we can learn from official reactions to the WikiLeaks revelations.
The most obvious lesson is that it represents the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.
And as the backlash unfolds – first with deniable attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks, later with companies like Amazon and eBay and PayPal suddenly "discovering" that their terms and conditions preclude them from offering services to WikiLeaks, and then with the US government attempting to intimidate Columbia students posting updates about WikiLeaks on Facebook – the intolerance of the old order is emerging from the rosy mist in which it has hitherto been obscured. The response has been vicious, co-ordinated and potentially comprehensive, and it contains hard lessons for everyone who cares about democracy and about the future of the net.
There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is now the so-called liberal democracies that are clamouring to shut WikiLeaks down.
Consider, for instance, how the views of the US administration have changed in just a year. On 21 January, secretary of state Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech about internet freedom, in Washington DC, which many people welcomed and most interpreted as a rebuke to China for its alleged cyberattack on Google. "Information has never been so free," declared Clinton. "Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable."
She went on to relate how, during his visit to China in November 2009, Barack Obama had "defended the right of people to freely access information, and said that the more freely information flows the stronger societies become. He spoke about how access to information helps citizens to hold their governments accountable, generates new ideas, and encourages creativity." Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.
One thing that might explain the official hysteria about the revelations is the way they expose how political elites in western democracies have been deceiving their electorates.
The leaks make it abundantly clear not just that the US-Anglo-European adventure in Afghanistan is doomed but, more important, that the American, British and other Nato governments privately admit that too.
The problem is that they cannot face their electorates – who also happen to be the taxpayers funding this folly – and tell them this. The leaked dispatches from the US ambassador to Afghanistan provide vivid confirmation that the Karzai regime is as corrupt and incompetent as the South Vietnamese regime in Saigon was when the US was propping it up in the 1970s. And they also make it clear that the US is as much a captive of that regime as it was in Vietnam.
The WikiLeaks revelations expose the extent to which the US and its allies see no real prospect of turning Afghanistan into a viable state, let alone a functioning democracy. They show that there is no light at the end of this tunnel. But the political establishments in Washington, London and Brussels cannot bring themselves to admit this.
Afghanistan is, in that sense, a quagmire in the same way that Vietnam was. The only differences are that the war is now being fought by non-conscripted troops and we are not carpet-bombing civilians.
The attack of WikiLeaks also ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has rosy fantasies about whose side cloud computing providers are on. These are firms like Google, Flickr, Facebook, Myspace and Amazon which host your blog or store your data on their servers somewhere on the internet, or which enable you to rent "virtual" computers – again located somewhere on the net. The terms and conditions under which they provide both "free" and paid-for services will always give them grounds for dropping your content if they deem it in their interests to do so. The moral is that you should not put your faith in cloud computing – one day it will rain on your parade.
Look at the case of Amazon, which dropped WikiLeaks from its Elastic Compute Cloud the moment the going got rough. It seems that Joe Lieberman, a US senator who suffers from a terminal case of hubris, harassed the company over the matter. Later Lieberman declared grandly that he would be "asking Amazon about the extent of its relationship with WikiLeaks and what it and other web service providers will do in the future to ensure that their services are not used to distribute stolen, classified information". This led the New Yorker's Amy Davidson to ask whether "Lieberman feels that he, or any senator, can call in the company running the New Yorker's printing presses when we are preparing a story that includes leaked classified material, and tell it to stop us".
What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.
As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, "Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure." What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.
Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.
But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.