Mr de Paolis came across the paintings after deciding to add a bathroom in the apartment, which partly extends into an abandoned medieval tower that was thought to have been part of a military fort in Civitavecchia, a port west of Rome.

Bit by bit, De Paolis uncovered copies of the frescoes in Raphael's Room of Heliodorus at the Vatican museums, thought to have been painted by a contemporary student of the Renaissance master, Ugo da Scarpi, best known for his wood carvings.

The Room of Heliodorus is one of four frescoed chambers by Raphael and his disciples, commissioned for the private apartments of Pope Julius II in the Apostolic Palace, now part of the Vatican Museums, next to the Sistine Chapel.

About 50 square metres (500 square feet) survive of the copies, badly damaged but clearly distinguishable in places.

They are slightly smaller than the original frescoes painted in the early 16th century, depicting the heavenly protection believed to be accorded by Jesus Christ to the Roman Catholic Church.

Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, has been accused of ripping off work by a military historian for a Remembrance Sunday poem.

Ben Shephard said Motion's poem An Equal Voice had used 17 passages from his book A War of Nerves, which documented the effects of shell shock on soldiers.

Motion, who said his poem "stitched together" accounts from "a variety of sources", dismissed Shephard's claim of plagiarism by saying he was working in a long tradition of "found poetry" that dated back to Shakespeare.

In a bid to remind the world of the prominent role that Scots played in laying the foundations of colonial India, the Scottish government has launched a campaign to renovate some of the sub-continent's finest imperial buildings before they decay beyond repair.

The conventional view of Indian colonial life as a quintessentially English experience - all G&Ts, tea and cricket - has long overlooked the fact that Scots were heavily represented in HMG's vast imperial civil service, and as businessmen and architects.

Now, keen to underline its independence from London in foreign affairs, Scotland's new nationalist government plans to reclaim that forgotten heritage in Calcutta, the capital of British India.

Its first target will be helping to restore the rubble-covered grand staircases and peeling walls of once-magnificent buildings like Duff College, named after Alexander Duff, a Scots missionary and pioneering educationalist who arrived in Calcutta in 1830 after being shipwrecked twice en route. But Holyrood also hopes to remind Indians of the role that Scots played in educating and inspiring some of the sub-continent's leading independence campaigners.

The green jade seal, belonging to the emperor Qian Long (1736-1795) fetched £3.6 million, six times its estimate, at the auction on Wednesday following frantic bidding by eight competing collectors.

News of the sale was greeted with anger on the Chinese internet, where the country's growing nationalism frequently finds its voice.

"Bandits have seized our treasures and are now selling them off at auction for ridiculous profits. How can we tolerate such behaviour?" wrote one user of the Sohu Internet portal. "The Chinese government must get fully involved in this matter." The seal, lot 136, was the prize object in a 261-lot sale which raised a total of £8.3m...

The future of records dating back more than 700 years has been secured - with the help of the taxman.

Estate ledgers, royal edicts and personal correspondence are to stay at Bangor University after a deal with Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

The deal agreed with executors of the Penrhyn Castle estate will see the archives accepted for the British people in lieu of inheritance tax.

They reveal the history and politics of the families of the castle in Gwynedd.

The documents, which range from 13th Century parchment to 20th century typed papers, chart hundreds of years of history.

BERLIN — During his childhood, Lutz Braun could see the Berlin Wall from his home in Blankenfelde, a village south of the city that was part of communist East Germany.

The wall snaked along, cutting through fields, yards and gardens. But Mr. Braun’s family did not talk about the wall. “As children, we did not see borders,” said Mr. Braun, 56. “They played no role.”

When Mr. Braun was conscripted into the East German People’s Army in the mid-1970s, he had no choice but to acknowledge the border that divided his country, and Europe. He was dispatched to a border guard unit that patrolled the area north of Berlin. The unit’s task was to prevent East Germans from scaling the wall and escaping to the Western part of the city...

... The fall of the Berlin Wall did destroy borders between countries, at least physically. Millions of people who had been raised in communist Eastern Europe had for the first time in their lives the possibility to see the West. But the idea of borders, mental or physical, across Europe, was not eradicated.

“The West had preoccupied our imagination for so long,” said Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia. “We had talked about destroying the borders. It was about the physical act of crossing. No constraints.” ...

... Now that Mr. Krastev can travel and lecture anywhere he chooses, he can see what opportunities the end of the Cold War and globalization have created.

“Yet for many, globalization is seen as a threat because there is no protection,” he said. “Borders have become important again, but this time it is the West that wants to put them up, not the East.”

BERLIN — “The Quiz of the Germans,” a lighthearted entry amid a crush of serious examinations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, pitted three West German celebrities seated behind the sloping hood of an old Volkswagen Beetle against counterparts from the East perched above the front of a clunky Trabant.

On a television stage emblazoned with an oversize map of unified Germany, the questions about the divided old days were as symmetrical as the antique cars. The topics — nude beachgoers in the East and sex education in the West, vacation destinations or the funny dialects on either side — struck a note of shared Germanness that endured even at the peak of the cold war.

The anniversary on Monday has prompted a powerful national conversation, not just about a moment two decades ago, but about Germany today. It is more united and less turbulent than many here or abroad expected and, given its 20th century history, than many thought it deserved to be. Especially among the young, there is the sense that the aspiration to transcend Germany’s dark history and simply become normal may finally be within reach.

The latest round of news media accounts on the tumultuous final hours of the wall have emphasized not some sense of historical inevitability driven by economics and geopolitics, but rather the capricious human side of the event. That is reflected in last week’s cover story in the magazine Der Spiegel, which meticulously reconstructed, hour by hour, the events of the day that built up to the wall’s unexpected opening, titled “The Error That Led to Unity.”

Bureaucratic confusion over new travel regulations led crowds of East Berliners to gather at border checkpoints on Nov. 9, 1989, prompting guards to open the gates, bringing a sudden end to the division of the city with a night of spontaneous celebration and reunion.

In recent weeks polls have been released on the differences, and as often as not the similarities, between the former East and the former West in matters of love and real estate, table manners and car ownership. In ways both typically serious and atypically jocular, Germans seem to be groping for an understanding of what happened and what, along the way, they have become.

Beneath the trivial differences lies a country more unified than anyone expected. That is not to say that there are not still some hard feelings, and particularly among those from the East, known officially as the German Democratic Republic. Despite great strides and an estimated $2 trillion in assistance since 1989, many there have not quite caught up to the West materially and saw their everyday way of life disappear along with the wall...

PARIS — Judges ordered Thursday that a lawyer be imposed on Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader on trial in The Hague for war crimes and genocide, but halted the trial until March 1, to give a lawyer time to get ready.

Their decision effectively gave Mr. Karadzic, who has insisted on representing himself, almost four additional months to prepare his defense, which is more than an appeals court gave him when it ordered the case to begin.

“We need time to digest this decision,” said Marco Sladojevic, one of the lawyers assisting Mr. Karadzic. “We will try to find a constructive answer when the team meets with him tomorrow.”

Since his trial before the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague opened Oct. 26, Mr. Karadzic has forced the court’s hand by staying in his cell.

He showed up briefly for a procedural hearing on Tuesday, only to argue again that he needed more time to deal with the great load of materials relating to the charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnian war...

For decades a hilly region in central Germany divided by the Iron Curtain was at risk of becoming the ground zero of a nuclear World War III. During the Cold War, troopers of the U.S. 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment -- known as the Blackhorse regiment -- patrolled this border from Observation Post Alpha near the West German town of Fulda.

They were there to protect the so-called Fulda Gap -- a key weakness in the West's defense. It was the most difficult area for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to defend because of its accessible terrain and a geography that marked a deep protrusion of eastern territory into the West.

The Fulda area, about 100 miles from Frankfurt, was seen as an attractive avenue for a military push from the East into Western Europe.

Roger Cirillo, who served in the Fulda area as a captain during the 1970s, says he always trained his soldiers to expect a situation where the enemy would outnumber them. But he knew that in case of an attack, "there was no way that I could do my job without getting killed." He also left no doubt in his subordinates that they were likely to die if it came to defending their post.

Mr. Cirillo, now director of the Association of the U.S. Army's book progam, in Arlington, Va., remains fascinated by Cold War Germany. After retiring from the armed forces, he got his doctorate and researched defense plans of both sides...

The American railroad produced the nation's original corporate capitalists—the ones we call tycoons, moguls, or robber barons. The first and greatest was "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, who amassed the New York Central system between New York and Chicago in the 1860s and '70s. This week's purchase of Burlington Northern by Warren Buffett seems to make Mr. Buffett a worthy successor.

"It's an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States," Mr. Buffett said of his purchase. "I love these bets." So did Vanderbilt. And Mr. Buffett's wager is on a Vanderbiltian scale. His company, Berkshire Hathaway, is paying $26.3 billion in cash and stock for 77.4% of the enormous railroad. (It already owned the rest.) In the Information Age, this is a startling endorsement of the oldest of the old economy.

Nineteenth century railroads largely created the modern corporate economy. Led by Vanderbilt, they landscaped the playing field that Mr. Buffett now strides across. The tale of the two titans, then, is a tangled story rather than a mere contrast of then and now.

On Nov. 8, 1833, the 39-year-old Vanderbilt boarded a train. Railroads were new enough that this was notable in itself. The locomotive resembled an oversize barrel thrown on its side, with wheels and a smokestack. The three cars that trailed behind were modeled on stagecoaches, and looked nothing like the rectangular boxes of decades to come. The train pulled out of South Amboy, N.J., and chugged down the Camden & Amboy Railroad. It soon reached the terrifying speed of 25 miles per hour...