The most popular biographies are those that embrace the subject’s life while assuming little prior historical knowledge on the part of the reader.

Is the unhappiness of beautiful people more significant than that of real people?

On the eve of the release of Woman in Gold, an expert at Christie's has spoken of a force that is changing the shape of the international art market: the scale of wartime art thefts.

The Auckland Writers Festival announced this year's line-up of authors last week. Michele Hewitson talks to the festival's director, Anne O'Brien.

The fact that Shakespeare wrote a play called Love's Labours Won is beyond dispute, though no copy has been found.

On a sunny terrace “somewhere in La Mancha”, all is swirling skirts, clicking heels and the colours of sunshine.

A tormented shriek, a sudden drop into darkness and a tall figure in robes emerges from the shadows, ranting.

The school bus lurches to a halt outside a Bekaa Valley primary school in the east of Lebanon.

Entertaining a discerning audience of 2- to 4-year-olds is a never-ending challenge for British theatre artist Andy Manley.

Two British actors who have forged successful parallel writing careers will headline the Auckland Writers Festival in May.

More than 50 years ago an artist from Auckland changed his name to Billy Apple and became a living brand. On the eve of a major retrospective of his life’s work, he talked to Greg Dixon about his past, his present and his future.

75: It was late in the day before New Zealand appointed war artists to document the conflict.

Auckland's Art Festival is filling the streets, parks and theatres for the next two weeks with light, colour and music. Find out what's on this week and our don't miss pics.

NZ On Screen Content Director Irene Gardiner selects five great New Zealand arts documentaries, to mark the start of the 2015 Auckland Arts Festival.

A gallery has grown in the heart of Coromandel Town. In a purpose-built space designed by Ron Sang, Barry Brickell's Driving Creek Art Gallery is hosting its sixth exhibition Using Paint and Clay Expressively.

"I don't make lollies!" Lemi Ponifasio is talking about the often-extreme reaction to his latest production, I AM, from which many audience members walked out when it was staged at last year's Edinburgh International Festival.

In painting, even at its most abstract, a strong horizontal across a work is inescapably read as a horizon.

On Thursday, Kathryn Stott caps off her first visit to our coundty playing Shostakovich with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.

Award-winning Auckland playwright Elisabeth Easther was once an erotic fiction writer. As Fifty Shades of Grey hits our screens, she reveals the highs and lows of her short-lived career in smut.

Other winning photographs highlighted animal cruelty in China and the Ebola crisis in west Africa.

There was only one thing that mildly irked Joyce Irving when she got her performance schedule for A Midsummer Night's Dream: she wouldn't appear every night.

As a setting for Shakespeare it would be hard to beat the café balcony of the historic Pah Homestead.

You're in the running for the Sunday Times EFG prize: How do you wish you could blow the winning 30,000?

Local playwright Victor Rodger has followed up last year's revival (Sons) and premiere (At the Wake) with a new play that brings a light touch to tragedy.

A NZ student who took only two years of art classes has received the best subject marks in the world in the Cambridge International Examinations.

Sections of the left-wing intelligentsia appear to believe the Eleanor Catton brouhaha says something disturbing about New Zealand.

Many writers resist national labels. Like Salman Rushdie, we'd rather belong to "the boundless kingdom of the imagination ... the unfettered republic of the tongue".

Prime Minister John Key says author's views shouldn’t be given any more credence than those of the Mad Butcher or Richie McCaw.