Todd Haynes's 2002 film Far From Heaven has been hailed as a homage to 1950s Hollywood melodrama, although anyone tempted to take the film at face value should be warned that it aims to subvert as much as celebrate that genre. Impeccably constructed, with a care for detail unknown in films from the era, it sets out to make key themes from the genre - romance across racial barriers and class lines, and perhaps the period's greatest taboo, romance between members of the same sex - utterly explicit, when half a century ago those themes had to be encoded in allusion and metaphor. Haynes took as his main source Douglas Sirk's 1955 classic, All That Heaven Allows, although Far From Heaven also references Rainer Werner Fassbinder's bleak portrayal of inter-racial love, Fear Eats the Soul (1974). In the context of Haynes's background in the New Queer Cinema movement, with films such as Superstar, Poison and [safe], this admixture makes Far From Heaven a rather more complex film than just another well-dressed period pastiche. John Gill provides a revealing insight into how Haynes confronts issues of race, sexuality and class in a suburban 1950s American neighbourhood. Haynes has been evasive when pressed for a definitive explanation of his film, although as Gill contends, he has left enough evidence lying around on screen for the keen viewer to pick up on numerous disturbing strands at work beneath the glossy surface of this sumptuously presented weepie. While it may affect to pass as a classic of the genre, Haynes's ultimate aim, Gill contends, is to undermine the nature and notion of cinema and storytelling.

A garden at the foot of Europe and a crossroads between Spain, Africa and the New World, Andaluca has been a cultural customs house on the border of the Mediterranean and Atlantic civilisations for more than ten thousand years. This book traces its origins from the earliest hominid settlers in the Granada mountains 1.8 million years ago, through successive Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Muslim cultures, and the past five hundred years of modern Castilian rule, up to and including the present day of post-modern novelists in Crdoba and Sevilla, guerrilla urban archaeologists in Torremolinos and Marbella, and underground lo-fi bands in Granada and Mlaga.

Archaeological investigations, undertaken as part of a programme to restore St George's Church, Bloomsbury, to its original Hawksmoor splendour, involved the removal of 871 triple lead-lined coffins from within the crypt and monitoring works within the churchyard. The elaborate named coffins of upper middle class parishioners provided a valuable opportunity to greatly develop the new field of post-medieval coffin analysis, and to integrate historical, archaeological and osteological data in order to build a vivid picture of this population. Over 90% of coffins were named, which allowed a rare opportunity to blind test osteological methods on 72 skeletons, whilst analysis of documentary and osteological evidence has challenged some long-held beliefs in post-medieval burial archaeology. Disease patterns in the St George's assemblage were influenced by the longevity and affluence of this population, factors that also underlay the necessity for elaborate and expensive dental treatment, including very early examples of fillings, filing and dentures.

Athens is an historical anomaly. Excavations date its first settlement to over seven thousand years ago, yet it only became the capital of Greece in 1834. During the intervening centuries it was occupied by almost every mobile culture in Europe: from its earliest likely settlers, tribes from what is now Albania, to Nazi forces during the second World War, and in between by successive waves of Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Slavs, Goths, Venetians, French, Catalans, Turks, Italians, Bulgarians and the clans of various kings and tyrants of the region's early city-states. There has been a structure on its 'high city', the acropolis, since at least the bronze age, although it was subsequently altered by successive occupiers, becoming a fort, castle, temple, mosque, church and even a harem. its 'Golden Age' peaked in the fifth century BCE, with the great building projects of Pericles and Themistocles, and its later history is one of a city already nostalgic for its past, although at a time when other European cities had yet to begin constructing a past.