“Culture is an axis of diplomacy that was practiced by any number of autocratic regimes, Hitler as well as Stalin,” said Lorraine de Meaux...
Russian officials have even suggested that Mr. Depardieu’s flight toward Russia’s flat income tax rate of 13 percent may start a trend. “The distinctiveness of our tax system is poorly known about in the West,” a deputy prime minister, Dmitri O. Rogozin, wrote...

A new study commissioned by VisitBritain and its partners in the GREAT campaign suggests that global perceptions of ‘Welcome’, Britain’s ‘Overall Nation Brand’, and the UK’s sporting and cultural credentials, have significantly improved thanks to the hosting of the London 2012 Games.

Music is a universal language and it is one of the ways to learn about another culture. To spread the teaching of Chinese music to the world, the Confucius Institute has set up the first Music Confucius Institute in Copenhagen.

Summits were more fun in those days. When Ferdinand III, the Habsburg monarch of the Holy Roman Empire, arrived in Regensburg, the Brussels of its time, in late 1652, he brought 60 musicians and three dwarves. There were sleigh rides, fireworks and the first Italian opera ever performed in Germanic lands. Aside from that, the Reichstag (imperial diet) was much like today’s European Council, the gathering for leaders of the member states.

On Wednesday morning, Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata stood in front of Michelangelo’s David-Apollo in an atrium of the National Gallery of Art. The sculpture last graced the museum in 1949 as a post-World War II sign of friendship between the two countries. The statue — one of the master’s many unfinished works — was not the only unfinished project in the room.

Clark, who led the campaign to drive Serbian forces from Kosovo in 1999 and is now the chairman of a Canadian energy company called Envidity, was responding to questions regarding the outfit’s desire to turn Kosovo’s estimated 14 billion tonnes of coal deposits into synthetic diesel fuel.

Last week, the Pew Research Center released its annual survey of European attitudes to America. While anti-Americanism has declined in Europe, a large "values gap" remains between Europeans and Americans. Meanwhile, anti-Americanism in the rest of the world seems actually to have increased since 2009, with confidence in President Obama noticeably down, especially in Muslim countries. Will America's reputation and influence abroad improve under Barack Obama's second term?