More than $20 billion worth of Russian money gathered under the high ceilings of New York’s Neue Galerie on Monday evening to open a new exhibit featuring the private collection of one of the country’s top bankers — and to promote the new oil company he has just taken part in founding.

In recent years an important direction of state policy is support for Russian culture and language in the Russian world abroad. The Public Chamber and the Russian Peace Foundation are implementing ‘The Russian Corner’ project.

When the British Museum lent one of the sculptures known as the Elgin marbles to the State Hermitage Museum here last year, the move angered Greece, which wants the sculptures back, and set off a spirited debate about restitution. But it was also a diplomatic coup by one man: Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage and a skilled cultural ambassador.

Students at Emerson Elementary learned more about Japanese culture through exchanging cultural artifact boxes with students from a Japanese classroom. Beth Dalin, a third-grade teacher at Emerson, said she hoped the project showed students that they have more in common with students from Japan than they may have previously thought.

History will be quick to remind us that China, India, and the Middle East had rich and refined cultures while Europeans were still struggling through the material and intellectual poverty of the Dark Ages and before the existence of the Americas was even known to them.

In what will be the first book to look at all of Tagore's travels internationally - his politics of friendship and practise of liberal humanism, scholars will gather in Edinburgh on May 12 to reveal to the world how the Indian Nobel laureate was perceived globally. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to be combining a well-calibrated soft power push with his visit to China, leveraging social media, Bollywood and yoga to reach out to ordinary Chinese citizens.