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It’s hard to draw a line between Disney and Walt Disney. Disney is the craggy monster at the top of the mountain in Fantasia; Mr Disney created the mouse. Disney is Aladdin’s all-powerful genie; Mr Disney had a Clark Gable mustache. Disney is an enormous and sunny paradise stretching all the way to the elephant graveyard; Mr Disney... again, I can only think of the mouse. But the man and the legend are indeed distinct, as the Walt Disney Family Museum intends to prove.

A new museum sponsored by Disney--the family, not the multinational corporation--seems strange at first. When it opens in October in an historic building in San Francisco's Presidio district, it will make for a somewhat humble $112m tribute. But this is appropriate. The museum celebrates a great American fantasist--a man, not just a mouse or a billion-dollar brand.   read more »

Today's New York Times has an article about one of the creepiest, most disturbing collections of photographs I have ever seen. It belonged to Karl Hoecker, the adjutant to Auschwitz's commandant, and it comprises 116 photographs of Auschwitz guards and personnel frolicking during their off hours. A slide show accompanies the article (unfortunately, some rather grating and obvious narration from an archivist accompanies the slide show), so you can see Auschwitz's joyous guards for yourself. The image - or rather the person from an image - that stays with me is a young German woman holding a bowl upside down and contorting her face into a mock sob because she just finished her portion of blueberries. At first it seems a typical summer idyll, before you realise that it was taken just a few miles away from an Auschwitz operating at full capacity.