It reeks of a kind of nostalgia, opening a scruffy, squeaky door to an entire gone world

The Courtauld Institute of Art, London

An epic campaign of restoration of Rubens' masterpiece is underway at the Courtauld Institute of Art. The Independent Online talks to the restorers and reveals the progress in pictures

Following the recent death of the Duke of Grafton we have lost, with the death of Denis Mahon, the last of that generation of men of independent means who dedicated their lives to the public good. Grandson of the 5th Marquess of Sligo and a beneficiary of the Guinness Mahon merchant bank, Denis Mahon was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he read history and took tutorials from Kenneth Clark, who in turn introduced him to Nikolaus Pevsner, then teaching at the Courtauld Institute. Pevsner had previously researched Milanese Seicento (17th century) painting and he suggested that Mahon should study the neglected Bolognese painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Il Guercino.

All bar one of England's 130 universities had their spending slashed for the next academic year yesterday.

Monday Interview: The National Gallery's director, tells Rob Sharp why it's too expensive to take the museum's best-known works to the regions

Every English university will have to charge students more than £6,000 a year to maintain standards under the Government's new fees regime, according to a new analysis published today.

It was a characteristically modest and exact description; Richard Walker knew better than anyone the art of cataloguing, describing what he saw economically and precisely, yet evoking the picture as vividly as if you could see it.

She's brainy and beautiful, and a rising British acting talent with a clutch of upcoming risqué roles, but don't expect a tortured soul with cigarette in hand. Rachel Shields meets Imogen Poots.

Michael Creeth had a long and distinguished scientific career and made a significant contribution to one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the last century, when as a young PhD student his experiments confirmed the existence of the special bonds known as hydrogen bonds which hold the two strands of the DNA molecule together. This finding, based on measurements of the viscosity of highly purified solutions of DNA, was published in 1947 and proved crucial for the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the double helix six years later by James Watson and Francis Crick.

Dispute with Christie's after painting worth millions was bought for £8,000

A breathtaking collection of drawings outlines the intriguing back story of the artist's dangerous desire

Cosy furnishings, hand-made mattresses, a roaring fire, and top food. Minty Clinch grins and bears it

Paul Nash, the celebrated war artist, could see conflict in everyday objects, even on the Sussex Downs