The glass dome, left, of Berlin's parliament building, the Reichstag, is the perfect metaphor for transparency in government. (RICK STEVES, Special to QMI Agency) More than any other place in Europe, Berlin is a work in progress. Over the last two decade

(Bantam Books) - “The Winter Palace: A Novel of Catherine the Great” by Eva Stachniak Bantam. 444 pp. $26 Catherine the Great, the much-mythologized empress of 18th-century Russia, has long been a popular subject for biographers, starring most recently i

For Fall 2012, old Hollywood glamour made its return, becoming new again for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York. Designers from Tadashi Shoji to new-comers to New York Fashion Week like Prete & Bruno all drew inspiration for their collection based on

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! Our very-visual, (almost) chatter-free snap judgment of the day: guys and girls alike can refurbish a button up sitting idle in the back of the closet with a Marlene Dietr

Keiko Okutsu wears the classic white shirt dressed up for work and dressed down over the weekend. VINCE TALOTTA/TORONTO STAR Ever since Coco Chanel blatantly liberated women from corsets and put them in a man’s style shirt, the crisp white dress shirt ha

In The Season, his classic study of showbiz, screenwriter William Goldman relates a tale which takes place at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid 1950s. MoMA's film department had prepared a reel of highlights from Marlene Dietrich's films (chasing Gary