The glitzy pianist, who famously hid his sexuality, was dismissed as a "vulgar joke" in his lifetime. But a new play gets to the truth of who he was, in private as well as in public.

The outlandish pianist and singer Liberace was such an accomplished purveyor of glitzy escapism that he famously called himself a "one-man Disneyland". During his heyday from the 1950s to the 1970s, he was also regularly described as "the world's highest paid entertainer", a claim that is impossible to verify and may well be untrue.

Still, there is no doubt that he liked to project outrageous wealth on stage. When he performed his final live residency, at New York City's Radio City Music Hall in 1985, Liberace made a grand entrance by stepping out of a giant recreation of a Fabergé egg, wearing a cape made of hot pink turkey feathers.

The man born Władziu Valentino Liberace – but who achieved global fame as a fabulous mononym – died in February 1987 from an Aids-related illness. He had learned around 18 months earlier that he was HIV positive, but never spoke publicly about his diagnosis, just as he always refuted rumours that he was gay. Since his death, however, it has become common knowledge that he enjoyed several long-term relationships with men.

Now a new stage play about Liberace, I'll Be Seeing You, which opens this month in Scotland, explores the apparent disconnect between his private and professional lives, as well as the flamboyant piano man's most immaculate deception. In 1959, three years after the Daily Mirror published an article heavily insinuating that he was homosexual, Liberace successfully sued the British newspaper for libel.

The actor who portrays Liberace in the play, revered British Shakespearean Simon Russell Beale, tells the BBC that Liberace made a significant "gamble" by taking the case to court – had he lost, his career could have been ruined. But Beale also observes that the "specific lie that Liberace told" under oath, when he insisted that he was "against the practice [of homosexuality] because it offends convention and it offends society", was "merely part of [his] continuum of lying" – or at least being evasive about – his sexuality. As it transpired, the court ruled in Liberace's favour and awarded him £8,000 in damages – the equivalent to £167,000 ($225,000) today.

Known as the "apostle to the apostles”, the controversial and multifaceted saint Mary Magdalene is shrouded in mythology and mystery. What do these artworks reveal about her?

Few biblical figures have fascinated society more than Mary Magdalene, said to be the first person to witness Christ's resurrection and to share the news. For centuries, Magdalene, a follower of Jesus known as the "apostle to the apostles", has maintained a passionate following among religious and secular communities alike, despite the Bible containing relatively few references to her. As a result, the mythology surrounding her has eclipsed who she actually was.

Over time, Magdalene's name has come to represent an amalgamation of different biblical characters and historical ideas, some of which have become more strongly associated with her than the biblical accounts themselves. This is what Mary Magdalene. Sin. Pray. Love., an exhibition opening at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt explores.

"We essentially discovered that there are three Mary Magdalenes in one," says art historian Bastian Eclercy, who has co-curated the exhibition. "One is the nameless sinner, the other one is Mary of Bethany and the third is the biblical Mary Magdalene in the strict sense."

And as its title suggests, the exhibition looks at three key ways Magdalene has been represented. "'Sin' stands for the image of the sinner and penitent that has shaped perceptions over the centuries; 'Pray' for Mary Magdalene as a saint and disciple of Jesus; and 'Love' for the various notions of love, devotion and intimacy associated with her," Eclercy tells the BBC.

Here, we look at 10 works from the exhibition that illustrate the different views on Magdalene – and changing perceptions of women over time. 

In German artist Albrecht Dürer's woodcut print on paper, a nude Magdalene is lifted towards the sky by six angels. The scene is inspired by The Golden Legend, a 13th-Century text by the Italian chronicler and archbishop Jacobus de Voragine. In one of the popular stories included in the legend, Mary retreats to the South of France in search of solitude. "There was no food available in the wilderness, and so seven times a day, she was taken up by angels and elevated into heaven to listen to their music, and that was her food," Eclercy says.

While the Italian oil painting isn't immediately recognisable as Magdalene, for experts, the small vase in the left-hand corner and red dress (broadly associated with sensuality and danger) peeking out from underneath a silver satin cloak has helped to identify her.

"Some people have argued that it could be Mary the Mother [of Christ] because we don't have many obvious tropes, but I think it is Mary Magdalene because we've got that white alabaster jar in it," says Siobhan Jolley, lecturer in Christian studies at the University of Manchester in the UK, who is curating a National Gallery touring exhibition on Mary Magdalene, set to open in 2027. She notes that the jar is associated with the unnamed female "sinner" in the Bible who anointed Jesus's feet.

Artworks through the centuries that depict Magdalene do not, in Jolley's view, tell us much about her as an actual individual. "They tell us, to my mind at least, a lot more about what different cultures have wanted women to be," she says.

Italian Mannerist painter Lavinia Fontana paints Magdalene in her signature red dress. It is one of the few early depictions of the saint by a woman artist. "While you might be looking for a kind of female gaze, this is something that we could not detect," says Eclercy. Fontana directly references a biblical scene where Mary mistakes Jesus for a gardener. In the painting, he is dressed as a traditional 16th-Century Italian labourer in a wide-brimmed hat and tunic.

Many historical and contemporary ideas of Magdalene conflate different figures in the Bible, including an unnamed "sinful woman" who anointed Jesus's feet, an adulterer, and Mary of Bethany, the relative of two other biblical figures, Martha and Lazarus. "This is what [art historian] Marina Warner calls 'the muddle of Marys' – where artists are not separating between different Marys as long as [the figure] does whatever job she needs to do in the painting or the story to make a point," Jolley says. In Vouet's painting, Magdalene is in a made-up scene (not in the Bible) at a dressing table and is being reprimanded by her sister Martha for being too vain. 

Magdalene in a state of contrition is a popular trope in art history. "She has become a role model for penitents, both male and female," says Eclercy. Western traditions in particular have progressively associated Magdalene with sexual sin, something that becomes clear in many paintings such as Cagnacci's, where themes of sexual desire are inescapable. 

While there is no direct scripture stating the wrongdoing of the unnamed "sinful woman", many have presumed it to be sexual. "It's really common to hear her described as a sex worker particularly in older texts, though we don't have any real foundation for that in biblical documents," Jolley says. "For artists, it's an opportunity to be a bit racy with a holy image. They know they can get away with depicting her as alluring or slightly sexualised in a way that they can't with other saints." In Cagnacci's painting, Magdalene holds a skull, often used in art history as a reminder that life is short and that we should prepare our souls to meet God. 

Georges de La Tour's version of a "penitent Magdalene" is notably gentler. "I like that La Tour gives us a kind of interior Magdalene," says Jolley. "We've got mirrors, candles, and other tropes of time, mortality and self-reflection without the artist needing to make [the painting] appealing in some other way." His paintings could be said to reject traditional portrayals of women in art as decorative or erotic. 

The Swiss painter portrays a dramatic Magdalene standing by Jesus's lifeless body. Instead of conforming to traditional portrayals of Magdalene as subdued or overtly sexual, Böcklin creates this fiery character, permitted to express the full range of her emotions, and thus mourn Jesus intensely. "Mary Magdalene is taking on the role of the Virgin Mary in a way," says Eclercy. "Expressing the utmost grief that you can have."

Interchangeably titled Christ and the Sinner, or Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, this painting is said to portray a famous biblical scene of Jesus stopping an angry mob from stoning an unnamed woman to death (a story that has become associated with Magdalene over time). In earlier works, where Magdalene is overly sexualised, "it tells us more about what people are imagining the worst thing a woman could be," Jolley says. Instead, Beckmann offers a more forgiving interpretation of this narrative. 

The South African artist's representation of Magdalene as Naomi Campbell addresses several ideas at once. Not only does it "say something about celebrity and reputation, which is what Mary Magdalene has endured throughout time," says Jolley, "it asks us to think about how we racialise beauty." While there is very little description in the Bible of Magdalene's physical appearance, in Western art, the saint is often portrayed as young and white. Dumas offers us something else to consider.

 "The work feels like a mirror for the audience... back on to society," Jolley adds, noting that people often feel like they know her despite understanding very little about her. "People have a parasocial relationship with Mary Magdalene. They have a sense of her that they encounter with popular culture and in art that isn't really underpinned by knowledge of the biblical character – or any real interest in that." 

Spanish visual artist Nieves González manages to keep many of Magdalene's trademarks – her auburn-blonde hair, red clothing, and her holding a skull – while modernising the famous figure by placing her in an oversized puffer jacket. Eclercy believes González is "presenting this extremely self-confident young woman." Magdalene's stare at the viewer is unapologetic. "This is a work about agency and ownership," Jolley adds. "You almost get a sense that she's kind of asking you, 'What do you want to say about me?'"

Mary Magdalene: Sin. Pray. Love. is at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt from 17 September to 17 January 2027.

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In June 1893, Lizzie Borden was tried and acquitted of the murder of her father and stepmother. It became one of the most infamous unsolved mysteries in US history – and the subject of novels, films and a new Netflix drama.

By vividly dramatising the lives of notorious killers, creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan have turned Monster, their true-crime anthology show on Netflix, into a smash hit. Serial slayer Jeffery Dahmer, patricidal brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, and Wisconsin murderer-cum-grave-robber Ed Gein have all received the "Monster" treatment – portrayals that Murphy says aim to address one question: Are monsters made or are they born?

Warning: This article contains details that some readers may find upsetting.

For the fourth season, the duo has selected Lizzie Borden as the focus of their creative speculation. And they are hardly the first. For decades, novelists, dramatists, poets – even opera composers and rock musicians – have been inspired by the macabre story of the American woman who was accused of two grisly murders in August 1892. 

It is so infamous in the history of crime in the US that schoolchildren still recite the ditty: "Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother 40 whacks / And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41."

While the rhyme might misidentify the killer, it also exaggerates the number of blows as well as the weapon (it was a hatchet, a small axe that is light enough to use with one hand). But the sequence of events is accurate – whoever killed Andrew and Abby Borden on a hot summer morning in Fall River, Massachusetts, began with Abby. She was 64, Andrew's second wife, and stepmother to his two unmarried daughters Emma, 41, and Lizzie, 32.

More than an hour later, when Andrew came home from running errands, he too met his end. Summoned by Lizzie, the police found her father on the living room sofa, nearly unrecognisable, after 11 hatchet blows.

Such was the brutality of the crime, authorities at first did not suspect Lizzie, a seemingly mild woman who taught at Fall River's Central Congregational Church. Yet at the inquest, she kept changing her account of her movements on the morning of the murders, when only she and Bridget Sullivan, the family's Irish maid, were at the house. (Emma was away on holiday and a house guest had gone out.)

Besides, although Lizzie and her sister denied it, friends and neighbours were aware of tensions in the home. Andrew was a wealthy but miserly man who forced his daughters to live in a shabby part of town and scrimp on household expenses, while he gave money to his new wife's family.

It was one of the finest pieces of art ever bought by the Met. But it had been excavated by an Italian grave robber, then smuggled to the US. In 1975, the BBC investigated the lucrative global trade in stolen antiquities.

In September 1972, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) purchased an ancient Greek vase for $1.2m ($9.6m or £7.1m today). Created around 515BC and signed by the painter Euphronios, it is considered one of the best surviving examples of ancient Greek pottery. "From this moment, histories of art will have to be rewritten," boasted the Met's director after the sale was announced, claiming that the vase was one of the two or three finest works of art ever owned by the museum.

But there were soon accusations that the vase had been illegally excavated and smuggled into the US, giving it the nickname "the hot pot". A BBC reporter, John Percival, followed its trail to the underground tombs of a necropolis just outside Cerveteri, Italy, where a professional grave robber, or tombarolo, was said to have unearthed it. And the excitement generated by its price meant that there was renewed activity in the area. "The Italian robbers are chasing million-dollar pots," said Percival. "The Italian cops are chasing the robbers."

Speaking on the BBC's Treasure Trail in 1975, Percival summed up the situation: "This is a story about buried treasure, about gold, silver and precious things hidden in the Earth long ago. It's about the thieves who dig for it by night, about the dealers who smuggle it across frontiers, about the collectors and the great museums that act as receivers of stolen goods."

"The destruction starts at the place where the object is found," Dr Nusin Askari, an expert at the Istanbul Museum, told the BBC. "It's broken so that it can be sold for a higher price in the end and so that it can be transported and smuggled out of the country easier."

To try and control the stolen antiquities trade in the Cerveteri area, a special team of police was trained in ancient art, attending lectures by an expert at Rome's Villa Giulia Museum. Yet illegal excavations were difficult to patrol, and kept appearing like giant potholes dotted around Italian fields. 

"The whole area is littered with absolutely hundreds of tombs which can be opened up easily," said Percival, crouching next to a freshly dug pit that had appeared that morning. It was an early Etruscan tomb, with grave goods not as rich as those found in some later ones, and the robbers had left behind multiple fragments not worth removing.

In a nearby area also plundered by grave robbers, Etruscan pots recovered from illegal excavations were piled in a museum courtyard. Next to them was a stack of long metal skewers or kiavi, which the robbers used to probe the ground, looking for hollow places in the soft bedrock.

Yet some tomb raiders had more sophisticated kit. "Nowadays, there's some very fine electronic equipment that's available, and these people do use this," the US explorer Howard Jennings told the BBC, describing the activities of treasure hunters in South America at the time. "It eliminates an awful lot of digging if you can locate metal objects, and it's metal objects that these people are generally after because gold is more easily smuggled out than bulky pottery."

He explained how the value of the loot was determined in a straightforward way. "The wholesale price of pre-Columbian gold artefacts is around 15 times its weight in gold. So if the curator of a museum agrees to purchase, the gold objects are simply weighed, and a bit of multiplication is done on the basis of 15 times that weight, and that's how the payment's made."

While laws have since been tightened, there was almost a Wild West feel to the situation Jennings described in 1975. "There are vast areas of South America, particularly in Ecuador, that are totally unexplored and unmapped, and it's very easy for a person to simply disappear into a jungle for months on end in areas where there are literally hundreds of burial mounds," he said. "They can work there without any question of the authorities finding them. And they stay until they've acquired all that they feel that they can smuggle out of the country – and then out they come and away they go."

Disposing of smuggled antiquities was easy, according to Jennings. "They're in great demand. The only thing the museums, the auction houses, the dealers, private collectors want to know is, is this artefact authentic? Once that's been determined, that it's an authentic antiquity, there are no other questions asked."

Yet countries rich in archaeological sites have passed laws forbidding the export of antiquities. Illegal shipments are regularly intercepted by the authorities, and many stolen artefacts have been returned to their countries of origin. The Met's "hot pot" was sent back to Italy in 2008, after it was found to have passed through the hands of antiquities smuggler Giacomo Medici, convicted of trafficking in looted objects in 2005. "But as long as there's a market," said Percival, "the pillage of the past goes on." 

More like this:

• The US explorers who found a lost ancient city

• The dazzling discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb

• The theory that Stonehenge was a prehistoric computer

"From murderous temple thieves in India to church pillagers in Bolivia to hundred-man bands of tomb raiders in China's Liaoning Province, looters are strip-mining our past," said a 2016 National Geographic article, arguing that "satellite imagery, police seizures, and witness reports from the field all indicate that the trade in stolen treasures is booming around the world". 

All that plundering damages our understanding of our history. "It matters because it's destroying knowledge," museum curator Nick Thomas told the BBC. Looting any archaeological site, "whether it's a grand temple or a minor tomb with just two or three pots and a skeleton… is simply destroying knowledge about our past which we can pass on to the future."

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From a wild-eyed performance by Robert Pattinson to an Elon Musk documentary and a short film about Marilyn Monroe at 100, here are the Venice films attracting Oscars buzz.

The Venice International Film Festival is often a launchpad for films that rocket their way to Oscar glory. Over the past decade, these have included La La Land and The Shape of Water, Roma and The Brutalist, Joker and Frankenstein. This year's festival featured fewer big-budget Hollywood awards contenders than usual, but here are six films that are already fizzing with Oscar buzz.

Robert Pattinson has had quite a year. He was hilariously flustered in The Drama and scene-stealingly oily in The Odyssey, and now he excels in the juiciest role of his career. Primetime tells the story of Chris Hansen and his controversial television show, To Catch a Predator, which tricked potential sex offenders into incriminating themselves on camera in the early 2000s. Pattinson, who also produces the film, is in almost every scene. He moves and sounds just like the real Hansen, while adding some signature touches of reptilian menace and wild-eyed obsession. Between the Academy's taste for impersonations of real people, and Pattinson's popularity as an art-house character actor with Hollywood leading-man charisma, it could be time for his first Oscar nomination.

Martin McDonagh's last film, The Banshees of Inisherin, was nominated for nine Oscars, but didn't win any. Could Wild Horse Nine do any better? A politically charged black comedy about two CIA agents on holiday on Easter Island in 1973, it's a showcase for another of McDonagh's dysfunctional double acts, but instead of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who starred together in The Banshees of Inisherin and In Bruges, the two main men are played by John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell. Malkovich is a best actor front-runner. He is always magnetically weird, but here, as a pained, red-eyed, ageing assassin, he is touching and complex too. It helps that the 72-year-old has been nominated for two previous Oscars, most recently for In the Line of Fire (1993), and that Academy voters love a "comeback" narrative.

Flesh Impact is a Venice rarity: a potential Oscar nominee in the best live action short film category. A warm-hearted 17-minute charmer, it was written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and commissioned to celebrate Marilyn Monroe's centenary. Gyllenhaal imagines Monroe as a sprightly 100-year-old auditioning for a Broadway play (Gyllenhaal's husband, Peter Sarsgaard, plays the director), and taking the opportunity to tell her life story in her own words. "Flesh impact," she explains, was Billy Wilder's term for the quality that made cinema viewers believe they could reach out and touch her. In a stroke of casting genius, Monroe is played by the 93-year-old Ellen Burstyn (an Oscar, Emmy and Tony winner), while Dakota Johnson plays her younger self in flashback.

As soon as Woman Unknown premiered, this steely Danish drama was mentioned as a potential best international film nominee, thanks to its heavyweight themes, nerve-racking plot, impeccable period details, and its terrifically contained but expressive performance by Mathilde Arkel. Directed by May el-Toukhy (it was the only film in Venice's main competition strand to be directed by a woman), Woman Unknown is set in Copenhagen just after World War Two. Arkel plays a nanny who is now engaged to her boss, a widowed industrialist (Carsten Bjornlund). But one day on the tram, an old schoolmate recognises her, and threatens to expose the sexual relationship she had with a German during the Nazi occupation. Woman Unknown examines the lines people will cross to survive, and the way men justify their abuse of women.

Lee Chang-dong's last film, Burning, came out in 2018, but the intricacy and delicacy of his follow-up, Possible Love, suggests why it might have taken so long. This piquant drama revolves around a middle-class director (Cho Yeo-jeong) who, with the help of her wealthy husband (Zo In-sung), is making a documentary about a striking factory worker (Sul Kyung-gu) and his wife (Jeon Do-yeon). She bonds with her subjects over drunken dinners and weekend breaks. But can the two couples have a genuine connection across the class divide, or is theirs is a friendship of convenience? Possible Love currently has a 100% score on the Rotten Tomatoes reviews round-up site, so it's more than possible that it will be nominated for a best international film Oscar.

Alex Gibney's profile of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is a four-hour epic. Without pausing for breath, the documentary races through the tech mogul's life, from his childhood in South Africa to his years as a geeky Silicon Valley hopeful, to his trillion-dollar success as the boss of Tesla and SpaceX, to his support of far-right political parties around the world. Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2008, and Musk is making so many headlines that it could do the same. The tycoon himself called it "a hit piece that misses and makes the fatal sin of being boring for four hours". He couldn't be more wrong.

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Although Barbara Cartland sold around 750 million books, you'll struggle to find a copy in a bookshop today. And the socialite led an extraordinary and surprising life - why has the UK's master of romantic fiction disappeared from memory?

To take your place behind William Shakespeare and Agatha Christie as the third best-selling author in history is a remarkable feat. Yet, ask most people what they know of the late romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland and it's probably not her literary success that they'll mention.

Instead, people might recall her penchant for pink, particularly her uniform of billowing, candy-coloured gowns. Or her famously thick, sooty eyelashes (created not with mascara, but boot polish applied with a toothbrush). They might remember that she always had a small dog tucked under her arm, that she reportedly took 90 vitamin pills a day and that she had a famous spat with Jackie Collins on live TV, calling her books "evil". Or that she was the step-grandmother of the late Princess Diana – who loved her books.

The Venice Film Festival has hosted the premiere of major documentary-maker Alex Gibney's epic and provocative new profile of the richest man on Earth, which has been years in the making. Here are five key takeaways from the film.

Alex Gibney, the Oscar-winning director of Taxi to the Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, has made documentaries about some of the richest and most powerful people on Earth. But none of them has been as rich and powerful as Elon Musk. Maybe that's why Gibney's profile of the tech entrepreneur and SpaceX boss is such an epic. Musk, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, has a running time of 225 minutes, and will be released with a 10-minute intermission – so that's almost four hours on the life and work of the world's richest man.

Still, the time rockets by. There is little in the film that isn't already on record, but Gibney gathers all the extant reporting into one breathlessly fast-moving, largely negative, and terrifyingly apocalyptic profile. Here are five things you should know about the documentary – just in case you don't have four hours to spare.

Gibney initially tried for an interview with Musk, but when the project was announced back in March 2023, Musk declared on social media that it would be a "hit piece", to which Gibney responded, "How would you know?" The director's solution is to have an AI-generated avatar of Musk repeat things that he has said in public. This is apt, says Gibney in his voiceover, because Musk believes that we might all be living in a simulation – a video game being played by our descendants in the future.

David Byrne has co-written Let Me Sell You a Dream for the film's closing credits, which has lyrics consisting entirely of phrases spoken by Musk in the past. The title is appropriate, according to some of Gibney's interviewees, who say that Musk tends to attract investment by promising that imagined future accomplishments – such as cities on Mars and completely safe self-driving cars – are imminent or already realised. "That's not happening," says Adam Becker, an author and astrophysicist, about Musk's scheme to colonise Mars. "The gravity is too low, the radiation is too high, there's no air, and the dirt is filled with poison." Musk has consistently defended his visionary philosophy however: "I'm very good at predicting the future," he told The Economist in a July interview. "I'm not perfect but I'm very good… people don't realise that what I'm saying will come to pass – maybe not exactly in the timing that I thought, but it will come to pass."

The film suggests that Musk dealt with the US government the way he dealt with Twitter. Zoë Schiffer, the author of Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter, says that after Musk bought the social media platform, what she refers to as his "goons" pushed out the majority of the staff without pausing to learn what they actually did. Later, as the head of President Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, Musk followed "the Twitter playbook", Schiffer says, describing how he tried and failed to wipe out the US national debt by slashing the budget of numerous departments, this time with the help of a group of assistants in their early twenties who had no government experience. Musk bemoaned that Doge had become "the whipping boy for everything" in an interview with the Washington Post in May last year, just before leaving the Trump administration.

Gibney uses clips from a British fantasy film, The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937), to illustrate his very dramatic view of Musk. In this black-and-white classic, based on an HG Wells story, a celestial being bestows an ordinary man (Roland Young) with infinite powers. The man eventually demands that the world's leaders change society instantly, but he ends up accidentally destroying the planet.

Reviews from the Venice premiere have so far been largely positive. Variety called it "a lacerating and important watch, grounded in Gibney's supremely insightful but user-friendly mastery of the documentary form", while in a four-star review, The Telegraph dubbed it "a chillingly forensic hatchet job". Unsurprisingly, Musk himself has not been one of its admirers: on X on Wednesday, among other comments, he described the film as "a hit piece that misses, and makes the fatal sin of being boring for 4 hours".

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Allan Ginsberg's graphic verse had a seismic effect on American society. When two people were put on trial for selling it, the judgement was a landmark moment in loosening censorship.

On 7 October 1955, Allen Ginsberg first performed his poem Howl, destined to be a defining work of the Beat Generation – a bohemian, nonconformist literary subculture rejecting the US's post-World War Two social order.

Only a select few gathered at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Yet less than two years later, Ginsberg and Howl would be infamous. In 1957, both were at the centre of a high-profile obscenity trial that would change the course of literary censorship for decades, and help to liberalise 1950s Cold War America.

Ginsberg's book Howl and Other Poems – the classic 1959 live performance album of which is newly reissued on vinyl this month – saw few sales when first put on the shelves of City Lights Books in San Francisco in 1956. But, with the trial, the content of the 112-stanza poem went on to cause national outrage. Religious groups and conservative authorities were shocked by its profanity and graphic depictions of drug-taking, homosexuality and mental illness.

"[Its publication] was near the height of Cold War culture," says Jonah Raskin, author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation. "A time of censorship of news and information, of intense conformity, of repression of people for their political beliefs and for being homosexual."   

Printed in England for cost-effectiveness, Howl was imported into the US for sale. The first shipment arrived without issue, but in March 1957, 520 copies from the UK were seized by US customs for being obscene: one inspector told reporters "you wouldn't want your children coming across it". Then when in June, two undercover police bought a copy of the book from City Lights, both owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti and bookshop manager Shig Murao were arrested and charged with selling obscene material.

Here are some of the world's best new buildings that are immersed in their wild surroundings.

The impulse to be immersed in nature at its most wild and untouched is a powerful one for many of us. It goes hand in hand with the human longing for tranquility, and the urge to escape the city and the modern world, along with pressing concerns about the environment.

And buildings that blend with their natural surroundings are increasingly sought after, according to the World Architecture Festival (WAF). Architects are allowing their imaginations to run free, and are exploring new, expressive ideas – from dwellings immersed in the jungle or with roofs open to the skies, to residences seemingly cradled, nest-like, among the trees.

The annual festival – taking place in Florida this year – is spotlighting many nature-inspired projects, as its shortlist demonstrates. "There's an increased interest in incorporating nature into buildings in terms of external landscape, and via balconies, terraces and rooftops," Paul Finch, WAF's founder, tells the BBC. "And there's an assumption that good buildings will be environmentally considered rather than this being exceptional."

Here are 10 projects from the shortlist, all deeply rooted in nature. 

This 40,000-sq ft resort occupies a sloped terrain, and one of its aims is to minimise its impact on the landscape. The complex, designed by Aslam Sham Architects, comprises closely grouped buildings, and fills a plot with a curving perimeter. Its buildings include villas, a restaurant and swimming pool, and their roofs support soil and indigenous vegetation. These help to camouflage the resort. The complex's orientation controls the degree of sunlight it's exposed to. The main, east-facing façade is bathed in gentle sunlight in the mornings, while the west-facing rear protects the complex from harsh sunlight and greatly cools its interior.

The low-rise, horizontal form of this house by Atelier Design N Domain (ADND) complements the flat terrain of the surrounding, sprawling coconut grove. As its name suggests, it's grounded in the landscape ("terra" means land in Latin). The unobtrusive house is concealed by towering coconut trees but isn't cut off from the sky since its roof is punctured with openings, letting daylight flood in. Light and air further permeate the interior thanks to a series of interconnected courtyards. Materials typically used in construction in Kerala help link the house with its location. A locally quarried stone called laterite clads the exterior while other surfaces are rendered with terracotta, adding warmth.

This project by Lacime Architects nestles in the southern foothills of Mount Emei in the inland Sichuan province – a Unesco World Cultural and Natural Heritage site. The mountain has a spiritual significance as one of China's four sacred Buddhist mountains. The centre borders the scenic Guanshan Lake, and is part of a private wellness resort but also open to the public. It incorporates a reception, rooms for community activities, wellness facilities and a dining area. The roof's complex geometry references different elements of the landscape. It undulates above arches, echoing the foothills' rounded silhouettes, while its angular spike nods to the mountain's peak. And the roof's gleaming, gunmetal grey cladding mirrors the silvery sheen of the lake's surface.

This two-storey family home designed by Strang is in a leafy, subtropical Miami suburb and comprises two interlocking, rectangular structures. These connect to a large garden with swimming pools, helping to dissolve the boundary between indoors and out, an effect enhanced by trailing plants cascading over windows. An upper-level comprises shared living spaces, and the lower one private rooms. An abundance of wooden screens with decorative diagonal openings allows cool air to circulate inside.

This house by Desai Chia Architecture stands on raised ground on land also used for farming. From its elevated position, it has views of the Catskill Mountains and of heavily wooded countryside – expansive windows at the front and back reveal a vista of the mountains. The upper part of the façade is clad in corrugated metal, partly chosen as the material is frequently used in contemporary farm buildings.

Jacobsen Studio's clients hankered after a home that blended into the surrounding forest landscape. The building appears to hover against its backdrop of dense, lush vegetation. The house is largely supported by a tree-shaped structure, reducing its contact with the ground. It's mainly hidden from view, accessed from a street behind it, and is entered via the roof that doubles as a garden. 

This is an urban project but, aesthetically, decidedly organic. The architects Lyth Design's brief was to design a street with character, where students would want to spend time beyond hurriedly grabbing a meal. Food is served from modular units dotting the street. Writhing, soaring, tornado-like structures, made of highly sustainable bamboo – playfully likened to a ravenous caterpillar – provide much-needed shade when temperatures hit 38C (100F), as well as protection during the summer monsoon. 

This crafts market is a government-funded project used by the local community to sell artisanal goods and fresh produce to visitors exploring nearby Mayan archaeological sites. Located in the municipality of Nicolas Bravo in the state of Quintana Roo, the project by Aidia Studio doubles as a community centre. It comprises three key elements – a lightweight steel structure, pigmented concrete block walls and clay bricks cladding the roof and paving. Its gracefully vaulted roof collects water used for irrigation, and the building enjoys unobstructed views of the adjoining countryside.

This park is another a government-funded initiative by Aida Studio – in this case a venue hosting an annual livestock and agricultural fair. It's now also a venue for concerts and features amusement rides and craft markets. The 10-hectare fairground is enveloped by subtropical jungle. Slender, olive-green columns and undulating wooden elements were chosen to help integrate the park with the surrounding subtropical forest.

This project by Sp(r)int Studio performs a dual function. It conserves the ruins of an 11th-Century Viking-era farm which was buried and preserved under volcanic ash – one of Iceland's most valued archaeological sites – and extends the site thanks to the creation of a larger shelter made of untreated larchwood, galvanised steel and recyclable polycarbonate. An original timber frame in poor condition that once protected the ruins was retained, reinforced and used as the project's core structure. The shelter now offers new amenities, including a sitting area and platforms for viewing the ruins, raised from the ground to avoid disturbing the terrain.

The World Architecture Festival takes place in Florida, US, on 18-20 November.

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In London, 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov was killed with an umbrella, in what is suspected to have been a political poisoning by the KGB. He died four days later. The following year, Markov's widow and elder brother told the BBC's Panorama that they were warned about the murder plot just months before – by an anonymous man.

"He'd felt a jab in his thigh. And he'd looked round, and there'd been a man behind him who'd apologised and dropped an umbrella." These are the words of Annabel Markov, talking about her husband Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident, journalist and writer.

On 7 September 1978, 49-year-old Markov was waiting at a bus stop on Waterloo Bridge in central London when he said he'd been stabbed with an umbrella. Four days later he died in hospital, with doctors initially diagnosing blood poisoning. Yet detectives soon realised it had been a political murder, one that had used a highly sophisticated technique that also targeted another Bulgarian exile.

Markov's widow and elder brother told the BBC's Panorama in 1979 how an anonymous man warned them that Markov was going to be poisoned, months before his death.

And interviews with the former head of a KGB assassination squad and a former colonel in the Bulgarian secret service, both then talking publicly for the first time, placed the assassination at the highest levels of the Bulgarian and Soviet governments.

In the days following Markov's death, Britain's anti-terrorist squad found a clue that convinced them that he had been the victim of a unique murder plot. "At Scotland Yard's forensic laboratory, the chief scientific officer examined a minute metal object that had been found in Markov's thigh," said Panorama reporter Michael Cockerell.

"Under the microscope, it was clear that the object was an extraordinarily sophisticated pellet, no bigger than a pinhead. It had four tiny holes passing through that the forensic experts were convinced had contained an infinitesimally tiny amount of a lethally toxic poison."