The Diary: Clint Eastwood; Babylon; Imagine This; Boni Sones

When Clint Eastwood met the news anchorwoman, Dina Ruiz, during an interview in 1993, it was by all accounts a whirlwind romance that ended in marriage (his second, her first). But now the Hollywood actor has admitted that while she might well have been smitten with him, she hadn't got round to watching his 'Dirty Harry' film series, which has helped make him an icon of masculinity. In an interview with 'Total Film' magazine, published today, Eastwood says: "My wife had never seen 'Dirty Harry' and she was broadcasting with the NBC affiliate in Monterey County and the fellows in the newsroom would always say to her, 'You haven't seen 'Dirty Harry' and you're going out with Clint Eastwood?' And she'd say: 'I've seen a lot of his films but not that one...'."

Mesopotamia's missing link

A curator of the British Museums's latest exhibition, Babylon, which brings together precious items from the ancient Mesopotamian city, has bemoaned the absence of treasures from Iraq. Irving Finkel, who secured the loan of treasures from museums in Paris and Berlin, says that when curators began planning the show, they thought about borrowing from the recently "liberated" Baghdad Museum. "But the museum was shut off and the collection wasn't accessible. When the world becomes sane again... we hope to stage an exhibition of works from Iraq," he says. The show does feature a set of playing cards for US troops inhabiting the original site of Babylon, with messages telling them its antiquities were "not for sale" and that: "Helicopter rotor wash can damage archaeological sites."

The survivors' story

Is it any surprise to hear that Jewish groups in Britain were a little suspicious when they heard about the new musical, 'Imagine This', which is set in the Warsaw ghetto, to be staged at the New London Theatre? But its American director, Beth Trachtenberg, was determined to give the show a degree of authenticity, and won the community over by consulting with British and American survivors of the Holocaust, whose stories have ended up being part of the drama. She described how the rich cultural and artistic life within the ghetto would be shown alongside the Nazi's reign of terror. "We had an obligation to be realistic. Yes, there are characters who die because there were people who died in the Warsaw ghetto. We have exactly what took place in the ghetto, though not in an explicit manner."

Their own women

In a riposte to 1997's "Blair Babes" photo of Labour MPs clustered around the new PM, Boni Sones, an executive producer of Women's Parliamentary Radio, has brought together 104 female MPs for a photo-shoot outside the Houses of Parliament. She said so many female MPs hated the picture – which had according to one, made them look like "pilot fish gawping at the Prime Minister" – that Ms Sones enlisted the same Reuters photographer, Kieran Doherty. The results include a rather amusing "Little and Large"-style portrait of Vera Baird standing back-to-back with the shortest, Sarah Teather (who apparently had a stand-off with fellow little person, Hazel Blears, for the honour). Sones said the debate between Blears and Teather was settled by "half an inch" .