Let me make it clear from the outset that I am not going to write about Samantha Brick, the woman who wrote in a newspaper last week on "why women hate me for being beautiful", and provoked the fury of a nation. I'm not going to rate her looks, her personality or her mental health (and anyone who feels the need to do so as a result of reading this column, please provide photos of yourself and a note from your psychotherapist so that we can all see what makes you such a perfect judge). But what I would like to talk about is who benefits from this bizarre news event. I want to ask, because seeing so many otherwise smart, feisty people being sucked into its vortex has made me want to cry.

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Katy Guest leaps to the defence of Britain's chewed postal workers

The Government gave us all food for thought last week when it finally published the first data from its long-awaited report on happiness. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) interviewed 80,000 people for its National Well-being Programme, and now it can tell us with some certainty that, on a happiness scale from 0 to 10, people in the UK are, on average, 7.6 happy.

How nice to hear Maggie Philbin on the Today programme last week, talking about a new magazine from the people behind New Scientist that will look at "what science and science fiction can tell us about the future". The first edition of Arc will be available on iPad and Kindle, and in print as a limited edition only. That's a shame: I like my futurology on paper pages, preferably bound together with a staple. But maybe I'm just a bit frightened by all of this 'ere new innovation.

The 1995 book 'The Rules' was full of questionable advice for women in relationships. Katy Guest devises 29 more useful tips to mark Wednesday's opportunity to propose

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Dunmore's historical novels have been compared to Tolstoy. This wartime ghost story is not in that league, but it does what it says on the dust jacket