'Something would always go wrong at his parties. One year something caught fire'

Getting snapped at fashion events is part of the package – even if the pictures that come out [in the media] can sometimes be bad. I wish you could delete bad photos in newspapers, like you can [untag them] on Facebook.

"I think opera needs to be part of the cultural landscape... If we only make opera about Martians who live on the moon, then it's deeply unsatisfactory." So believes John Fulljames directing Babur in London, his last production for The Opera Group before joining the Royal Opera House. The uncompromising slice of reality premiered at Basingstoke pending a countrywide tour before hitting India concerns four homegrown terrorists Mo, Faiz, Nafisa and Saira on the eve of their suicide mission. Strangely, considering the project's extensive consultations with Islamic scholars to avoid offence, celluloid has been there ahead of them with Chris Morris's 2010 achingly funny and touching Four Lions, about four incompetent British jihadists. 

To those of us who own an underwear drawer full of greying, baggy cotton, renowned lingerie label Agent Provocateur might seem a far-off foreign paradise of silken wonder.

From foxy florals to sexy sets, Emma Akbareian selects the underwear that's too good to hide

Mark Ronson has married Josephine De La Baume.

Xavier Pauchard was born in 1880 in Le Morvan, known as the green heart of France. Unsurprisingly wood was the most important construction material but despite that, he and his father and grandfather before him were zinc roofers.

Nothing says love like a pair of discount knickers. For a friend's upcoming bachelorette party, we – her friends (which, by the end of this, may or may not include me) – decided to each send the bride a pair of racy underwear. Given the price limit, I decided it would be better to procure a discounted version of something pricy, rather than a full-priced version of something paltry.

Scotland Yard has come under pressure to reveal the extent of its covert surveillance of peaceful protesters after the collapse of a case following the unmasking of an undercover police officer.

Police were facing serious questions today after using an undercover officer to infiltrate climate campaign groups for up to 10 years at a cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Mike Figgis is better known for his films than for taking photographs. But now some of the director's sexually charged images of women, including blindfolded girls, an abstract nude and Kate Moss descending a staircase in suspenders, are going on show in "Best of British", at London's Little Black Gallery, alongside pictures by Terence Donovan, Terry O'Neill, Patrick Lichfield and Bob Carlos Clarke.

Claire Rayner, the doyenne of agony aunts whose warmth and wisdom imparted in her trademark gravelly tones made her the nation's favoured mother figure for four decades, has died after a long illness to which her family said she had typically refused to succumb.