Dorothy Knowles was a woman of immense talent and charm who excelled in many fields. A respected academic and authority on French 20th-century theatre, she was also a talented dancer and musician as well as a champion fencer.

Steve Borthwick's hopes of forcing his way back into the England squad for the autumn internationals have suffered an early setback.

An elderly woman killed herself after ending up almost penniless chasing a lottery scam, an inquest heard today.

An ex-Premier League footballer wept today as he was cleared of drunkenly head-butting his sister during a row in which he allegedly called her a "form of cancer".

Artist and teacher Stanley Lewis, who died last year at the age of 103, painted every single day for 84 years. Yet despite his remarkable talent and prolific work ethic, the first major exhibition of this little-known artist is yet to be held. It opens on Saturday alongside works from the Cecil Higgins Collection by Lewis’ tutors, friends and influences, including William Rothenstein, Augustus John and Stanley Spencer.

Police were looking today for witnesses who saw a man being frogmarched naked through a town by a gang of people.

A proposal to legally ban a teenager from wearing his trousers so low that the public could see his underpants has been rejected, it was revealed yesterday.

The London Marathon is the greatest pro-am mass participation event in the world, something of which Britain can be justly proud. Simply magnificent, brilliantly staged by Dave Bedford and his team. The way that race director Bedford got every international elite competitor to the starting line this year amid the volcanic ash crisis was a masterpiece of organisation.

It was not the kind of preparation that the late, great Cliff Temple listed in the pages of Challenge of the Marathon – alongside carbohydrate loading and race week tapering. Mara Yamauchi was still finding her feet yesterday following her six-day, 6,500-mile marathon trek to get to England for the mere 26.2 miles of the London Marathon on Sunday. The afternoon after making it to the race headquarters in the shadow of Tower Bridge, the Oxford woman had every reason to feel more like Steve Martin in the midst of his Planes, Trains and Automobiles ordeal than the lean, mean, fully revved-up marathon racing machine ranked second in the world in 2009.

The country's richest crime lawyers have been named and shamed by the Justice Secretary in an attempt to prove barristers and solicitors are overpaid by the state.

Like Dufy, Edward Bawden looks easy to imitate, until you try. Unlike the ebullient French painter of pleasure, however, Bawden could not have been more English – in the manner of his time.