Notebook

"Unknown road," warned the stranger's satnav. Diverted from the familiar A303 by a sudden closure on a dark evening, I joined another baffled motorist at a tiny junction with an unhelpful signpost indicating an unexpected place name such as Longbridge Deverill, or perhaps it was Marston Magna. It was a shock to be faced so abruptly with the A303's hinterland, hitherto unknown to me and, I suspect, many of the drivers of the vehicles – sometimes more than 30,000 – pounding over what Tom Fort calls "the highway to the sun".

Go on a tasty trip to Cadbury World in Birmingham, which has joined up with the Ramada Encore to provide overnight breaks for a family of four for £99. The deal includes B&B and tickets for two adults and two kids for the attraction, which tells Cadbury's delicious story.

Outlook Yell has a problem. The stumbling directories business that used to be known as Yellow Pages has become a byword for bad management and bad debt. (It has a mountain of the stuff which needs restructuring. Again.) Not to mention the fact that the internet has presented all sorts of challenges to its business model.

The company behind fizzy drink Irn-Bru has defied the downturn with an increase in sales this year.

The vast majority of UK adults [84 per cent] think children should be protected from marketing by tobacco companies, according to new research by Cancer Research UK.

Ben Ainslie is back into another knife-fight with his fellow Britons after the first day of the Finn class world championship in Falmouth. He is still a banker for a fourth gold at the Olympic Games regatta in Weymouth.

Rival firms bend rules to reap rewards from the Games

The stylist opened his first salon in London in 1954 and helped shape the look of the Swinging Sixties

Sainsbury's signalled an end to the supermarket "space race" today when it revealed it would scale back expansion this year.

A scramble is on to sign Ajmal Shahzad after Yorkshire admitted their differences with the 26-year-old England bowler, who made one Test appearance against Bangladesh in 2010 and was a member of the Ashes-winning squad the following winter, cannot be reconciled.

Fashionable underwear and dresses for plus-size thirtysomethings helped catalogue business N Brown report a surprise profit rise.

Fashionable underwear and dresses for plus-size thirtysomething women have helped the catalogue business N Brown report a surprise profit.