Since her popular debut, Guppies for Tea, Swedish-born Marika Cobbold has established a reputation for astute and acerbic romances. Her previous novel, Aphrodite's Workshop for Reluctant Lovers, saw the goodness of love intervening in human affairs via the auspices of a relationship therapist. The heroine of her seventh novel, Eliza Cummings, could do with some one-to-one sessions herself.

The potter Ray Finch was a man of dignity with strong values who shrank from self-promotion and publicity.

It seems that more of us are taking our summer breaks in Britain. If you're doing the same – and have an eye for style – you can pick up some brilliant finds for your home away from the beaten track.

A celebration of the power couple of modern interior design husband and wife Robin and Lucienne Day opens in London this week.

The newly appointed director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich, Paul Greenhalgh, says that craft-based art is at risk of a slow death in Britain unless art schools are better funded.

She died many centuries ago, but her mummified corpse and clothing have been almost perfectly preserved despite being buried for hundreds of years in a wooden tomb a few feet beneath a busy street in the city of Taizhou, eastern China.

Her prints are loved by Hollywood A-listers, but Stickley hasn't let success go to her head. It's still just a hobby, she tells Huma Qureshi

When Emma Bridgewater first came to Stoke on Trent with a view to making ceramics, she was charmed by the "cheerful griminess" of the city and "fascinated and appalled by the chaos of roadworks... boarded-up shops and rundown terraces". In this book, her husband and business partner, Matthew Rice, a fine designer, sets out to explore the contradictory qualities and defects of this city founded on coal, steel and ceramics; to try to understand why Stoke on Trent and its industry grew, why it has declined and what its future might be.

Although trained as a potter, Gillian Lowndes incorporated a range of other materials in her objects that took on all the strength and intrigue of sculpture. Taking an experimental approach that drew on a diverse range of objects that included traditional artifacts seen and collected in Africa, the detritus of everyday, as well as clay, Lowndes produced work that challenged perceptions of what clay could be and how it could be used to comment on waste, culture and tradition.

A team of American archaeologists excavating in the Guatamalan jungle beneath an ancient Maya pyramid have discovered a royal tomb, filled with colourful 1,600-year-old Mayan artefacts and the bones of as many as six children, possible victims of human sacrifice.

European competition watchdogs fined 17 bathroom fittings companies a total of €622m ($835m) yesterday for fixing prices, but five of them received lower penalties because of the economic crisis.

The potter fired by treasured memories

It is rare for a textile designer to achieve a high public profile. Lucienne Day, whose vibrant printed patterns revitalised British homes during the 1950s, was the exception.