Brave was the adjective they used. It's the same epithet that friends apply when they see me playing the ukulele and singing songs in public: "That was brave." I don't take it as a compliment. "Brave" in these cases is pretty clearly a euphemism for stupid, foolhardy or reckless. So it was that when Victoria and I told friends and acquaintances that we were planning to open an independent bookshop and café, we were often told, worryingly, that we were being "brave".

Emma Thompson is working on a remake of My Fair Lady and has suddenly come over all Henry Higgins. "We have to reinvest in the idea of articulacy as a form of personal human freedom and power" the actor has told the Radio Times. "I went to give a talk at my old school and the girls were all doing their 'likes' and 'innits' and 'it ain'ts', which drives me insane. Just don't do it. Because it makes you sound stupid".

If you ask me, I do wish working mothers and stay-at-home mothers would stop scrapping as it is very tiring, boring and pointless and it also makes a terrible racket if they happen to scrap in your street, as they do in ours. Many a time I have had to stick my head out the window and shout: "You, working mother, and you, stay-at-home mother, just pack it in. There's a mother who is meant to be working but is watching Cash in the Attic up here and I can't hear a thing over this row about what's best for children and it's not as if it is ever going to get you anywhere, anyhow. Who knows why some kids grow up to be crack-addicted, maladjusted losers? Now, be off, or I'll throw a bucket of water over you both. There's a decent-ish picture frame in that attic and, goddamn it, I want to know what it's worth."

Three years ago an art installation in Trafalgar Square charted the journey of a sex-trafficked girl from Eastern Europe to a Western brothel. A powerful clarion call, it inspired Lucy Kirkwood's hit It Felt Empty When the Heart Went at First But It Is Alright Now. It also, it turns out, inspired Fair Trade, which arrives at the Fringe with Emma Thompson's endorsement as executive producer.

*Frances Ruffelle is calling on old showbiz pals to jazz up her show. Tonight's features Sadie Frost, duetting on "My Best Friend". "I'm doing a film at the moment where I'm singing," says Frost. "I'm having lessons, but I know my limit."

The actress reveals how adapting 'Sense and Sensibility' for the screen helped her to recover from depression

Take a preview peak at 'Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang' ahead of its release in cinemas on Friday. This exclusive video feature explores the relationship between Nanny (Emma Thompson) and a Jackdaw named Mr Edelweiss who follows her around.

Helen Mirren fulfils the unofficial requirement for at least one British Dame to be in the running for a Best Actress Oscar, but the big story for home-grown talent this year involves two of our most celebrated comic writers: Nick Hornby and Armando Iannucci.

Though every page testifies to the well-stocked mind of Sutherland, it is particularly revealing of his chain of thought.

A 16-year-old's crush on a man twice her age with a taste for Ravel and fine art inspires a brilliant evocation of 1961 and a world The Beatles would make disappear overnight

Too cool for school

In this autumnal romance Dustin Hoffman plays a disappointed musician (he writes jingles for a living) who flies to London for the wedding of his only daughter.

In his introduction to this slim volume, editor Barry Day tries to argue the case for Coward as a weighty thinker, deeper and more profoundly political than his lightning one-liners have led us to believe. Wit, Coward said, should be "a glorious treat like caviar", not "spread about like marmalade".

"It's our turn now," says the young soldier at the end of Brideshead Revisited, and so it is. Do not mind the old incumbents who moan that Diana Quick can never be robbed of her role as Julia Flyte, or that Jeremy Irons conveyed more emotion as Charles Ryder. Instead, there is a fashionable distaste for barmy old faith and self-restraint. Brideshead has become better looking and more shallow.