The poor hyphen. With the news last week that rapper Jay-Z was dropping the hyphen from his name to become simply Jay Z, it becomes the latest diacritical mark to come under sustained pressure from modern usage. We’ve not been this upset since Waterstones boss James Daunt ditched the book chain’s apostrophe.

The two families will meet in autumn 2014

It seemed like a harmless question, but when you’re the 44th President of the United States there’s no such thing. On Tuesday afternoon, Barack Obama turned up at the second annual Kids’ State Dinner, hosted by his wife, Michelle, and attended by the winners of her competition to create a healthy lunchtime recipe. One of the 54 children at the event asked the President to name his favourite food, to which he replied, implausibly: broccoli. Given his grasp of political history, Mr Obama must surely have known that broccoli was a hot potato.

Eve Best made her first appearance at Shakespeare's Globe as Lady Macbeth some twelve years ago in a studiedly abstract, black-tie production that won few fans.  

The boss of Rupert Murdoch's British book publishing arm, HarperCollins, dramatically departed yesterday as parent company News Corporation moved much of the UK responsibilities to its head office in New York.

If all the smallholding activities we have attempted in Devon, keeping chickens comes out top for both pleasure and utility. Growing vegetables can be satisfying and is certainly therapeutic, but when you can buy a 10kg sack of potatoes for a fiver, the toil involved in producing your own seems hardly worth it. This year I have managed to sow some rocket and broad beans, and planted a few cabbages, but looked at strictly in terms of cost-saving, the gains are negligible.

The victory of 8-1 shot Tominator in the Northumberland Plate, by a short-head after a steely-nerved ride from Graham Lee, neatly ticked some statistical boxes.

Fifty years on from Liz Taylor's troubled turn as Cleopatra, Geoffrey Macnab reflects on the Egyptian queen's poisonous history with Hollywood film-makers

It is one of the mad ironies of rugby that a Lions Test of ebb and flow, bash and sashay, and 43 players whose every aching moment is dedicated to standing up for their mates should come down to one kick by one man. Kurtley Beale's final-minute penalty attempt to win the match for Australia transported him out of the ultimate team game into the loneliness of the long-distance goal-kicker. His miss and the manner of it, as his standing left leg slipped from under him and he fell flat on his back on the spiteful Suncorp Stadium turf, joined the horrible history of defeats settled in a single act.

Boris Johnson has confessed that he came close to committing a gross injustice that would have involved innocent creatures being blasted to death at gunpoint – and all over an anonymous cat. The Mayor of London was speaking at a debate hosted by the radio station LBC, for whom he will host a new phone-in starting on 2 July.

The farmers and marksmen involved in the badger culls are so fearful of reprisals from opponents of the trial that they are being protected by an iron cloak of anonymity, according to the director of the company running the programme in Gloucestershire.

What is believed to be a bomb found by police investigating the attempt to murder three officers in West Belfast has been taken away, police said.

Alexander James specialises in submerging sculptural installations underwater and photographing them (without digital enhancement). He works with a South American butterfly (Caligo eurilochus) that falls into a coma when the temperature drops.

Battlefront collapses after being pulled up during race over controversial big fences of Aintree course