The mayor hailed the “historic moment” that two French people of the same sex were united in marriage.

Take one room, spin it through 90 degrees and let a gravity-defying Frenchman loose in it. Then prepare to be amazed

Champion makes light of heavy going in farewell race by showing fighting quality to take unbeaten run to 14 races against top opposition

It was bad enough when Iggy Pop, once the embodiment of self-mutilating, rock n’ roll excess, reinvented himself as a motor insurance salesman.

He persuaded his father to buy him his first guitar, for 15 shillings in London’s Petticoat Lane market

One man does more to shape our music industry than any other. As he begins another star search, the svengali talks to our guest editor David Walliams.

Hitmaker Simon Cowell tells David Walliams what it's like to be Britain's biggest pop maestro

Drums - Picasso

I've always wondered what he could do with a pair of sticks.

The singer Violetta Villas, who has died aged 73, was a coloratura soprano who spurned opera for popular music, a Polish singer who became a caberet star in Las Vegas and who was trapped for years behind the Iron Curtain when she flew home to tend to her dying mother.

Passengers at Manchester Airport will be greeted by holograms of staff from next week in a bid to reduce security check queues.

They called themselves "The Clan" and "The Summit". The press termed them the "Rat Pack", after the group of roistering friends who had attached themselves to Humphrey Bogart a decade earlier. Bogart and his coterie, which included Frank Sinatra, were never photographed at play. Their successors – Frank Sinatra again, but this time with Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jnr and Dean Martin – were, in private snaps never intended to be published. The images have now been recovered from a cardboard box of negatives found in a photographic agent's office.

Sir Elton John is to team up with chart-topping star Plan B at this year's Electric Proms, it was announced today.