Britain in 1940. Europe is torn apart by war, but America is not persuaded that it should join the fight against the Nazis.

As a barrister, I seek justice for people and defend their rights. As a vegetarian, I like to think that I take a stand against injustice for those who happen not to have been born human and so are confined and killed for their flesh.

Gwyneth Hughes explains how she adapted a great literary whodunit for TV

As the creator of the legendary interview series Face to Face for the BBC in 1959, in which public figures were subjected to a stark interview by the relentless John Freeman, Hugh Burnett's place in television history is secured.

Last year, a highbrow glossy magazine asked me to nominate one classic drama that might well not get the green light in our current cultural climate. With my tongue hovering close to my cheek, I proposed George Bernard Shaw's acute, glittering comedy Pygmalion (1913). I suggested that in our era of job-swap, wife-swap and life-swap programmes, Shaw's concept would be found wanting. His Professor Higgins conducts an experiment to prove the arbitrariness of social distinctions by training a cockney flower-seller to talk posh. But given our present-day appetite for the inauthentic and the provisional, Shaw would be forced to invent a situation whereby the professor and Eliza Doolittle switched roles for a week, with Eliza trying to fake it as a phonetician and Higgins struggling to come over all gor-blimey flogging blooms.

Shakespeare's Globe is on a high. It kicked off this season with a star performance (from Joshua McGuire) in a wonderfully clear and accessible touring version of Hamlet (directed by Dominic Dromgoole). Now it inaugurates its main stage repertoire with a production of All's Well That Ends Well that one would say takes the roof off the theatre, had the theatre a roof.

The sanctifying process that preserved so many early 20th-century literary figures in the popular imagination never really caught up with GK Chesterton (1874-1936). HG Wells is briskly re-imagined every half-decade or so, the shade of George Bernard Shaw stalks on through Michael Holroyd's three fat volumes of biography, but the standard life of the author of The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) dates back to the year of the Normandy landings.

Films: I saw 'Never Let Me Go' and found it very impressive. In such a believable way, it incorporates science fiction with the strangeness of the times we actually live in. It was deep, haunting and beautifully shot. My other favourite is 'The King's Speech'. Top drawer!

As one of the very first society photographers, EO Hoppé captured images of everyone who was anyone in the arts and in politics between the two world wars, on both sides of the Atlantic.

The actor Simon MacCorkindale, who for six years appeared as Dr Harry Harper in the BBC drama Casualty, has died of cancer.

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".

George Bernard Shaw once wrote: "If Velasquez was born today, he would be a photographer and not a painter." But the Irish playwright may also have thought his true calling lay behind the camera, according to researchers who have rediscovered more than 20,000 of his photographs.