Calm down dears, as David Cameron might have said. The row yesterday over Diane Abbott's remarks about "white people" shines a light on not just British attitudes to race, but also on our ability to absorb and deal with controversy in the era of instant communication. The wisdom – or lack of it – shown by the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, aka "leftwing" or "firebrand", has already been discussed enough. The only tuppenceworth I will add on that score is that she seems stuck in a time warp of 1980s clichés and lazy assumptions. If she had said what she had said in the pub, or more likely at a north London dinner party table, her interlocutors might have agreed with her, challenged her or castigated her. Then they would have poured themselves a glass of chardonnay and moved on.

For all the Michelin meals, first-class air travel and fat salaries, they are not to be envied

Joanna Briscoe describes her brand of 'erotic suspense' to Catherine Taylor

London is expensive. Extortionately so – or so runs the conventional wisdom. And it's true: a pint in a Zone One pub costs considerably more than it does anywhere else. The tube is both a necessity and a luxury: yes, it gets you from A to B, but it's also pricey, crowded, dirty and unreliable. And that's before you even take into account the lack of large-scale supermarkets, shunned in favour of their more expensive "metro" equivalents. There's no doubting that London living isn't cheap. But what do visitors to the big city think?

National Gallery, London

Fashion and interiors are one, says the designer in an exclusive interview with Annie Deakin

Most of my good gay friends truly like femininity. But I have known some phobic ones too

By any measure George Michael has had a glittering chart career - but brushes with the law and tales of his drug use have increasingly made more impact than his musical output.

The world’s oldest play is revived to spectacular effect in a Welsh military range – but Xerxes never had to worry about CCTV...

My parents were... supportive, creative and inspiring. My mother was an optical receptionist and my father had his own television sales company.

Our writer takes a walk, smells the flowers, and feels better. Green exercise works – and anything blue, it seems, is a bonus

View from the front row with Bath & England prop

It's said that if you remember the Sixties, you weren't actually there – a saying variously attributed to Grace Slick and Paul Kantner, both of Jefferson Airplane, and Dr Timothy Leary, so-called "Galileo of consciousness". Barry Miles was there throughout: present at the recording of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life", the climactic track of Sgt Pepper, and at the live recording of "All You Need is Love", which marked the first global television link.

He had a capacity for idolatory, but it was not a passive form of hero-worship