Two days of strike action at museums and galleries across Britain has begun in a long-running row over jobs, pay and pensions.

The billionaire Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft is to sign a pledge to give at least half of his estimated £1.2bn fortune to charity, it emerged today.

Foyle's War creator Anthony Horowitz says the current series of the detective drama will probably be his last.

A life-size portrait of Sir Winston Churchill, which he said revealed his soul during one of his darkest hours, is going on public display after years spent hanging on the wall of the home of his late grandson.

The Prime Minister said there would be events to mark 100 years since the outbreak of war in 2014, Armistice Day in 2018, and the dates of major battles in between.

He is known as a documenter of high society and glamour: the man who shot the Windsors, Grace Kelly, Vivien Leigh; Picasso, Dietrich, Churchill, Twiggy; whose aesthetic sensibility was affronted by the newly coronated Queen's nose being too red, Audrey Hepburn's neck too scraggy and Great Garbo's hands as having done too much washing up.

You do sometimes wonder about the posthumous contributors to Who Do You Think You Are?, those sepia figures, so stiffly putting their best face forward, who peer out of dog-eared family photographs as their character and deeds are described on air.

Maria de Villota collides with lorry in pits after test run at Duxford for British Grand Prix

John Keane, 57

A military historian who faked an illustrious Army career has been found guilty at Peterborough Crown Court of perverting the course of justice.

Simulated battles aren't everyone's cup of tea – but for those who take part (some 20,000 people in the UK), they are a serious business: call their uniforms "costumes" and you might find yourself on the sharp end of a bayonet.

Might the day ever come when it would be thought inappropriate to express open and unqualified admiration for an orchid – I mean for its beauty, its elegance and its glamour? Well, stranger things have happened.

Despite her long life Erlund Hudson's career as an artist lasted less than 20 years. Much of her work dates from the Second World War; rejected for war service because of her health, she drove a mobile canteen, taking tea and sandwiches to the Kensington rescue services as they dug out bombing victims. Exhausted from working two or three shifts without a break, she still found time to draw: Kentish women drying herbs in barns for medicines; middle-class ladies in white overalls cutting up sheets for bandages and pyjamas; scenes from the Naafi canteen. After the National Gallery sent its pictures for safety to a disused quarry in Wales, temporary exhibitions, often of living artists, occupied the empty walls. The War Artists Advisory Committee paid Hudson 25 guineas for six of her works to hang in the War Artists' shows; these are now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum.