Prince William made an impromptu visit to see the crowds gathering along The Mall ahead of his wedding to Kate Middleton on Friday.

The death of John Sullivan last weekend passed without much comment away from the obituary pages, which seemed an oversight to me, not that the creator of Only Fools and Horses would have wanted any fuss. He was a softly spoken, gentle, rather humble fellow, as comedy writers so often are, and wryly witty in conversation rather than raucously funny, unlike many of his scripts.

Prince Harry and Kate Middleton go back to Westminster Abbey to prepare.

It's still little reported in this country, but we are living through a revolution in the social sciences that will change politics permanently, mainly by exposing the binary distinction between Left and Right as immature gibberish. This research may have filtered through to you via Malcolm Gladwell's articles for The New Yorker; or in surveys of books with catchy titles like Nudge, Influence, Connected, and Predictably Irrational. The best yet is David Brooks's seminal The Social Animal, which documents new findings in fields as diverse as neuroscience and behavioural economics, and reports on their impact on social science.

It will be in many ways a different country that greets Prince William and his bride tomorrow

'The Independent' has a proud tradition of covering royal matters less slavishly than its rivals. We have loosened up a bit since our early days, when the 1988 birth of the Duke and Duchess of York's first child was marked with a single grudging sentence in the News In Brief column.

Notebook

Everyone from Anne Boleyn to Kate Middleton is supposed to have used their wiles to get ahead. But, argues Harriet Walker, the tactic should be understood rather than condemned

Rant

A glorious Easter weekend is a perfect opportunity to do some spring-cleaning. Not the kind requiring a vacuum cleaner, but a far less strenuous undertaking involving no more exercise than sitting in a chair in the sun and doing a spot of contemplation. Scientists have been trying to work out why, as we get older, our memories appear to stop working. It certainly drives me bonkers – I spend ages trying to remember the name of a bore who worked for me 10 years ago. Or where I put that recipe for slow-cooked shoulder of lamb. Or why my reading glasses vanish every two hours. The list is endless. We waste hours rifling through the messy Rolodex in our heads, trying to put it into some sort of coherent order, trying to retrieve all sorts of lost information, that will suddenly pop back into circulation ages after you actually needed them.

Like a good tomato, Kate Middleton shows the virtue of the long wait

In the 30 years since Charles married Diana, British society has changed beyond recognition. So what to make of this week's royal nuptials? Here, Peter York wonders if we've simply stopped caring about the Firm's strange mating rituals...

Search for any blemish on the character of the woman who is to marry Prince William and you will do so in vain. But will sheer niceness be enough to protect her on the hazardous journey ahead?

Thursday marked Judgement Day.