It is 60 years since she succeeded to the throne – a reign in which her sense of duty and absolute retention of royal mystique has only deepened her subjects’ affection for her.

"I am here, but I am not all there." So declares the troubled monarch at the centre of Alan Bennett's play. In Christopher Luscombe's production, a wall of empty frames looms over the stage: this royal family is expert in framing itself for public view. But now, someone has forgotten how.

We know about sandwich and cardigan, but santorum? The story of how names pass into common use can be eye-opening.

There must have been a moment or two there where the Duke of Edinburgh had to bite his tongue. Maybe the Queen had had it bitten for him. Maybe she'd asked Barack to bring him as a gift those "fell pony bits and shanks" (this had to be repeated to us hacks three or four times). Maybe he was wearing the bits to stop saying the things he is famous for saying as they showed POTUS and FLOTUS around the displays in the Royal Collection.

The death of the Earl of Onslow this week has robbed the upper house of one of the last of its shameless eccentrics.

Though two million pay homage to this fissured symbol every year, the Liberty Bell is little known in this country. If we know it at all, we tend to claim that it was "cast in Whitechapel".

Start the week...

The South Pacific nation celebrates the election of a 'commoner' as prime minister

A painting of an 18th-century English major which once graced the walls of Gianni Versace's opulent Villa Fontanelle on the shores of Lake Como has been reunited with the British family from whom it was stolen more than 30 years ago.

One of my favourite areas of woodland is the Longleat Estate in Wiltshire, near Warminster. It is probably better known for its safari park, but that's not for me. Since January 2009, Longleat has also been home to 200 oak trees planted as a growing monument to the evolutionary thinker Charles Darwin.

A challenge to the bleaters

The Queen is set to become one of the wealthiest crowned heads in Europe after the future of the British monarchy was secured in a historic deal with the Government that will give the House of Windsor a share of the £210m profits from government estates relinquished by George III.

In the shadow of Cardinal Wolsey and George III, the Star Chamber is deciding how the spending axe will fall

As the Tories prepare for their party conference, Amol Rajan argues that the Big Society would be lost without philosopher, pamphleteer and disgruntled ideologue Edmund Burke