Less than £200... Soak up the culture in Barcelona on a two-night break for £173pp. The deal includes easyJet flights from Gatwick on 19 May and stylish accommodation with breakfast at the Rafaelhoteles Badalona, close to Montjuic. Lastminute.com

A juror has been jailed for 56 days after she said she was too sick to attend court and promptly jetted off on a two week holiday to Malta.

Few political personalities can look back at the past with as much satisfaction as Vincent Tabone.

In the “mostly sun-filled days” of summer 1944, two children, nine-year-old David and his younger sister Sarah, are holidaying with their grandparents in the country near Peterborough. Their mother should have come but has stayed behind, leaving the pair at a loose end, irritable. Back in Leicestershire, David had his pal Robin, his choir practice, the Fox gang, and his GI friend, Jay Krassner from Gary, Indiana, drummer in a swing band.

Rural retreat

Hand Picked Hotels has today launched a promotion across its group of 18 luxury retreats dotted throughout the British Isles. The deal includes an overnight stay, breakfast and dinner with a glass of champagne and canapés for £145 per couple. It is being offered for stays taken between 1 February and 18 March; properties range from the 18th-century Buxted Park Hotel in East Sussex to Crathorne Hall Hotel, a country manor house overlooking the Yorkshire Moors. Handpickedhotels.co.uk

High winds have beached a cargo ship off France's Atlantic coast and some of the 220 tons of fuel in its hold is leaking, threatening a local beach.

Jill Dawson's vivid seventh novel is the picaresque tale of the childhood and later career of Queenie Dove, a female criminal. Born in 1933, Queenie flowers as a con artist and thief in the fragile new wealth and glamour of late 1950s and early 1960s London, finding her apotheosis as one of the never-traced participants in the Great Train Robbery of 1963.

In 2002, 24 year-old Joseph Calleja made his UK debut in Welsh National Opera's Oval Office staging of Rigoletto.

A huge success at the Royal Opera House last year in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra, Joseph Calleja understandably includes his standout aria from that production, "Sento avvampar nell'anima", on this latest collection, along with plenty of Puccini and a series of French heroic roles from Offenbach's Hoffman, Massenet's Manon and Bizet's Pearl Fishers, in all of which he shows no cramping of his natural bel canto style by the French line, finding plenty of room to manoeuvre.

Maltese citizens will no longer have to travel abroad to divorce, following yesterday's overwhelming vote in favour of finally allowing couples to end their marriages at home on the heavily Catholic island nation.

Malta has passed a law allowing its citizens to divorce in their own country.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are renting a "fortress" once used to protect residents from pirate attacks.

The staunchly Catholic island of Malta was yesterday set to end its status as the only European nation that does not allow divorce after a narrow "Yes" victory following a bitterly fought referendum campaign.