The 17th-century Hôtel Lambert burns just as renovations finish for billionaire Qatari owner

Outlook One of the stranger questions raised after the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA) revealed that five of the country's biggest lenders have a £27bn black hole in their balance sheets was whether or not the gap should have been disclosed at all.

'Try to look as if nothing has happened, and when you analyse it, nothing much has.' Those words spoken by Patricia Hodge's character in Trevor Nunn's production of Noël Coward's Relative Values are factually accurate.

The son of former England footballer Trevor Francis has denied stealing ladies' shoes and souvenir football shirts from a cottage belonging to ex-Aston Villa player Lee Hendrie.

A rescue operation has been carried out after an amphibious tourist bus sank with 30 people on board in the Albert Dock, Liverpool.

First seen as part of a 1912 double bill, Ariadne auf Naxos was revised and reshaped as Europe plunged into the carnage of the First World War. Strauss was profoundly relieved when his son, Franz, was declared unfit for military service. But his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, had already served as a reservist when the now familiar version of their backstage comedy on high and low art premiered in Vienna in 1916, four days after the assassination of the prime minister in the dining room of a hotel a few minutes' walk from the opera house.

One of the main attractions of this year’s Brighton Festival is a night-time traipse around Preston Manor, a gorgeous historic house in the suburbs which was bequeathed to the city by the Stanford family in 1932.

A group of teenage girls holds an initiation ceremony to the Vampire Society in a Chicago cemetery at midnight.

Tests shows 22-year-old and boyfriend drowned at hotel but what happened is a mystery

Staff dived into the water to save them but they could not be resuscitated

It’s alright for some, isn’t it?

From former alcohol warehouses to old Ottoman mansions

A second home in the country is a luxury the French can no longer afford - cue an invasion of British bargain hunters?

Petition with almost half a million signatures demands the Work and Pensions Secretary backs up his claim