Mr Skyllenberg's warm clothing and sleeping bag would not saved him on their own

In a continuing near-40-year protest against the motor boat, rowers crowded the Canal Cannaregio in Venice yesterday to claim the waters for an older form of transport.

Opera has long been renowned for the extravagance of its settings – but few productions can have aimed for so dramatic a backdrop as this new production in Austria. For Italian musician Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chénier, British director Keith Warner has deployed an enormous sculpted torso, complete with 15ft eyeless head. The set is still several months from completion.

The aurora borealis, or northern lights, hangs like a fluorescent curtain over the village of Ersfjordbotn, near Tromso in northern Norway.

Sometimes collective will is just not enough to get a horse first past the post. With the 2,000 Guineas favourite Frankel already tucked safely away for the winter at Warren Place, it was widely expected that his stablemate, Picture Editor, would extend this season's Henry Cecil fairytale by making the journey back up the hill from his local track yesterday as market leader for the Derby. Unfortunately for the trainer's followers, the punters who backed him to 4-6 and any authors named Grimm, the colt was made to look ordinary as he finished third in the Zetland Stakes behind two rivals with few lofty pretensions.

Nanton cuts a peaceful figure as he walks around the pre-parade ring at York racecourse yesterday afternoon.

As far as their personal rivalry goes, the score between Afsoun, winner of the Contenders Hurdle here, and Straw Bear, the runner-up, is now 3-2 in favour of the former. But that is a tiny, almost irrelevant, thumbnail. In the bigger, Champion Hurdle, picture the title of yesterday's race could be viewed as a breach of the Trade Descriptions Act. The result caused barely a ripple in the market for the Cheltenham showpiece, certainly not at the sharp end. Even Afsoun's trainer, Nicky Henderson, was ambivalent about his charge's chances in the face of powerful Irish opposition.

Secrets of the studio

Undergraduates from Emmanuel College taking part in the annual Cambridge Rag Week. Last year more than pounds 73,000 was raised for good causes

From her avant-garde work in the Seventies and Eighties to her return to first principles in the Nineties, Brazilian artist Gretta Sarfaty has always concerned herself with perceptions of the body. Sarfaty's latest series addresses the role of the nude in art history and, though earlier work will be exhibited, the new paintings focus specifically on the play of reality and image suggested by the major motif of "Reflections of a Woman", the mirror.

Some Picture's attempt to land greyhound racing's "Triple Crown" failed miserably when he trailed in last in the Irish Derby Final at Shelbourne Park, Dublin, on Saturday.

From basketball to football, from America to Australia: the year's best photographs

'IN THE LIBRARY at Charleston farmhouse hangs Duncan Grant's 1942 Portrait of Vanessa Bell, generously lent by the Tate Gallery. At first glance, the sitter appears rather imperious and forbidding, but on closer inspection one sees a loving and intimate portrait of a sad and beautiful woman in her sixties. The pose is grand, she sits in a high-backed Victorian chair, wearing an apricot cloak lined in dusky pink. The black-shoed foot pointing downwards echoes one of Grant's favourite works of art - Gainsborough's Countess Howe at Kenwood. But unlike the cool meticulousness of the latter, here we have lashings of paint. This, after all, was a portrait of a woman whom Duncan Grant had known intimately for over 30 years. It was painted five years after the death of her elder son Julian in the Spanish Civil War and only a year after the suicide of her sister, Virginia Woolf; the tragedy is all too visible. It is hauntingly beautiful.'