Whitney Houston died as a result of accidental drowning, but cocaine use and heart disease were contributing factors, a coroner said.

In her first interview since Whitney Houston's death, daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown said she was "doing as good as I possibly can" and recalled the tender last moments she shared with her superstar mother before her sudden death last month.

The hallowed lectern at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre has, over the years, been graced by such speakers as Sir Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Martin Luther King and Mikhail Gorbachev. Yesterday, a very different sort of global opinion-former joined their lofty ranks: Lady Gaga.

On Wednesday, I was drinking Indian chai with the writer William Dalrymple at his beautiful farmhouse outside Delhi. I was interviewing him for a book I am writing on England and the East. He is well settled out there and rightly admired for his magnificent books on India and for starting the Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF), now the equivalent of Cannes for writers and celebs.

Booker-Prize winning author Salman Rushdie cancelled plans to appear at an Indian literature festival today after protests from Muslim clerics and warnings that he could be targeted for assassination.

Travel View

An American woman who underwent a full face transplant after being mauled by a chimpanzee in 2009 revealed her new face for the first time yesterday.

Oprah Winfrey is set to receive an honorary Oscar.

The queen of US daytime TV hosts her last chatshow next week – and the future is uncertain for all concerned

The Duchess of York said not being invited to Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding was "so difficult" for her to cope with.

Generalisations about nationality are worthless. I've met plenty of extremely unpassionate Spaniards, several far-from-cowardly Italians and a few Welshmen who have no obvious tendencies to larceny. So I'm suspicious about the claim that the Office of National Statistics' annual update of the country's favourite purchases offers a true picture of the Real British. They keep a record of the 650-odd things on which we spend more than £400m, and claim that these goods and services somehow define us as a population. And if sales drop below a certain level, it means that we're just not like that any more.

James Frey became the bad boy of the US literary establishment when it emerged sections of his best-selling 2003 debut "memoir", A Million Little Pieces, were fabricated. His latest book, a fictional tale of how Jesus Christ would live in the 21st century, will do little to appease his critics.

The veteran US chat show host Larry King has given his verdict on his successor, Piers Morgan: the British former tabloid editor "may have been oversold" to the Americans public, he told BBC Radio 4 .

Why are there no black contenders among the nominees for this year's Academy Awards? Guy Adams lifts the lid on the failure of the film industry to represent people of colour