As David Cameron hosts summit to tackle threat to trade on the Indian Ocean, Britain is accused of soft-pedalling the issue

Oddly, many of the obituaries for Auberon Waugh claimed that his most significant achievement was the "Diary" he wrote over 13 years for Private Eye. The quote marks are required because it was a pungent combination of fact and fiction. One of his milder musings dates from 1975: "Rather unexpectedly, I found myself in Kathmandu with Prince Charles for the coronation of King Bihendra... the Prince looks particularly fetching in a yashmak with blue paint on his eyelids."

Now a Unesco 'City of Design', this Austrian gem is full of handsome medieval and striking modern architecture. Chris Leadbeater explores

World shipping leaders have been urged to co-ordinate the fight against piracy better.

Fancy watching a film about groovy London beatniks eating a tin of cat food? Or one that has Peter Cook playing a policeman who travels around an absurd post-apocalyptic landscape by hot air balloon?

He is Shakespeare's gloriously Machiavellian monarch-in-waiting, who machinates and murders his way to the throne during the 15th-century Wars of the Roses.

Even the most cursory glance across the breadth of West End plays staged in the past decade would reveal a clutch of golden moments in the history of contemporary British theatre.

When a public figure dies, the whole of his life flashes before other people's eyes. So hours after the Prime Minister's post-dated political demise, a kneejerk appreciation called Gordon Brown: a Political Life was rushed on to Radio 4. Yet although Shaun Ley's programme contained a perfectly comprehensive checklist of all the delights of Brown's years in office – Bigotgate, psychological flaws, Forces of Hell, moral compass, smile – it had a perfunctory air that suggested now was not the best time to take the measure of the man. And that is the problem with living in interesting times. Achieving perspective from the middle of a political avalanche is a challenge and the Today programme has coped better than most. Unlike the TV studios, where captive politicians can sit for hours repeating formulas on a loop, Today's presenters have been far sharper than their televisual equivalents. When Paddy Ashdown came on with a lofty peroration about how he could not possibly reveal his own position, Nick Robinson was as cutting as a kitchen knife. "We can hear what you're saying, Paddy, and so can the rest of the country."

Who knew Scrabble could be so exciting? It is normally the kind of game you might play with your gran, but poetic theatre collective Pen-ultimate are putting on their first full-length play, A Night on the Tiles, at the Contact Theatre in Manchester and giving the board game a whole new underworld spin. The plot revolves around Harry "The Hackney Hacker" Jones, a 78-year-old ex-SAS gangster who returns from retirement. He decides to gather the biggest Scrabble players from around the world together for one last, big, high-stakes game.