1. Voyage d'Hermès

Soap up and rinse off stress, grime and grit with these brilliant bathroom buys, from spartan sponges to luxe lathers

For this week's Insider's Guide, Kay D'Souza, regional manager of the slow travel specialist Inntravel (inntravel.co.uk), offers her top tips for a holiday in Liguria.

He's had more than 130 lovers and admits to being unfaithful to them all. But Michael Winner is to end his reign as Britain's most confirmed bachelor by finally marrying, at the age of 75.

Kevin Rawlinson catches up with Harry Potter's wizardly escapades at Orlando's new attraction

Rod Stewart is to become a father again at the age of 66. His wife, Penny Lancaster, 39, is pregnant with the singer's seventh child. She discovered she was pregnant while celebrating the couple's third wedding anniversary in Portofino, Italy.

The rain drifted away, the sun made an occasional bow, but light winds plagued the opening day of the Nespresso Cup at the picture postcard, oh-so-chic fishing village of Portofino, on the Italian coast east of Genoa.

Michael Whitaker continued to celebrate his return from a four-month ban when he rode Portofino to win yesterday's Christmas Pudding Stakes at the London International Horse Show at Olympia.

'An engine fell out of the plane on my way to Toronto'

It's got glitz, it's got glamour, and it's got some of the best seafood you'll taste in the whole of Italy. Sarah Barrell reveals how to get the best out of a holiday in Liguria

The best travel tip I ever had came from my late father. If you don't have the money to stay in a smart hotel, he said, then stay somewhere cheap but try to muster enough for lunch in the posh place. Then you can legitimately arrive early, linger all afternoon, and feel as though you're part of the beau monde. After all, who needs a cavernous bedroom with swags on the tails and tails on the swags? All you need is a bed. But every holiday should have a long, lazy lunch in fabulous surroundings, then an hour or two by a sparkling pool, ideally with waiters providing small chilled aerosols of mist to stop you overheating. If you can afford to stay the night, so much the better. If you can't, you've still had a five-star experience.

Italy's billionaire prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has offered to put up in his own homes to some of the thousands of people made homeless by this week's earthquake.

Michael Whitaker, always so hard to beat, outsped his rivals yet again to win the Xerox Special Event Services Cup here yesterday at the Horse of the Year Show. Riding Debbie Cox's Fairviews Mirabelle d'Or, a French-bred eight-year-old mare, this newly formed partnership won by the narrowest margin, 0.01sec, from Guy Williams on Onyx V.