Playing the Queen may have won Dame Helen Mirren an Oscar and an Olivier award, but she revealed she is struggling to “wriggle out” of the regal mantle. Only a rewrite at her request meant the acclaimed actress did not have to imitate Elizabeth II in her latest film, a big budget American action movie.

Children will be taught fractions from the age of five and will once again have to learn the 12 times tables under a controversial new national curriculum to be announced today by the Education Secretary Michael Gove.

The Week in Books

Plebs is set in Ancient Rome, but the sitcom tells timeless truths about life at the bottom of the pile, says its writer Tom Basden

Plebs is set in Ancient Rome, but the sitcom tells timeless truths about life at the bottom of the pile, says its writer Tom Basden

1. The often-quoted opening line of The Go-Between – LP Hartley's 1953 novel – is what?

Former Deputy Prime Minister irate at missing out on title

Nadav Kander was inspired by ideas of Elizabethan purity to create these stunning photographic portraits of six nude females and one male. 

Acclaimed actress Anne-Marie Duff is to make a return to Channel 4's Shameless for the show's last episode.

Old stories ignite new passions as Oliver Knussen conducts Angelika Kirchschlager in The Rape of Lucretia, and Barbara Hannigan, James Gilchrist and Jasper de Waal join Amsterdam Sinfonietta for Les Illuminations and Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings.

Protestant and Catholics from a Northern Ireland town devastated by an IRA bombing showed their unity today by joining forces to host a Diamond Jubilee visit by the Queen.

In these pages yesterday, Justin Byam Shaw, a distinguished member of the boss class here at i, looked through one end of the telescope at that bastion of British class and privilege, the honours system.

Prince Charles could be stripped of the title of Head of the Commonwealth when he becomes King, under radical plans set out in a book published to coincide with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.