Most women fell for him: his office manager’s job was to change the photographs in his flat when needed

No longer depressed and deprived, Manchester and Liverpool can give London a run for its euro, dollar and yen. By Jonathan Brown

More than 40 per cent of visitors to the UK now include an overnight stay outside London

Garrick Club, London

Many know about the death by drowning of WS Gilbert; others are aware that in 1933 Ernest Hemingway, incensed by a review, trashed the Paris bookshop in which he read it. Few could point to these incidents' one degree of separation. Such surprises regularly punctuate the soberly engrossing chronicle which Robert Fraser has created around the life of a poet whose modest fame has burned steadily, almost brightly, since his Thirties emergence as a teenage prodigy.

For years, a painting in the National Gallery was labelled as a 16th-century copy created after Titian and rarely seen by the public, having been variously relegated to the lower galleries and conservation studios.

Sarah Moss's debut, Cold Earth, was a stylish thriller set on a remote archaeological dig in Greenland. Here she takes the emotional isolation of early parenthood as her subject, intensifying the experience by transplanting a young family to a remote Scottish island.

National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh National Gallery, London

When some artists affect to say the unsayable, the result is simply unspeakable. To listen to some folk, you might run away with the idea that Philip Ridley - renaissance man of the East End and master of the sawn-off baroque - is just a sensationalising miserabilist out to exploit and maximise everything that is morally and viscerally gross and triple-X rated.

Rant

The riches of Florence are a legacy of the city's great financial institutions, as Maya Jaggi discovers

A six-pack is the Holy Grail of men's fitness. But just how difficult is it for an average male to achieve? Gym-shirker and beer drinker Tom Mitchelson gave himself six weeks to get into shape

A six-pack is the Holy Grail of men's fitness. But just how difficult is it for an average male to achieve? Gym-shirker and beer drinker Tom Mitchelson gave himself just six weeks to get his abs in shape

Rant