Up to 850 jobs at the bankrupt Coryton oil refinery in Essex are likely to be lost after administrator PwC announced it has failed to secure a rescue deal – despite talking to more than 100 potential investors and purchasers of the operation.

The swimmer who brought this year's Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race to a dramatic halt has denied causing a public nuisance.

The late comedian Kenneth Horne, master of the double entendre, used to tell a joke about a town in London's commuter belt with a somewhat unfortunate name: "How to get rid of unsightly Staines – blow up the bridge and burn the cinema!"

The town formerly known as Staines has renamed itself to create a more genteel sound. But is it all a massive mistake?

The swimmer who brought the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race to a dramatic halt was today banned from the Olympic torch route and from visits to Windsor before the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.

Once a working-class staple, eels are now considered an endangered species. But efforts to boost their stocks could change all of that.

Former minister Margaret Hodge has finally found her vocation: making life a misery for civil servants who don't pull their weight. Oliver Wright meets Whitehall's nemesis

The three bidders competing to build the first neighbourhood at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the site of the London 2012 Games, were named today.

The best books are written with an ear to somebody. Treasure Island was written in 1883 for Robert Louis Stevenson's 15-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. It was intended to be a boy's book in the mould of RM Ballantyne's Coral Island, Captain Marryat's Masterman Ready, and Fennimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, ripping yarns all. It succeeded beyond Stevenson's wildest dreams, becoming a cornerstone of childhood literary memory, indirectly inspiring masterpieces as different as Peter Pan, Swallows and Amazons and High Wind in Jamaica, and directly spawning a dozen forgotten prequels and sequels.

Treasure Island: The Next Generation

I'm in London, I've left my job with the Discovery Channel in the US, and the houseboat fridge is dangerously low on supplies.

The brother of a former EastEnders actress whose headless body was found dumped in a canal has been charged with her murder.