It is something of a paradox than Chopin could make the piano sing like few others in musical history but on the evidence his meagre collection of songs could not unlock that effortless facility in the human voice.

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High Court to decide on minimum sentence tariff for serial killer

A mother was found guilty today of starving her daughter to death in a flat with a well-stocked kitchen and despite visits from social services who failed to notice that the child was being abused.

Rochette showed a moving combination of grace and guts. She gave the best of herself

We may think it only affects boys. But the female variant is often much harder to spot – and that means thousands of girls may be going undiagnosed. Jeremy Laurance reports

The younger brother of shadow chancellor George Osborne acted "outside his competence" when he prescribed anti-psychotic drugs to a friend, a disciplinary hearing was told today.

Walter Sartory made a fortune in the markets, but it never made him happy and was the motive for his murder, writes Guy Adams

To begin, a couple of debuts. It's rare to find a first novel as assured as Helen Grant's The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (Puffin, £6.99). Set in the small German town of Bad Münstereifel, it begins with the disappearance of a 10-year-old local girl, which sets the whole town on edge. Told by a half-English, half-German girl, Pia, who takes it upon herself to investigate, it is a perfectly plotted thriller from its great opening sentence to its hurtling conclusion. Lucy Christopher's Stolen (Chicken House, £6.99) is another nail-biter. This time, our narrator is Gemma, a teenager kidnapped from an airport and taken to a nowhere place in the Australian Outback. Tautly written and hard to put down, Stolen asks some troubling questions, too. Gemma's kidnapper is charismatic; this book is her letter to him and it makes for sometimes uncomfortable reading. Gripping, but definitely not for younger readers.

Officials at the Department for International Development were inhibited in post-war planning for Iraq because of concerns about the legitimacy of military action, the official inquiry into the conflict was told today.

A divorced father of three stabbed his mother 21 times after becoming convinced that she was a witch and had put a curse on him, a court heard today.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's reputation is founded on The Wages of Fear (1953) and Les Diaboliques (1955), and it might have been enhanced if he had completed his 1964 project, Inferno, about a jealous husband driven towards insanity.

Why prostitution must be decriminalised