The potions on our bathroom shelves provide an uncomfortably intimate map of our physical insecurities. Yet many of us are far less embarrassed by our arsenal of wrinkle creams and blemish zappers than by that lone bottle of fake tan.

Fashion: Best foot forward

Stoke City 3 Blackburn Rovers 1: Stoke add to misery of defiant Blackburn manager with easy victory

The art of giving

A £600m programme to create 100 free schools will be announced by the Chancellor, George Osborne, in his Autumn Statement on Tuesday.

From volcanoes and ancient forests to the stars in the night sky, there's plenty to lure adventurous families to the steep little island of La Palma.

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger would welcome goal-line technology and more - sooner rather than later.

Standing nearly twice as tall as the Olympic Stadium, the crazed and twisted steelwork of the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower is an undeniably impressive piece of engineering. Consider that it was bolted together by just three men, and its loops and spirals seem more imponderable than ever.

Liverpudlian has high hopes of being one of the first women to win an Olympic boxing medal, she tells Robin Scott-Elliot

Hands up anyone who can find Burgundia, Borusia or Etruria on the map. You can't. Neither they nor the dozen other mostly forgotten European countries in Norman Davies's Vanished Kingdoms (Allen Lane, £30) exists.

Year after year the book trade proclaims the death of the Big Biography. Year after year it rises from the grave. Why? Because the best of its practitioners follow where their talent leads, not where trends demand.

Occasionally, works of intellectual originality arise from the ferment of popular science writing. One such is David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity (Allen Lane, £25), which goes against the pessimistic grain of the times in suggesting that the scientific project begun in the 17th century has limitless possibilities and that the problems pressing on us now are all eminently soluble.

High-ranking military officers and their aides mingled with salesmen and potential customers at the 11th annual drones conference. Some had paid as much as £3,000 to attend Unmanned Aircraft Systems 2011, a two-day event that opened on 16 November in a plush hotel in Kensington, west London.