On Tuesday night, 18 crack teams of students convened at Birmingham's Ikon Gallery for the inaugural iQuiz. Each team had battled through regional heats in November, lured by an unforgettable prize: a two-week trek across America.

Central banks should be prepared to break the ultimate monetary taboo and directly finance government's deficits, the chairman of the Financial Services Authority, Lord Turner, suggested in a speech last night.

What's her love of Switzerland got to do, got to do with it?

With over 50 years in the music business Anna Mae Bullock, or Tina Turner as she's known to most of us, has accolades, awards and hits aplenty; and now airport chiefs at Staverton, near Gloucester have handed her another.

OperaUpClose veer towards greatest-hits territory while a lupine concert holds toddlers transfixed

He quit Bros at 19 – and transformed himself into a music-industry mogul. Ian Burrell meets Craig Logan, reformed teen idol.

Televising the trial of a young mother accused of child murder threatens to tip the scales of justice. Guy Adams reports

Andrew McGibbon currently makes a living as a writer and producer of broadcast comedy. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, he played drums in Morrissey's backing band. This brush with celebrity became the basis of a radio programme, which grew into a Radio 4 series – and which has now resulted in this odd collection of interviews with people who were once on first-name terms with the famous. "One person's unique encounter with a legend, by way of factotemry [or] flatmatery," McGibbon explains, creates "an unusual and very personal insight into the famous one, highlighting the ordinary... things about them or their behaviour that demythologise them." The dozen legends are almost all from a different era of fame, when celebrities were known for something other than celebrity itself. But besides that distinction, they're a bafflingly eclectic bunch.

Lucky Peterson sits unnoticed at the bar, fedora pulled low and dark coat draped on his shoulders. He must have gotten his name when, aged five, the legendary bluesman Willie Dixon saw him performing at his father's upstate New York roadhouse and produced his first record. He was already a stage veteran of two years. The skinny adult blues prodigy of the 1980s is a big man now, and vanished for a while with bad luck. Still only 45, he has older times in him. He devours Ronnie Scott's tonight.

With infectious, irresistible invitations to the dance-floor such as "And The Beat Goes On" by the Whispers, "A Night To Remember" by Shalamar and "Midas Touch" by Midnight Star, Sound of Los Angeles Records – commonly abbreviated to Solar – the West Coast label founded by Dick Griffey, provided the sunny, soulful soundtrack for much of the Eighties on both sides of the Atlantic.

Heaven 17 celebrate three decades of their debut album, which hasn't lost its relevance

Tony Blair's sister-in-law, Lauren Booth, has become the latest in a long line of Western Islamic converts. From Chris Eubank to Jermaine Jackson to Alexander Litvinenko, she joins an eclectic list, yet she is markedly different from most of its names, for one key reason – she is female.

We carry more stuff with us than ever, and lost property offices are full of items that we leave behind. Is this accidental or is it a subconscious attempt to free ourselves from a life of clutter? By Michael Bywater

Tom Jones's record company don't want want him to sing about the reality of being 70