Concrete? I'll have you know that reinforced concrete was invented by a gardener. The gardener in question was a Frenchman, Joseph Monier, who was trying to make the best-ever plant pot. (This isn't the kind of thing that gardeners just happen to know: I read it in a book about inventions I got at the Science Museum.) Gazing at Marseille's Unité, a block of apartments by Le Corbusier, it occurs to me that we have all been labouring under the misapprehension that gardening and concrete don't exactly go together. The truth is that the most brutal building always looks better with a lawn of verdant green. And some palm trees.

Forget the property ladder – there are just as serious gains to be made reacquainting ourselves with Britain's woodlands by building a den. Spending a night under the leaves is a fantastic way to get a new perspective on the world.

The Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or is a trophy any self-respecting director would want to see alongside an Academy Award on the mantlepiece.

If Selina Hastings's recent biography helped rescue Somerset Maugham from oblivion, Pushkin Press has performed a similar service for Stefan Zweig, another best-selling figure who mysteriously slipped out of fashion. Almost 70 years after this most cosmopolitan of writers committed suicide in exile in Brazil, Pushkin has produced a series of elegant reissues crowned by Anthea Bell's translation of the classic memoir, The World of Yesterday.

Police are investigating after human remains were found in a field on farmland on Easter Monday.

The cottage looks out over a wide sea loch and across to the mountains in the distance. When we arrived, all the hills were hidden in cloud, but towards evening the banks of grey started to lift and first Blaven appeared, a peak as bulky as a prize bull, and then, in the sunset, the Cuillin ridge itself – a great jagged sawblade lit from behind by a blast of yellow light which slanted down onto the loch and turned the flickering waters to gold.

I t has not escaped Secret History's notice that there's a certain fascination with all things Danish at the moment – the jumpers, The Killing, the interior design (that's Lego for the small ones). So we bring you this week... the Artichoke Lamp.