Miuccia Prada is nothing if not contrary.

A writer's history of his childhood home becomes a microcosm for local life buffeted by the winds of change.

Watching BBC4's The Bridge at the weekend one could be forgiven for thinking that Scandinavian women – or perhaps just Scandinavian detectives – never change their clothes.

'People think I'm arrogant'

Children’s show Echoa came to Sadler’s Wells as part of a Family Weekend, which featured workshops and activities as well as performances.

Lanzarote airport. Sugar-hyped children. Suntans. A smattering of leopard print. One lone female on a plastic seat, weeping. Reader, she was me, after an intensive breathing retreat.

A beautiful woman wearing a moustache has a strange hold on the imagination. Witness timeless knockout Christy Turlington sporting an upper-lip decoration on the cover of May's Tatler magazine and look no further than your local high street for hordes of hipsters dressing up as dandies on a hen night.

So I had left Istanbul with its colourful chaos and ended up in a place in America where the wind blew hot as a hair dryer, huge thorny cacti greeted newcomers and Spanish was the official language. What was I doing in Tucson, Arizona? Teaching, writing a new novel... The part of me that couldn't settle down, always a nomad, an outsider, East and West, and yet precisely because of that at home everywhere, that stubborn part was holding the reins. It was as if I had taken a plastic globe, given it a real good spin, and randomly put my finger on a spot.

A teenager accused of killing two British tourists called his half brother from prison saying police had found bullet casings which could "f*** him up", a court heard today.

Feeling comfortable in one's clothes speaks volumes, as the appearance of Samantha Cameron and Michelle Obama out and about during the visit went to prove.

With her combination of vulnerability and assertiveness, anger and empathy, Sinéad O'Connor makes an apt headliner for the Southbank's Women of the World Festival. Especially since, with her new album, How About I Be Me (And You Be You)?, she's operating with a rare strength and clarity of purpose, with a band flexible enough to lend light and shade to the full range of her material.

Stella McCartney opened the proceedings at the Paris collections yesterday at the Hôtel de Ville, the neo-Gothic city hall, and a reminder of the French capital's historic power and grandeur. Beneath the building's monumental, gilded, vaulted ceiling, models stepped out in the sort of oversized broad-shouldered masculine tailoring that is sweeping the runways and looks set to be a major trend.

"I have two doctors," the historian G M Trevelyan once said, "My left leg and my right." They seem to have served him well because he lived to 86, not bad for someone who was born when Disraeli was prime minister. And if Horizon: The Truth About Exercise was to be believed, more of us should be signing up with the Trevelyan practice. Amid the blizzard of acronyms that featured in this account of recent research into exercise was NEAT, which is short for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis, pretty much everything you do that isn't sleeping or sitting in a chair. Eulogised by an excitable scientist who looked to be making a pitch for a show of his own, NEAT can make a change to your overall fitness without you really noticing.