Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has become instant shorthand for those who consider it the last word in dumbed-down, crassly written fiction. But there is no denying the appeal of the globe-spanning, puzzle-based narrative, with strands reaching from ancient history to the modern world. Before The Code, Katherine Neville offered some ingenious sleight-of-hand in this style. Now she has followed up her debut novel, The Eight, with a blockbuster thriller that again pushes all the Brown...
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Built in the 19th century to show large Victorian paintings, the South London Gallery has been completely transformed by the Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander. Using the building's features, she has followed the picture-rail to divide the space in two by the insertion of a wooden floor. This not only transforms the gallery but creates two new environments, each with its own character: the dark lower space with its struts forming the skeleton of the structure, and the light, airy upper...
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As the clouds of recession blow our way, it is time to turn to those basic, ancient foods that kept (and still keep) folk alive through real hard times. These staples have been eaten by humans for more than 4,000 years and are described in Sanskrit and ancient Egyptian texts. I speak of pulses – dependable, nourishing, still amazingly cheap, resistant, long lasting and not boring, not if you know them as well as many of us do.

One would normally expect to see Welsh superstar and one-man sex bomb Tom Jones defending himself from women's underwear on the world's most celebrated stages. But yesterday afternoon Jones took a break from being part of the international jet set to go back to basics. He busked for petty cash outside London's Royal Festival Hall.

Albert, Bert and Andy. They were squatters and we were squatters, we had this in common. The hotel which overshadowed our cottage had been our home. Then, one day, suddenly we had to move out. The place was being boarded up as my mum frantically carried her furniture across the yard from the hotel to what we called the staff cottage. We never owned the cottage; we just lived there – free. We had to, there was nowhere else to go.

The original "It" girl Tamara Beckwith, Lindsey Carlos Clarke, the widow of the late celebrity photographer, Bob, and his former agent Ghislain Pascal are a team. They are standing in their new photography gallery in Chelsea, which currently looks like a bomb site, but is due to open later this month in memory of the photographer, who committed suicide in 2006. There will be a Bob Carlos Clarke room downstairs with an ever-changing selection of his work on show and a dining room, with...
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The calendar in Chekhov's house near Yalta in Ukraine, still shows the day in May 1904 when he left to go to Germany to die. But the wallpaper is barely holding to the walls, the plaster is flaking and mould is spreading. He moved to warmer climes because of his suffering with tuberculosis, the temperature is often six degrees below in the winter, colder inside the house than out. The first floor, where Chekhov slept and where his study was full of the paintings of Levitan and photographs of...
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That men are chefs and women merely cooks has long been the received wisdom of grandest reaches of haute cuisine. In 1950, Fernand Point, the inventor of nouvelle cuisine, was asked why he had never agreed to accept a woman as a student. Point responded that, "only men have the technique, discipline and passion that makes cooking consistently an art". A modern chef such as Gordon Ramsay performs on the world's television screens and to his salivating, wealthy customers, but he is happy to...
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This was thrill-ing: a daring, yet meaningful juxtaposition of four highly contrasted 20th-century showpieces, vividly directed by one of the most inspirational young conductors, and delivered by a London Philharmonic Orchestra at the top of its form to an audience that hung on its every note.