Dearest Gentle Reader, this Monday has arrived with ninety thousand darkened homes, a Budget so secret its authors sign oaths of silence, and a knighthood the Prince of Wales describes as the easiest decision in living memory - and that is before we reach the whale. This Author has much to report, and restrains herself only with the greatest of effort.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Sunday brings a royal tour into peril, a prime minister musing aloud on the unmentionable, and a letter sent to a hospital bed in the Philippines that closes a door - and opens a very great many questions. This Author has read every dispatch with widened eyes and a steadied hand, and invites you to do the same.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Thursday brings a banking house that profits mightily whilst bidding farewell to five thousand of its faithful servants, a Dame of the stage who now navigates the world by the warmth of strangers she cannot quite see, and a mother's fight for a justice that a murderer refused to witness in person. This Author has rarely encountered a morning's dispatches so varied in their texture - from the Arctic to the Old Bailey, from the laboratory to the drawing room. Pray, do read on.