Dearest Gentle Reader, this Friday brings dispatches of the gravest and most impudent variety - a convicted murderer who would appear to have found one final move upon the board, a Prime Minister who has relocated the entire machinery of government to Manchester, and a Principality quite literally visible from space. This Author's lorgnette has rarely been so thoroughly exercised.

Dearest Gentle Reader, the Celestial Empire has registered its displeasure, a mayor has traded his civic empire for a rather larger one, and somewhere in the Kingdom a young woman has finally received justice for a most extraordinary campaign of impersonation. This Author has much to report, and Friday - baking, as it is, beneath a heat dome of truly theatrical proportions - has not disappointed.

Dearest Gentle Reader, Monday has delivered a most extraordinary assortment of intrigues - smugglers operating in plain sight with the confidence of dukes, a strike designed to prevent workers from having more leisure, and a young man from Wolverhampton who has just rewritten a century of golfing history. This Author's tea has gone cold, but she would not have missed a single dispatch for the world.