Dearest Gentle Reader, this Sunday brings a transatlantic telephone call of splendid bluntness, a defence plan as absent as good sense in certain quarters, and a kebab scandal so audacious it deserves its own chapter in the annals of culinary deception. Plus - a royal wedding to restore one's faith in the possibility of a happy ending, if one can only get past the fraudulent mutton first.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Friday delivers a prince who sub-lets, a machine that outsmarts every virologist alive, and a mathematics paper so brutal it has driven twenty thousand souls to petition for mercy. Whether one's concerns run to royal cottages, university crossbows, or the imminent implosion of the Progressive Assembly's leadership arrangements, this Author has the full, rather bewildering account - and she trusts you will not wish to miss a single syllable of it.

Dearest Gentle Reader, this Thursday opens with tragedy in a Devon field, a pharmaceutical miracle twenty years in the making, and a controversy about lapel badges that threatens to consume more energy than the policies they symbolise. This Author has also noted a new arrival to the ton - unnamed, genderless, and already more mysterious than half the Cabinet.