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This May Turin’s stately boulevards and grand piazzas will be flooded with sequin-clad divas and flag-brandishing fans, as it gears up to host the 66th edition of the Eurovision song contest. This is only the third time ever that Italy has hosted the competition, following Rome in 1991 and Naples in 1965. The country’s first ever capital (from 1861 to 1865) and the urban hub of the stunning Piedmont region (a foodie haven) – Turin is an under-appreciated gem among European city breaks. There’s no better to time to discover the best of what the city has to offer ahead of the Eurovision Grand Final on 14 May. What to do With

Ask a foreigner to name the fruit that above all others epitomises their image of Britain, and it will surely be the strawberry. It is less a fruit than an icon. Redolent of royalty: not just for its role jam sandwiching together a Victoria Sponge but for its colour too, as patriotically red as the tunics of The Queen’s Guards. To eat bowls of strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. To partake of a punnet on a park picnic. These things are as quintessentially British as tea and queuing. What is it that is so evocative about strawberries? They are of course synonymous with summer, and they have about them something

Turville Grange has many of the expected hallmarks of the top-end English country houses and estates on the market this spring. First comes its punchy price tag – in this case £18.75m – and lusted after location, the upmarket riverside town of Henley-on-Thames, in Oxfordshire. Then there are its classic good looks: built in Queen Anne style in the 1880s, the Grade II listed three-storey house sprawls across 8,000 sq ft of space, has five main bedrooms, five staff bedrooms, two guest bedrooms and five reception rooms. There’s even a scratch or two of graffiti as proof of the requisite royal visitors – Princess Victoria, younger sister of King George

We seem to need little excuse for a party here in the UK, and HRH Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year shift on the throne is set to be no exception. Whether you’ll be raising a lunchtime gin and Dubonnet to our sovereign’s stamina or simply making the most of the bonus day away from your desk, the Jubilee is the perfect pretext for baking. While you’ve left it a little late to enter Fortnum & Mason’s rather fabulous sounding Platinum Pudding Competition, I urge you not to be deterred from donning your aprons and dusting off your cake tins. F&M’s FAQs reason that a pudding can be ‘steamed, baked, layered or

During last year’s European Championship, England football fans switched, for some reason, from ‘Three Lions’ to ‘Sweet Caroline’ by Neil Diamond (‘so good, so good, so good’). If anything can make them switch back it’s the Football Association, who this week said they were thinking of dropping the Baddiel and Skinner anthem as England’s official song, because it could be seen as ‘arrogant’. Football fans are like children, and as any parent could have told the F.A., if you want to make sure someone does something then just tell them not to do it. The F.A. quickly had to issue a statement confirming there were no plans to change. David

‘Was that Will Smith?’  This was Chris Rock’s characteristically quick and hilarious reaction when his friend, comedian Dave Chappelle, was tackled by an audience member on Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl. Comedy venues need to be a sacred space, free from the threat of violence We don’t yet know the motive, we don’t yet know the man’s name, but this is the second high-profile attack on a comedian in two months. Luckily for Dave, he has great security, including Django himself, Jamie Foxx, who helped subdue the attacker, who some reported as being armed with a gun and a knife.  Video footage of the man being loaded into an ambulance

There are moments in life that serve as a wake-up call to adulthood. Perhaps, the first was sitting in the beige office of a mortgage broker, wondering how my soon-to-be-husband and I had made the leap from meeting on a sweaty Durham dance floor to this airless room in Holborn. More recently, it was looking around a primary school for our four-year-old-son. Mindlessly staring at wall displays of woodland animals, you’re racking your brains as to how you will finish work at 3pm for pick up come September and scramble enough childcare for a six-week summer holiday. Goodbye 52-week-a year nursery.  But book yourself enough tours at enough schools, and

I would do anything to help a friend. Need money? A shoulder to cry on? A place to stay? A confidant to confess to? I’m your man. Want me to read your new novel? Forget it. I would do anything for a friend, but as the late Meat Loaf would say: I won’t do that. Sorry. I’ve been there. Read that. And I’ve had enough. Many years ago a really good friend showed me his first novel. It was so bad it left me speechless — but I had to say something. So I did the only thing a good and trusted friend could do: I lied. ‘It’s really funny