Colourful Tracey Emin is among the artists short-listed for the £20,000 Turner prize. Self-characterised as Mad Tracey From Margate, Emin is as distinctive as her confessional work.
Twins Jane and Louise Wilson, who work together, Steve McQueen and Steven Pippin also feature on the short list announced at the Tate Gallery in London yesterday. An exhibition of their work will be staged at the Tate from October 30th and a winner chosen during a live Channel 4 broadcast on November 30th.
Prince Charles, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Aga Khan yesterday joined friends and figures from the world of classical music at a memorial service to Yehudi Menuhin, one the century's greatest musicians and a noted humanitarian. Westminster Abbey was packed for a 90-minute celebration of his life, which united the world with messages from the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela.
Sir Christopher Cockerell, who has died aged 88, was one of Britain's most original scientific minds and had a string of inventions to his name.
In the early 1950s, he began to consider the possibility of travel by hovercraft, a vehicle which can move across land or water on a cushion of air. The first prototype crossed the Channel in June 1959. In June 1962, the first commercial hovercraft service was launched by Vickers across the estuary of the River Dee. Commercial cross-Channel services began in 1966.
He was born in 1910 in Cambridge, where his father, Sir Sydney Cockerell, was Curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum. At Gresham's School in Norfolk he was a contemporary of the poet W.H. Auden and the future spy Donald Maclean.
Queen Elizabeth met some creepy-crawlies yesterday - on a trip to London Zoo.
At close quarters with a bright green jungle nymph, she asked for reassurance: "It doesn't jump, does it?" Then, with nervous laughter, she said: "It can only creep."
The queen was introduced to Roger, a hissing cockroach from Madagascar, an Australian stick insect and a number of giant African land snails, each held, without fear, by child volunteers.