Why try to explain how you are feeling when an emoticon can do it for you? The internet has now become the first port of call for pretty much anything, and these days ever more people are opting for virtual therapy sessions via email or web chat programmes such as MSN and Skype.

The online revolution is the most recent step in the development of counselling, an initiative that [...]

Those of us irked by the automatic 10-15 per cent discretionary service charge frequently added to our restaurant bills have been even more disgruntled to learn that the "tips" increasingly fail to reach the staff for whom they were intended.

Legally belonging to the restaurant when paid by card, the amount can go towards anything from tips to tableware, or even pay.

At Strada, the chain of Italian restaurants owned [...]

Last summer the American toy company one2believe made the news when Wal-Mart agreed to stock its biblical action figures. The figurines include Jesus and Samson and recite passages of scripture at the push of a button.

Five months on, buoyed by the success of the figures, the company has come up with a new range - Bible Princesses - and is in negotiations with a UK distributor to get the [...]

“So here I go, into advanced old age, towards my inevitable and no longer distant end,” writes Diana Athill in this memoir. Now aged 90, Athill gives us insight into the twilight years of life in a society firmly focused on youth.

Athill is a former literary editor of writers such as Philip Roth and V S Naipaul who worked at the publishing house André Deutsch in its heyday. The [...]

In 2004 the palaeontologist Neil Shubin found the fossil of a fish that exhibited features of both sea- and land-dwelling animals. Think fins with arm bones, a fish with a neck. According to Shubin, the tiktaalik, as it came to be named, is a vital step in the transition of life from sea to land, as important in piecing together our evolutionary development as hominids and primates.

Your Inner Fish [...]

The romantic literati left not only their works, but also their love letters, which give an insight into their private lives. Think of John Keats and Fanny Brawne, James Joyce's letters to Nora, or the famous correspondence between the medieval abbess Héloise and her tutor Abelard.

Other less likely contenders showed their softer side, like this from Napoleon Bonaparte just before he married Josephine in 1796: "I wake filled with [...]

Wood Green in north London isn't traditional independent bookshop territory, but later this month, or in early December, a new venture hopes to open its doors under the name Big Green Bookshop (a name chosen earlier this month following a competition among local residents).

The store intends to replace the local Waterstone's that closed suddenly in August - one of 10 stores closed by the company this year. Sure that [...]

In 1969, the body of David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant, was pulled from the River Aire in Leeds. The event attracted little attention at the time, but Kester Aspden’s attempt to trace the circumstances behind Oluwale’s death reveals a tale of brutal racism.

Oluwale arrived from Lagos in 1949 and fell into a life of vagrancy, punctuated by bouts of mental illness and run-ins with the law. His death was [...]

Italian food is now as much a part of British cuisine as curry. What would we eat without pizza, pasta and ciabatta; focaccia, risotto and a dab of pesto? Where the likes of Carluccio’s and a multitude of Italian delicatessens have brought us the cuisine’s taste, Delizia! fleshes out its history.

Italian food is more complex than the romanticised image of busty mammas and capricious chefs would have us believe, [...]

Journalists are seen as a cynical bunch – not just by politicians, but by the general public as well. Noble ideas of honesty, accuracy and a bit of hard graft seem to have been abandoned in favour of networking and re-spun press releases.

Or so this book, by the veteran journalist Dennis Barker, would have us believe. Barker presents us with 56 short chapters that explain why journalists are so [...]