From small, sharp black ones to big, juicy green ones, olives add a certain bounce to your cooking at any time of year

By this point in our use-up-the-old-to-make–way-for the-new store cupboard forage, you may well have polished off all the dates, but I hope you haven't quite finished with the capers, if only because they go so wonderfully with this week's ingredient, olives. Whether your olives come in tubs, jars or tins, in oil or in brine, their punchy flavour and fleshy nature make them just the thing to whizz into a dip, perk up a...

Sweet peas are one of the unbridled joys of the spring and early summer garden. Their delightful scent and blooms repay in spades any early effort you put in

One of my successes last year was a 50p packet of sweet pea seeds. Humble they may have been, yet they transformed the garden, allotment and every windowsill I could find on which to sit little jam jars of picked flowers.

Sweet peas need a little heat to get going – a warm windowsill is perfect. Aim to sow six to eight weeks before the last frost, so now is just about perfect....

Hello!, OK! and Heat editors all had to testify. So few, when so many celebrity magazines regularly splash dubious misery-porn

What has circled sweat patches, the medical condition Pseudologia fantastica, and makes the Daily Mail look like an evening with Gloria Steinem? If you answered "the weekly celebrity magazine market", then congratulations. You win the chance to flick through this week's divorce and eating disorder speculation, and photo spreads of the great adipose migration. (It is one of the immutable laws of showbiz that...

Most stars are just the front-of-house display for an industry that makes fortunes for many others

I asked my mum over the holidays where her big pile of sketches was, because I wanted my sons to see them. She said she'd thrown them away ages ago. I was stunned. I'd loved looking though them all when I was little. Portrait after portrait of actors, all beautifully copied from the movie magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, some of them oil paintings on greaseproof paper, a nimbus of ochre linseed around their edges, most of them...