10/08/2013

Robin Ellis – heart throb of the 70’s and 80’s as the handsome Captain Ross Poldark of the hugely popular TV Series. He now lives in France with his wife, six cats and a hen, where his life-long passion for cooking plus a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes has led to him writing cook books and regular blogs on food and life in rural France.

Find out more about diabetes.

Photo credit: Meredith Wheeler.

Singer-songwriter KT Tunstall inherits ‘The Elements’ by Tom Lehrer, and passes on ‘Loser’ by Beck.

Angelique is a WWF primate specialist who has spent the last 14 years in the Central African Republic looking after a group of gorillas and building a family of her own. But when rebel groups overthrew the government in March this year, Angelique was forced to flee the country, and leave behind the gorillas she’d befriended and the place she calls home.

More on Angelique’s work with the western lowland gorilla

Karen is the daughter of Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, who was one of New York’s most infamous Italian mobsters during the 70s and 80s. She tells us about her lavish upbringing as a mafia daughter, finding out as a teen that her father had been responsible for 19 murders, and the impact it’s had on her as an adult.

'Mob Daughter' by Karen Gravano with Lisa Pulitzer. Published by St Martin's Press 

Barry Fantoni is a founder of Private Eye, artist, playwright, novelist, cartoonist and now denizen of Calais. He tells John McCarthy why he has moved there and shows him round his new home town and the nearby seaside village of Wissant.

You can see one of Barry's paintings here

Amanda Hone tells us about her pastime known as ‘brown-signing’ - cataloguing tourist brown signs with the aim of inspiring us to start following brown signs as an alternative and spontaneous way to discover Britain.

Follow the brown signs....