Friends...? Only on TV

Captain America: The Winter Soldier has set a record as the biggest domestic April release ever.

Ramona Lisa smile

If anyone thinks writers are bookish, unadventurous souls, here’s Charles Willeford, born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1919. Aged 13, he boarded an LA freight train during the Great Depression and travelled along the Mexican border under an assumed name, becoming a role model for rebellious children everywhere. After being stationed in the Philippines as a US Army fire engine driver, he became a tank commander, won awards for bravery at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, and enjoyed a long military career, but also became a published poet. He lived in Peru, then re-enlisted and served for two years in Japan.

But America's late-night round-up is showing its age

'If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough," declared the great photojournalist Robert Capa. Capa, it is fair to say, was close enough. Not least when he swam ashore with the second assault wave on Omaha Beach on D-Day, for perhaps his most famous shots of the Second World War – but also earlier in the campaign, when he was with American forces as they crossed Sicily.

George Bernard Shaw's 'Pygmalion' is 100 years old, and as popular and quietly revolutionary as ever. Michael Holroyd, the playwright's authorised biographer, tells the story of its conception, and how its author was smitten by his leading lady

A tacky jeu d’esprit with a blow-job aria as its calling-card

The country’s stand-up comedians are about to take over the Royal Albert Hall. But how well will their humour travel?

The 56-year-old was commended for his innovative use of cardboard tubes