Researchers in Italy claim to have unearthed the portrait of a noblewoman by Leonardo da Vinci which has been lost for 500 years and features the same enigmatic smile as his Mona Lisa.

The portrait of Isabella d'Este, which carbon dating suggests was painted around the start of the 16th century, has been found in a vault in a private collection in Switzerland, and has been verified by a leading authority on the renaissance polymath.

"There are no doubts that the portrait is Leonardo's work," said Carlo Pedretti, an emeritus professor of art history at the University of California.

If acknowledged as genuine - and if experts concur that it was painted before the Mona Lisa - the portrait could shake up academic studies of one of the world's most famous paintings.

Oh, to be Norwegian. It has been announced that NRK, the country's state broadcaster, will soon show a programme about a sweater being knitted. That's it. Norwegian viewers will tune in and watch a sheep being sheared, before seeing its wool being spun and used to knit a sweater. This will happen in real time. Nobody seems to know how long this show will last for. Some say five hours, some say eight. It's enough to make non-Norwegians everywhere insane with jealousy.

And the fact that this isn't even Norway's first incredibly long TV show about hardly anything just makes it worse. In February there was a 12-hour programme about a log fire being built and maintained. And a 10-hour show following a train journey from Oslo to Bergen. And 18 consecutive hours of salmon spawning. And a five-day broadcast of a cruise ship travelling up the Norwegian coast. It's all part of a movement called Slow TV, and I desperately want to see it happen over here.

Each year, a quarter of a million Germans come to Cornwall, lured by the books of a British author largely unknown in her own country - and the gorgeous locations in German TV adaptations of her work

"Rosamunde Pilcher?" The guy behind the bar gives me a blank look with a hint of social fear: should he know the name? He shouldn't worry. Rosamunde Pilcher was born in 1924, barely 10 miles down the road from The Gurnard's Head, a cosy pub in the village of Lelant, in Cornwall's storm-battered, rugged west. After marrying in 1946 she left for Scotland, where she went on to become a writer. Pilcher never came back to live in Cornwall, but many of her stories are set in the rough landscape of her childhood home.

Now, aged 89, she has sold more than 60m books and has a fortune thought to exceed £100m. Her international breakthrough came late, in 1987, when The Shell Seekers entered the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for 48 weeks. Although Pilcher continued to write prolifically, none of her novels and stories since has matched the huge success of that one. She still leads - as family and friends are keen to stress - a very regular life near Dundee, untroubled by a public largely unaware of her work. In the UK, that is.

In Germany, it is a different story. Pilcher is a household name, not because of its German ring nor the 15m sales of her books - but because for 20 years she has been a firm fixture in the TV schedules. In Germany, Sunday night is Rosamunde Pilcher night: around six million people in Munich and Berlin, in Heidelberg and Hamburg, tune in to one of her dramas. Public broadcaster ZDF aired its first Pilcher movie, The Day of the Storm, in 1993. More than eight million - 25% of viewers - watched it, and a further 111 films have followed, all similarly successful. The movies feature mostly German actors, but they're filmed on location in England, usually in Cornwall, and each show typically contains long stretches of scenic footage, fly-overs of the cliffs at Bedruthan steps or of sun-flooded moorland in the west.