If you haven’t been you can’t quite believe that it’s that good, but in fact it is And it’s recently added a £2.5m spa. We went recently with friends, with a total of five children in tow, between the ages of three and 11.The Playzone was an immediate pull for our gang of five. Those that really succeed are not cheap but they are mentioned in reverent tones by anyone who has wanted a weekend break with young children in civilised surroundings.
Calcot Manor, near Tetbury in the Cotswolds, is the sort of hotel that you hear people raving about at parties. They tend to be noisy and there’s often nowhere child-free to which the parents can escape.

Hotels that bill themselves as family-friendly are often not as relaxing as you might think. But what really happened? As usual, the story is projected with almost cinematic vividness by James Macpherson.. That helps him enter the mind of the ex-SAS loner who appears to have gunned down three high-school kids and shot himself. Araby’s magus-like cousin James saves the situation, leaving listeners immensely amused and realising that, perhaps, they are not so very different from Araby.
The back story of Ian Rankin’s Inspector John Rebus fills in with the revelation in A Question of Blood (Orion, abridged, c 7 hrs, £12.99) that he failed the arduous tests for the SAS.

All this could cue an Ealing comedy, but an attempted murder and accidental death soon darken the plot. Although she is in her sixties and married, he decides that she needs rescuing, and kidnaps her. He retires to a house by the sea to write his memoirs, but discovers that his first great love, who rejected him in his early twenties, is living nearby. I usually feel impatient with the artifice of the situations and the unsympathetic characters, and suspicious of their relentless cleverness. But the warmth and charisma of Derek Jacobi’s voice reading the first-person narration of The Sea, The Sea (Random House, abridged, 6 hrs, £12.99) made me go on listening to the very end.