MERYL STREEP can sing. We know this from Silkwood, where we hear her sad, soft Amazing Grace as the whistleblower Karen Silkwood took her last drive. In Ironweed she delivers a music-hall tribute to Jack Nicholson called He’s My Pal. And of course there was the moment she sold the soppy ABBA ballad The Winner Takes It All as a wrenching piece of opera in Mamma Mia!, the movie that turned Streep from a highly regarded Oscar-winning actor into a box-office movie star.

Six Tudor Queens

THE question of the new tax powers for Holyrood may have dominated the election campaign so far, but the biggest issue the next parliament will face is the financial crisis in local government. The scale of the cuts and job losses to come is staggering, and yet the manifestos and campaigns have barely touched on the question of what local government should look like – or how it should be paid for.

Colin Hutchison

Living in an old, unheated campervan for 14 months, including the coldest winter for 30 years, Jonathan Bennett travelled clockwise all the way round Britain, surfing every beach he could catch a wave. In this extract, Jonathan faces his biggest surfing fear: Thurso.

Tom Ballantine

THE CAULIFLOWER

THE wind is rising in the eaves, making the windows shake. Beyond the garden, across the field, the Lammermuirs look bleak. From downstairs comes the rattle of stepladders, and the smell of paint. I am in my childhood bedroom, which I shared with my sister, keeping out of the decorator’s way as he touches up a ceiling stained nicotine after a leak. Next he’ll be painting the cupboard under the rafters where we used to lay mousetraps, hearing them snap like alligators during the night. When I’d tiptoe in the next morning, expecting to find a rigid little corpse, often the cheese would be nibbled but the mouse gone.

Alastair Moffat

The Killing of Osama Bin Laden