• Sainsbury’s and Royal Parks have unveiled plans for a two day festival in Hyde Park – billed as the largest family festival London has ever seen – celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee over the June holiday weekend. The Jubilee Family Festival will feature live music and entertainment with one of the key highlights of each day being the finale – a 70 minute Disney concert specially created to celebrate the Jubilee. Other activities will include appearances by celebrity performers and dancer and children’s TV characters as well as equestrian events and motorcycle displays. There will also be a range of “Commonwealth-inspired” acts, food and drink supplied by Sainsbury’s and giant screens showing Jubilee-related events taking place elsewhere. There will be capacity for 50,000 ticket holders on each of the two days – Saturday, 2nd June, and Sunday, 3rd June. The event will run from 10.30am to 7pm on each day. Tickets – priced at £20 an adult/£12.50 for under 16s (children under three free) or £52 for a family of two adults and two children – go on sale at 9am tomorrow (Friday 24 February) from Ticketmaster – www.ticketmaster.co.uk or call 0844 847 1661 (+44 161 385 3211 from outside the UK) – or Seetickets –  www.seetickets.com  or call 0844 858 6760 (+44 1142 249 784 from outside the UK). In addition, from 28th March, Sainsbury’s customers who spend £60 in store will be able to enter a daily ballot for free family tickets. For more information on the festival, see www.sainsburys.co.uk/jubilee.

• The British Library has republished what many believe was the first detective novel ever published. The Notting Hill Mystery by Charles Felix was originally serialised between 1862 and 1863 in the magazine Once a Week (pictured right – image courtesy of the British Library). It was also published as a single volume in 1863, meaning it predates both Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) and Emile Gaboriau’s first Monsieur Lecoq novel, L’Affaire Lerouge, but has not been available commercially since. The story is presented in the form of diary entries, family letters, chemical analysis reports, and interviews with witnesses as well as a crime scene map and follows an insurance investigator, Ralph Henderson, as he builds a case against the sinister Baron ‘R___’ whom he suspects of murdering his wife for life insurance. Available from the British Library bookshop – www.bl.uk/shop.

• Tickets for the BT London Live Closing Ceremony Celebration Concert go on sale tomorrow. The open air event will feature headline act Blur and will be held in Hyde Park on Sunday, 12th August, the day of the Olympic Games Closing Ceremony. Other artists performing at the concert will include The Specials and New Order, and giant screens in the park will show highlights of the Closing Ceremony. Another concert will be held in Hyde Park on Friday July 27, coinciding with the Games’ Opening Ceremony (headline acts and ticket prices will be announced shortly – BT customers will have 48 hour priority access for tickets for both concerts via www.bt.com/londonlive. Tickets for the August concert, priced at £55 (plus booking fee) go on sale at 9am on Friday via www.btlondonlive.com.