People

Last night Ronnie Corbett was back on the north Norfolk coast, in Cromer, where his career began in 1954 - a long way down the bill in the summer show Take it Easy. He was invited to open the town's new museum, honouring the extraordinary Henry Blogg, who died in the same year as the town launched Corbett's career. Blogg worked letting out beach huts, but also served as an RNLI lifeboat crew member for 53 years, carrying out 154 rescues, saving 448 lives - including Monte the dog, rescued from an Italian steamer in 1932 - and becoming the most decorated lifeboat man ever. The centrepiece of the museum is the motor lifeboat the HF Bailey, which was donated by Peter Cadbury, whose father, Major Egbert Cadbury, had grateful memories of many airmen rescued by the Norfolk lifeboats during his wartime service as commanding officer of Great Yarmouth's naval air station.

Renzo Piano is one of the most celebrated and admired architects in the world, with major commissions in many capital cities and his proposed Shard of Glass tower still being hotly debated in London. Surprisingly, when the Morgan Library and Museum reopens in New York later this month, with Piano's glass pavilions adding a 7,000 sq metres (75,000 sq ft) extension, it will be his first completed commission in that city.

As Arundel Castle reopens for the tourist season, visitors will find that the present Duke of Norfolk is not yet up on the walls. All of his ancestors are there, including several who either lost their heads - such as Henry Howard, the poet earl, beheaded by Henry VIII on a trumped up charge - or spent some time in the Tower of London. "The Tower of London is rather like our Wormwood Scrubs," the duke said, "it figures very highly in our family history." Once he inherited the title and moved back into the castle - from Fulham - with his wife and young children, he knew he would have to add his own portrait. Andrew Festing, whose previous commissions include the Dukes of Argyll, Northumberland, Wellington and Montrose, as well as former Speaker Betty Boothroyd, has completed the job but still has the painting as he hopes to submit it for this year's BP Portrait Prize.

James H Billington, chief librarian at the US library of Congress, announced yesterday that among 50 recordings being added this year to his permanent collection are Fats Domino's 1956 version of Blueberry Hill, a 1925 recording of former American president Calvin Coolidge and a 1930 recording of the Modesto California High School band playing Beethoven.