In brief: Bacon triptych sells for record $86m

A three-panelled painting by Francis Bacon - Triptych, 1976 (pictured) - was sold at Sotheby's in New York on Wednesday for $86m, the highest price ever paid for a Bacon... Nicholas Soames, the former Tory minister and great-grandson of Winston Churchill, has been banned from driving for two months after being caught riding an uninsured quad bike while following a hunt meet; the MP for mid-Sussex already had nine points on his licence, but escaped the usual one-year ban because of his constituency work... A biography of the writer VS Naipaul which exposes the Nobel laureate's cruelty towards those closest to him, particularly his wife, has been tipped to win the £30,000 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction; Patrick French's The World is What It Is tells how the literary lion constantly put down his wife, Pat, had numerous affairs and visited prostitutes. Naipaul can have no complaints - he authorised the biography... Mary Martin, the wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons, has been cleared of breaching parliamentary rules for claiming on expenses more than £40,000 for taxis over a four-year period, even though the lion's share was incurred on shopping expeditions...