This is a world where Van can fight a duel in a pine forest, 'in the kind of single combat described by most Russian novelists and by practically all Russian novelists of gentle birth,' before speeding off to a penthouse in Manhattan.Van and Ada are surrounded by the kind of delicious dazzle that goes against the grain of contemporary fiction. But it soon turned into an obsession: if someone came in when I was busy and won the jackpot, I'd want to kill that person: it was my turn to win. 'They might sell at pounds 65,000, but to find anything with three bedrooms in the country is going to cost pounds 100,000 to pounds 125,000.'In Cambridge it was blight that created the areas now enjoyed by high-earning professional couples. It saved their self-esteem for the moment, but they will not be at all happy with the haphazard manner in which they arrived at their result.Scotland have only the one point from their draw with Ireland to show for a series in which they had done their best to rebuild their side under the pressure of injuries. Sir: I read with interest the letter written by Prof Snodgrass (24 February) concerning the condescending attitude towards the Irish rugby team in the English media. The special effects are not so sophisticated, but the plotting and score (Ian Armit and Carl Zeller) are a treat, particularly where they use the conventions of 1920s musical comedy to subvert the Grand Guignol.Let me instance a skating party, led by Toni Palmer in blonde pigtails, which finally sweeps the resident ghouls - Terrence Hardiman's vampire doctor linking hands with the metal claw of Bogdan Kominowski's black leather police chief - into an oom-pahing Black Forest stomp, which is so wholesome that you can't wait for them to return to the Walpurgisdorf laboratory and get the hypodermics into Diana Morrison's radiant snow queen.

The worst may be over for Japan. 'You just can't do it without the horse,' the trainer said yesterday. Moreover, the plan to build a new Museum of 20th-Century Art in London, perhaps at Bankside, is no longer a foolish fantasy: when Serota talks about it, you can imagine it happening.The harshest charge against Serota is that, wittingly or not, he has done a favour to commercial galleries like Anthony d'Offay and the Lisson Gallery in London and the PACE Gallery in New York by providing a state-sponsored platform for the work of their fashionable and expensive young artists.What we are seeing is another bitter skirmish in the battle between the modern and the familiar in art It has been raging for over 50 years. British players are still too slow around the play-the-ball - something that was not shown up by the Kiwi hooker, Duane Mann, because although the brain is still there the legs aren't.'A good Australian hooker - like either of the Walters brothers - would make ground against British defences all the time. Stravinsky's The Rake's Progess (last year's Glyndebourne tour) and Britten's Death in Venice (GTO 1989) were written with smaller theatres in mind. 'It is part of developing an identity, and it can be equally worrying if a child does not do this. Anyways I was nice to him and he finally left.' In the event, the interview never appeared.

Few ever clap here: all hands are occupied with expensive bar products.The whooping moved into another scale when the Man returned already strumming the opening bars of 'Moondance', which the others picked up in big-band swing tempo. Anthony Burgess takes his title, A Mouthful Of Air (Hutchinson pounds 17.99), from Yeats, who said that he made a poem 'out of a mouthful of air'.The main thrust of his book is not the visual symbol of the written word, but the sounds we make and hear, 'the buzzes, hisses, bangs and flutings'.The first 19 chapters deal with language generally, including phonetics, linguistics from Grimm to Chomsky, and foreign idioms. Paintings and drawings will come from the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lille. When on the shelf in the white room, each bore a tag revealing which of the 250,000 moulds it had come from. It's a mark of his singlemindedness that although he was already earning professional money as an actor in Taggart and elsewhere, he went on to do three years at Rada, where his classmates included Imogen Stubbs, Jane Horrocks and Ralph Fiennes.In the six years since, Glen has never been out of work His tall, febrile frame exerts a commanding stage presence. Many are familiar ('Algy met a bear,/A bear met Algy./ The bear was bulgy./ The bulge was Algy'), quite a few are limericks, and not all are about animals.Prelutsky smuggles in a few poems of his own, as do, with rather less artfulness, Robert Fisher in Minibeasts (Faber pounds 7.99, illustrations by Kay Widdowson) and Rowena Sommerville in Don't Step on that Earwig (Hutchinson pounds 7.99), who does the drawings too. A modest devaluation in the ERM would probably result in higher interest rates, while leaving the ERM and floating the pound is unthinkable for Mr Major, both in terms of surrendering to inflation and ripping apart the Government's European policy.