Corporate leaders fear GDP data will panic consumers while CBI suggests manufacturing remains robust

Hopes are rising of a significant advertising boom from a triple whammy of feelgood events with the Diamond Jubilee, Olympics and Euro 2012 football championship between June and August.

Cigarettes and alcohol; cars with tail fins; technological utopias and the lifestyle, clothes and accoutrements of the international jetsetter.

Sir Martin Sorrell's WPP, the world's biggest advertising group, yesterday smashed profits and revenue records but sounded a warning about "clouds on the horizon" next year.

WPP, the world's biggest advertising group, yesterday smashed profits and revenue records but sounded a warning about "clouds on the horizon".

Charity launches face recognition billboard on Oxford Street to highlight gender discrimination

News from across the Atlantic will have put a smile on Sir Martin Sorrell's face last night. As his WPP empire closed at its highest since last March, one of its major rivals posted forecast-beating figures on Wall Street while predicting a jump in advertising spending over 2012.

Malcolm Fowler was a part of that generation of art directors, writers, designers, photographers and film- makers who revolutionised British advertising in the 1970s and 1980s. The names of David Puttnam, Alan Parker, Ridley Scott and Hugh Hudson are familiar to many through their work in cinema, but talent requires and attracts talent, and the creative blooming in film and magazine advertising required comparable energy, imagination and panache from everyone involved.

Life on Marsden

A study in elegance: Montreal's latest digs

Thousands of Czechs lined the cobblestone streets of Prague yesterday as soldiers carried the coffin of former President Vaclav Havel on his last public journey – to Prague Castle – where his body will lie in state until his funeral tomorrow.

The whole dynamic of the jockeys' championship has changed since Kieren Fallon won it for a sixth time, back in 2003. Even so, the milestone he reached yesterday, when riding his 100th winner of the campaign, confirmed he could yet roll back the years at 46. Fallon still ended the afternoon 11 behind the defending champion, Paul Hanagan, but the satisfaction he would obtain from retrieving the title, after all his notorious vicissitudes, guarantees that he will be giving it everything during the coming weeks.