WHENEVER THE irrationality of debate in the House of Commons threatens to become injurious to the health it is a useful restorative to wander down the corridor to the Lords, a chamber so eccentric in its operations and so irrelevant in its pomp that, by a kind of trick of the light, it makes the other place appear a model of intellectual rigour.

Over 30 years ago I received a call from the BBC Overseas Service, as I did quite often in those days, asking me for an interview on the current political scene. When I turned up at the studio, it was explained that the broadcast would be one of several to Southern Rhodesia, then in rebellion against the Crown. It soon became clear that the interviewer, a corporation employee, was conducting the Harold Wilson Show. All his questions were what the Latin grammar books call a question expecting the answer Yes. Did I agree that Mr Wilson dominated the government? He was vastly popular in the country too? And his policy towards Rhodesia commanded universal approbation likewise?

For the last 40 years, the most powerful force in politics has been the European Union, as it now likes to call itself. It used to be known more prosaically as the Common Market. It created a party, the SDP, whose nucleus comprised the original Labour rebels who had voted against Labour and with the Government in the early 1970s.

`Street of Crocodiles' Theatre de Complicite Queen's Theatre london

Pop; PJ HARVEY COLSTON HALL BRISTOL

SO WHO has won and who has lost in the great constitutional crisis between Lords and Commons? Just as in Alice in Wonderland, "we all won".

Reading aloud for children is an art, says Christina Hardyment

Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got, as George Wendt, a.k.a. Norm, is finding out. By James Rampton

GARGANTUA THE UNDERBELLY CENTRAL LIBRARY

Theatre: The Barbers of Surreal/Camino Real

inside...: Ceramicist Kate Malone's London studio is a work of art in itself. Katherine Sorrell reports

A new club night highlights what the organisers claim is the `druggy' nature of Alice in Wonderland. Not as you read it with mother

Sir: In your article "Alice in clubland upsets Lewis Carroll fans" (30 September), Kate Wilson, of Macmillan's Children's Books, claims that "Members of the Lewis Carroll Society will not like this."

Twenty years were wiped out when her marriage was annulled, but this Kennedy wife isn't taking it lying down. To prove it, she's written a book blowing the lid off the US Catholic establishment