Is "brave" the most over-used word in the English language? Jade Goody receives the same kind of gushing tributes that surrounded the death of Princess Diana. Then, psychologist Oliver James was roundly condemned for daring to voice the opinion that the nation was succumbing to a kind of collective hysteria (and not true mourning) about a woman people felt they knew, even though they'd never met or spoken to her.

Let's drink to our choice of rosé wines

Thousands of women will be waking up with Jamie Theakston on his new radio show. Ian Burrell reports

He is one of the most influential men in media, his ad campaigns have been used to promote governments, Wonderbras and Playstation. As outspoken as ever, he sounds the death-knell for bad ads, Conservatives - and olives. Sholto Byrnes listens to the Trevor-lution

THIS WEEK I want to offer more thoughts on the subject of fund management performance and costs, about which there now seems to be a healthy, and long-overdue debate developing in the investment industry. But the cause of cheaper financial services has hardly taken the country by storm. I see little prospect of a nationwide march by irate fundowners and mortgage-holders, descending on London to demand better terms and conditions, splendid though that might be as a spectacle.

`I find it very refreshing to be alone in the outfield for hours, with nobody to jostle or jeer at me'

he number one topic on fund managers' hate list at the moment is "this media obsession" with high charges on stock market funds sold to the public. Whenever I meet up with a marketing man from one of these firms, the script goes something like this.

An analysis of funds' add-on costs throws up some interesting anomalies

JOHN LEHMANN: A PAGAN ADVENTURE

A London gallery is celebrating its golden jubilee -

PHILIP O'CONNOR was kept alive by a kind of fiendish, gleeful curiosity, only partly centred on himself. One of the many virtues of his autobiographical masterpiece Memoirs of a Public Baby, published in 1958 to widespread acclaim, was that the author showed his ability to drag his eyes away from his own tortured life and look with penetrating compassion on the world about him. The same qualities of poetic understanding later made him a highly effective and fashionable radio interviewer, especially when he chatted with other misfits and madcaps like himself.

A good cigar is a celestial indulgence rarely seen. Squeezed out by economic sanity and olfactory puritanism it has become a lost pleasure. But in London's West End Nicole Veash sniffs something in the air: the rich perfume of Havana.

Although dauntingly different at first sight, many offshore funds run by UK fund managers have identical investment objectives to their onshore siblings. But, warns Abigail Montrose, investors should beware of different charges levied on each product.

It was radical Germaine at her most fiery. In a blistering attack on the racism of her native land, Dr Germaine Greer said last week that she would never return to live in Australia unless Aboriginal sovereignty was acknowledged, went on to demand that the Upper House in Canberra be composed entirely of Aborigines, and observed that all white Australians were secretly slightly mad.