Raf Simons leaves Jil Sander after triumph at Italian fashion week

SVG, the quoted proxy for the mighty Permira private-equity funds, saw its shares leap more than 8 per cent yesterday, after the firm said its first £50m tender to buy back some of its shares is to be priced at around 315p.

Easy to say from a dressing-up suite at the Paris Ritz – but fashion's first lady is no pampered muse, as Chanel's new couture collections are set to prove.

As Jacques Austerlitz remarks towards the end of the book that bears his name, we "have appointments to keep in the past... and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak". Let me, briefly, keep one of those appointments. On a bright February day in 1998, I'm sitting with Max Sebald, professor of European literature, over lunch in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts on the Norwich campus of the University of East Anglia – where he has taught since 1970.

Catalan soprano Nuria Rial here explores the largely uncharted terrain of Georg Philipp Telemann's operatic arias, rarely performed today, despite his having composed an estimated 50 operas during a most prolific career.

Dynamo Dresden fans are in the vanguard of a new and worrying wave of hooliganism spreading among hordes of disaffected youth in the former GDR

In Bavaria, anyone who fancies taking the waters should forget their swimming costume and dive right in

In the most elevated fashion circles it is not always deemed strictly stylish to wear a dress that is simply flattering. Witness the rise of Lady Gaga as a fashion plate par

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Moaning about the weather may be a typically British characteristic but Philip Green is perhaps clutching at straws blaming the so far unusually mild winter for flagging high-street sales. "It's been the hottest October and November in history. Nobody can deal with that," he told journalists this week. "Winter goods are tough."

That half of Britons in their early twenties do not know that the Romans built Hadrian's Wall, or that Nelson led the British to victory at Trafalgar, is evidence of young people leaving school "woefully undernourished" in history, Michael Gove lamented yesterday. Absolutely right. But the Education Secretary should resist the inevitable Tory temptation to take the National Curriculum back to a focus on Kings and Queens.

Reckitt Benckiser has been fined €24m by the German cartel office for fixing prices on dishwashing and laundry products with its German rival Henkel.

With his chanson-like songs, Franz Josef Degenhardt was so ingrained in the consciousness of German speakers that it is impossible to think of an appropriate British comparison. His eloquence, seniority and track record elevated him to quasi-Dylan status wherever German is spoken. A goodly proportion of several generations knew and could sing his songs.