The Schubert bicentenary celebrations come with one built-in advantage: there's no shortage of material. The famous Deutsch catalogue lists nearly a thousands titles (with extensive song-cycles like Winterreise or Die schone Mullerin counting as just one work). And the proportion of that vast output that's actually worth hearing is astonishingly high - higher, dare one say, than is the case with Mozart.

Sir: Having grown up in the Fifties I was able to empathise with a great deal of what Peter Popham had to say about that decade ("Sad 1950s were hardly a golden age", 23 October). However, I found his conclusion that the Fifties were closed to outside influence extraordinary, even rural.

Designers are transforming the idea of recycling by turning the stuff we throw away into stylish and ingeniously crafted objects. Jane Withers reports

YOU CAN dip them in ink and you can cover them with chocolate. Dead or alive, spiders have inspired a rare wealth of suggestions. Here is our classification:

High Art and Low Life (V&A, 071-938 8500, to 31 Oct). 200 exhibits from the 1890s. Good on the Studio magazine and an excellent survey of Beardsley.

WHEN, at the end of The Taming of the Shrew, it is clear Kate will now do her husband's bidding, the astonished Hortensio wonders what this bodes. 'Marry, peace it bodes, and love, and quiet life,' replies Petruchio. In this production Brian Protheroe delivers the lines with heartfelt relief. How much he, his director, Jude Kelly, and Nichola McAuliffe (who plays Kate) must wish Petruchio had stopped there and not gone on to attribute this consummation to his 'awful rule, and right supremacy'. The goal of their interpretation is to show Petruchio and Kate establishing a marriage based not on awe but mature respect. It's a tribute to their abilities that we do not have to peep through our fingers to see them bring this off.

I first saw Pollock's work in a French art magazine when I was at the RCA in the mid-Fifties and then at the Whitechapel show that Bryan Robertson organised. It led me to treat the activity of painting as an arena - to stretch across the canvas. The idea of disturbing the surface of the paint came from Pollock, though I never copied his dripping. I used other means: bicycles and fire. Summertime: Number 9A (right), in the Tate Gallery, is one of his greatest. It led me to be completely non-figurative. It was a liberation.