How do we stop the riots happening again? I agree with Iain Duncan Smith that locking young people up is no solution and exposes them to career criminals. Fining guilty kids and removing benefits is pretty pointless: how are they supposed to save up and pay for their mistakes? Since the rioting, there have been over 1,800 arrests, two-thirds of which are of kids aged between 11 and 24 – the vast majority young men who are unemployed and unemployable.

"Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive." Josephine Hart is best known for her début novel Damage, which she wrote in six weeks and which was translated into 23 languages and sold one million copies around the world. It was alsomade into a successful film, directed by Louis Malle, scripted by David Hare and starring Jeremy Irons, Miranda Richardson, Juliette Binoche and Rupert Graves.

Jeremy Irons is a very suitable standard-bearer for eternal misanthropes: his particular talent on film is to exude moroseness from every pore

When TV drama focuses on higher education, the results are excellent. Why, then, has it so often ignored academia? Gerard Gilbert reports

Asked to choose the smoothest heroes and iciest heroines in literature, John Sutherland found a mixture of fascination and fear.

The word on the street is that "Too Close to the Sun" - a new musical by the composer who tormented us with "The Man in the Iron Mask" - has no business in the West End. How did it get there? Someone's hard-earned money unknowingly squandered. And all the while a wealth of writing talent goes unnoticed and unheard. Don't get me started.

It must, I feel sure, have been Evelyn Waugh who said you should always think of those less fortunate than yourself. How much more entertaining for most of us to think of those more fortunate than ourselves getting it in the neck. Brideshead Revisited seems likely to be an abiding delight, not just because the noble house of Marchmain get what is coming to them, but because it is a book of great splendour, splendidly done. I am particularly grateful to John Mortimer, who adapted the book, for his remarkable fidelity to Waugh. I noticed only one ripple of Rumpole. "There is no Mrs Lunt," said Mr Lunt, with notable satisfaction.

If you miss the rituals of the class system, read on

Arriving at the Casanova felt like walking on to a film set. This wasn't without grounds, because we were (if only for the day). A TV crew filming a beer advert had set up in the hotel's bar, which meant that cameras, bright lights, swarthy men and beer bottles were strewn all over the place – not that any of this fazed the immaculately groomed staff, who carried on as if it were just another working day.

Casanova was a generous and charming man who found true love – over and over again

Evelyn Waugh's classic novel, all languorous living and raging snobbery, is so much more than a love story. John Walsh hopes that the makers of a new film remembered that

There must be something in the water. First David Mamet declared himself through with being a "brain-dead liberal", and now Howard Brenton, the one-time self-professed Marxist and celebrated left-wing satirist, has written an elegiac and profoundly human portrait of the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

Macmillan, from boy to man, portrays the inside Tory