What appeared at first sight to be seismological developments at the Securities and Investments Board may turn out to be no more than 1.5 on the Richter scale.

AUDREY HEPBURN was one of the more uncommon stars to emerge in the Fifties, writes Sheila Johnston.

EIGHT shopping days before Christmas, in the middle of a deep recession, Sony will launch a personal stereo that costs pounds 500 and cannot work without a new and scarce disc. It is competing against another new system, using cassettes, that will have been in the shops for two months. The Japanese have never been known for taking gambles. Sony is doing its best to reverse that reputation.

Puccini - La Fanciulla del West: Marton, O'Neill, Fondary, Munich Radio Orchestra / Leonard Slatkin (BMG/RCA 09026 60597-2 - two CDs)

SO THE little girl with bandy legs, buck teeth, and the freaky voice grew up to be Julie Andrews. Broadway made her, Hollywood immortalised her - but some things are forever England. She will always be Eliza, the cockney sparrow turned swan; she will always be the chipper Nanny with the brolly and the carpet-bag; or halfway up that mountain with a song on her lips. To some she is just too squeaky-clean to be true. Perhaps she was born out of her time, perhaps she represents a kind of bitter-sweet nostalgia for us all, something classy, something constant, something intrinsically English. That pristine voice with its unfashionably clear enunciation and open, well-lubricated vowels somehow belongs to another era: Noel and Gertie, cocktails and laughter, blithe spirits. So is that it, the secret of her success, the key to her durability? Star quality is elusive.