While our image of Notting Hill today may be of a wealthy person's retreat, the area had a more bohemian and radical reputation when I was growing up. A combination of West Indian culture and a punky vibe made it irresistibly glamorous and edgy to me and my friends. It was the land of sound systems, skateboarders, the Clash, the Westway, the Mutoid Waste Company, the carnival and head shops on Portobello Road. It was home to Rough Trade (where I worked for a year when I was 21), Whole Earth foods, second-hand clothes shops and stalls on Portobello Green run by artists. It was the Notting Hill of Jimi Hendrix and of John Michell, the celebrated late cosmologist and author. I suppose it represented creative freedom.

Many know about the death by drowning of WS Gilbert; others are aware that in 1933 Ernest Hemingway, incensed by a review, trashed the Paris bookshop in which he read it. Few could point to these incidents' one degree of separation. Such surprises regularly punctuate the soberly engrossing chronicle which Robert Fraser has created around the life of a poet whose modest fame has burned steadily, almost brightly, since his Thirties emergence as a teenage prodigy.

The subject matter of Günter Grass's poem about Israel isn't the problem – it's the quality of his writing, says John Walsh

Named after a piece by the Uzbek composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, Night Music: Voice in the Leaves explores music from the former Soviet Asian republics, played with dexterity and sensitivity by performers including the theremin virtuoso Lydia Kavina, who excels on Iraida Yusupova's "Kitezh-19", in which her eerily plaintive keening is allied to a tape of varispeeded chimes and plucked strings.

In his instructions for the half-hour long "Astralis", the centrepiece of this album, Wolfgang Rihm indicates that it should be performed both as slowly and as quietly as possible, instructions that impose a hovering, static quality on the piece, rendering it in a state of perpetual becoming rather than being.

Dante's Divine Comedy, arguably the most famous work in Italian literature, is too politically incorrect for undiluted consumption in schools, a group of academics has claimed.

If a police helicopter can be romantic maybe Russia can be reborn

Further to your obituary of Barney Rosset (28 February), Evergreen Review and Grove Press were oases in the deserts of Dullsville in the late 1950s, as far as international publications featuring avant-garde writing were concerned, writes Michael Horovitz. I particularly valued Rosset's championing of Samuel Beckett some time before he became a household name. And it was in an early Evergreen Review that I was delighted to discover the then still unknown student Pete Brown's first minimal poems, near-haiku with a Cockney music-hall punchline, which he had simply sent in on spec.

Listen, Whitey! seethes with righteous anger and revolutionary determination.

Director Grant Gee follows up his Joy Division documentary with a film about cult writer W G Sebald. Sebald's influential novel The Rings of Saturn is the subject of Patience (After Sebald). It looks at the life and work of the writer by retracing the journey at the heart of one his most celebrated books, in which Sebald embarks on a walk, spanning several days, along Suffolk's coastline.

Acting heavyweights Christopher Plummer (above left) and Frank Langella are set to spar in front of the camera for Stephen Frears.

Just before kick-off in the Eternal City's modern version of the Colosseum of old a band of Azzurri followers let off a flare high in the Curva Nord section of a stadium transformed overnight into a winter wonderland. If only they had found a way of letting off some flair instead, temperatures might have risen sufficiently to warm the spirit.

Italy 15 England 19: Dickson and Morgan best of the bunch but spirit rather than flair secures win in Rome

It should have been the ultimate "hell-on-earth" blockbuster, starring the "sexiest man alive" and including the most spectacular battle scenes ever seen on screen.