----------------------------------------------------------------- BEST-SELLERS / TOP 10 REASONS FOR VISITING A HYPNOTIST ----------------------------------------------------------------- 1 . . . Lack of confidence 2 . . . .Giving up smoking 3 . . . .Slimming 4 . . . .Sleep Problems 5 . . . .Nervous tension 6 . . . .Public speaking 7 . . . .General anxiety 8 . . . .Speech problems 9 . . . .Self-improvement 10 . . . Learning difficulties ----------------------------------------------------------------- Chart supplied by Central Hypnotherapy Unit, London W11 -----------------------------------------------------------------

Sir: By caving in to the Tory right, it seems that John Major has abandoned his big ideas of a 'Classless Society', 'Citizen's Charter' and 'Britain at ease with itself'.

Sir: The article today by John Patten, the Secretary of State for Education, was interesting, not in what it said, but in what it left unsaid.

Happily for early music lovers, a new concert series devoted to music up to and including the Bach era has been established at the South Bank. In 1993, the Purcell Room will house a small-scale vocal and instrumental programme planned by the artistic director, Philip Pickett. Pickett aims to bring to London some of the leading specialist performers from the Continent. But it was Pickett's own group, the New London Consort, that inaugurated the series with five of Bach's six Brandenburg Concertos.

BERLIN (AP) - Experts say that a new word expressing German annoyance with 'politics as usual' has become the country's most popular word for 1992. Politikverdrossenheit appears in editorials and speeches bemoaning a cranky national mood, or East- West arguments, or the wishy- washy public reaction to violence against foreigners. The Society for the German Language said Politikverdrossenheit, which breaks down into Politik, and Verdrossenheit, which comes from the verb verdriessen, meaning to annoy - had made a strong impact on public speech.

Friday: In the afternoon I leave the office with unusual reluctance. Working through the weekend would surely be preferable to what faces me.

IN AN attempt to elevate her novel above rock-bottom schlock, Josephine Hart employs several devices to divert and flummox the reader. The first is the Double-Take Metaphor. This is a descriptive image which seems reasonable until a) you start to think about it - 'a high purity that almost festered in the eye' - or b) it is taken to unwise extremes: 'Grief swelled her face as though all the fluids of the body, lymph and blood, were surging in a wave of revolt, crashing against the rocks of bone structure.'

'A Jest's prosperity,' Rosaline tells Berowne, 'lies in the ear/Of him that hears it, never in the tongue/ Of him that makes it'. The waggish self-regard which characterises too much comic performance suggests that Rosaline's words are not too often pondered now. James Macdonald's version of Love's Labour's Lost at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, follows the precept faithfully: it is the audience that is served by every aspect of this production.

TWENTY-ONE years after publishing his first collection, the American poet Stephen Berg makes his British debut with a handsome and extensive selection which includes extracts from work in progress. His name has rarely been heard here, one more symptom of the transatlantic estrangement which became evident after the deaths of W H Auden in 1974 and Robert Lowell in 1977.

THE 'family-friendly' workplace is a long way from becoming the norm and may remain more 'rhetoric than reality', according to a study by the Institute of Manpower Studies.