The 'Titanic' has become a myth. Every time the word Titanic comes up, the word myth is never far away - and not just because the latest Hollywood blockbuster about the doomed ship is the most expensive film ever. James Mckenzie visited Hamburg, site of Europe's largest Titanic exhibition and met the show's historian, Gunther Babler, in an attempt to separate myth from reality, fact from fiction.

THERE IS a thriving market already in props used in the making of Titanic, which is perhaps the most bizarre measure of the extraordinary success of this $200m Hollywood movie. In the three weeks since it opened in America, Titanic has ceased to be a mere epic and has become a phenomenon. It may well turn out to be an epic phenomenon, quite apart from being the most extravagant movie ever made - perhaps the last of its kind.

It was the perfect ruse for adding a touch of romance to a charisma- challenged Vice-President with higher ambitions, and for seven days it had all of Washington in a tizzy. Was it to take seriously Al Gore's claim, as reported by Time magazine last Monday, that he and his wife, Tipper, were the inspiration for Hollywood's most famous tearjerker, Love Story?

Closer, National Theatre, London SE1 (0171-928 2252) 10pm

VICTOR HUGO by Graham Robb, Picador pounds 20

You can tell from his films that Leonardo DiCaprio likes a challenge. But was `Titanic' a trip too far?

There are three books that all educated young Englishwomen are supposed to have read by the time they fall into the arms of the man they are to marry (or they take their A- levels): Little Women, Rebecca and Jane Eyre. The last two have both been televised by ITV this year, and Little Women cannot be far behind.

Ethan Hawke, the 24-year old star of the impossibly beguiling Before Sunrise, has his first novel published on Monday by Flamingo Press. The Hottest State is about a young actor and his experiences of love, loss and rejection. Statements claiming coincidental resemblance between author and subject will doubtless follow forthwith.

This is not pretty costume drama. It's tragic, raw and brutal. As it should be. By Adam Mars-Jones

Not yet 21, Kate Winslet is established as Hollywood's favourite young British actor. She still can't believe her luck

(So said Lew Grade in 1979. Yesterday the pounds 3.3m operation to rais e the Titanic was abandoned)

Should we go sightseeing at the Titanic? Godfrey Hodgson asks when we may break an ancient taboo

If music is a real concern, there can be few more revealing experiences than switching on the radio in the middle of a fascinating piece one has never heard, only to discover at the end that it is by a composer one thought one loathed. Back in the 1970s, Radio 3 actually used to connive at such epiphanies with a series entitled The Innocent Ear, devised and usually introduced by Robert Simpson. Programmes generally comprised two or three complete works in contrasting forms and styles, about which listeners were told in advance no more than what they were scored for and how long they lasted. The object, Simpson would reiterate, was not to guess the composer - though it was always difficult to refrain from trying to - but to listen with ears uncorrupted by preconceptions. There must, indeed, be not a few who remain lastingly grateful for some discovery or other when Mr Simpson revealed all at the end of each broadcast, and who would welcome a return of the Innocent Ear idea.

Old gold: a film buff's guide to On Golden Pond