Teddy Carew was an upper-class twit with a streak of evil who liked inflicting pain on girls

Letter: Tim's mission

Affinity by Sarah Waters Virago pounds 9.99

A haunted orphan with a junkie sister: and that's just the doctor. A new drama has a novel approach to mental health

You can tell most of what you want to know about this unfortunate sign by looking them up in a rhyming dictionary: "Taurus: `bore us', `how pleased we are when they decide to ignore us', and `can't sing or dance particularly so put them well in the back of the chorus'." They cite, respectively, Terry Southern, Bianca Jagger and Bing Crosby and this shows how rhyming lexicographers are a third less accurate in their grasp of character than metropolitan astrologers.

The original satire on the cosy suburban sitcom, the Simpsons family is dysfunctional but sympathetic. To begin with, the focus was on young Bart's problematic behaviour but, as the show developed, his dad Homer became the central figure. His stupid, selfish, profoundly passive response to the world makes him one of the most profoundly human characters on television. Key Homer quote: "Donuts - is there anything they can't do?"

THE OTHER night, at a party, I bumped into a beautiful woman called Rachel who was in the kitchen looking for a drink. She was about 29, had shoulder-length brown hair, pale skin and watery blue eyes - and it soon became obvious that she was very much in love with me. I noticed this early on in the conversation. There was something in the way she said "cranberry juice" when I asked her what she wanted to drink which proved the strength of her desire. And when she abruptly ended our short chat, saying, "I've got to go and join my boyfriend in the next room, bye," and walked out quickly (or ran out), there was no longer any doubt about the depth of her love for me.

The Plato Papers by Peter Ackroyd Chatto & Windus, pounds 15.99, 140pp; Seen from a mythical age, far in the future, London today looks like a bad dream. John Clute celebrates one major writer's flight of fancy...

Futuristic fantasy; Wellsian dystopia; satire-cum-soul searcher; mantric realism - whatever Peter Ackroyd's new book may be, it cannot go out and take its place in the world, as the jacket declares it, as a "novel". If not for any other reason than that, in a literary Magimix age where fiction and biography melt the borderlines of fact and invention, and the coming of the virtual age promises us eternal uncertainty, there is nothing novel to be found in this reconstruction of a future from the distant past. The characters have been here before. The hero, donning an orator's mask, bears the name Plato. The fragments of a long-dead world he investigates are recognisably a part of the world of Peter Ackroyd - that is to say, London.

"MENTAL ILLNESS is as common as asthma," announced Frank Dobson yesterday. "It affects as many as one in six adults at any one time."

Alan Bennett's play Kafka's Dick is a `philosophical farce'. But isn't that a contradiction in terms?

Nobody, it seems, likes Freud - even Freudian psychoanalysts question their place in the world

JOSEPH SANDLER was a leading figure of modern psychoanalysis and one of the most productive and creative psychoanalytic theoreticians of the past 50 years. His extraordinary clarity and scholarship has led to a reformulation of psychoanalytic ideas and was one of the major contributions to the sea change which the profession experienced after the Second World War. There have been barriers between high-quality clinically based psychoanalytic thought and rigorous thinking in university life. Sandler broke them down.

LILITH FAIR: SARAH MCLACHLAN, SINEAD O'CONNOR ROYAL ALBERT HALL LONDON