on a successful national tour by this demanding and innovative company

He was a film mogul, flyer, hermit and syphilitic. Godfrey Hodgson reads the history of Howard Hughes

Kevin Costner would like to get his hands on Dennis Pennis. So would Hugh Grant. And Madonna. But they'll have to catch him first. Mark Wareham meets the clown prince of the hit-and-run interview

Many women who like a drink notice that their ability to handle alcohol varies through the month, but the evidence for this has always been largely anecdotal.

I WAS very interested in Hester Lacey's report ("A poem a day keeps dejection at bay . . . '', 1 January) on poetry taking the place of Valium. I am a manic depressive and have been right through the drugs spectrum and none seemed to work the orac le; however, an interesting point is when I am in a manic depression I find it easy to write serious verse, some quite beautiful - here is an example: Last night in the twilight gloom A butterfly flew in my room Oh what beauty Oh what grace Who needs visitors from outer space.

LAST NIGHT, Everyman (BBC 1) offered you a psychologist wielding a placard headed, 'All I need to know about life I learned from Star Trek' - a poster which assembles a number of Trekkie aphorisms, such as 'Tribbles hate Klingons' and 'Don't put all your ranking officers in one shuttlecraft'. Dr Jim Goodwin was taking a patient through the finer points of 'boldly going' when you first saw this therapeutic tool, but he must be fond of the can-do spirit of, 'If it can't be fixed - just ask Scotty'. For Dr Goodwin is an engineer of the human soul, a believer in the cure-all powers of the antidepressant Prozac. Not so much engineer, actually, as Kwik-Fit fitter - all his patients receive the same diagnosis and the same treatment, some within minutes of walking through the door.

SMOKING not only damages your health, it can also damage your job prospects. In a report published today, nearly one- third of all companies said that if they had two otherwise equal job candidates they would choose the non-smoker.

A WOMAN aged 19 who was raped at gunpoint in front of her brother during a raid on an off-licence has been ostracised by her Tamil community, a judge was told yesterday.

A PHYSICALLY healthy man of 29 died in mental hospital minutes after being given an injection of an anti-psychotic drug intended to calm him down.

IT IS often said that literature can only be judged in the context of the political and social conditions under which it was written. So, for example, Pennsylvania in the 1840s produced a dark tale of murder, metaphysics and the tormented soul, Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-tale Heart. Given largely the same ingredients, California in the 1990s has produced Scott Bradfield's What's Wrong With America.

SARAH is 13. She takes LSD and sniffs glue and aerosols - gas lighter fuel and air fresheners are her favourites. 'It's nothing unusual, people do it all the time,' she says, writes Jason Bennetto.

COCAINE AND CRACK.

IVAN OWEN is a shy 66-year-old who shrinks from the limelight - quite the opposite from his noisy, abrasive alter-ego, Basil Brush. Yet they get on famously. Owen refers to Basil in the third person, he talks very dearly of Basil and he was hugely pleased for Basil when he was recently asked to return to regular television, 12 years after his BBC1 show ended.

SOME of the points raised by Richard Grant's article 'The Prozac Generation' (Review, 30 January) need clarification. Prozac is an anti-depressant. Valium is not. Valium may, under certain circumstances, cause physical dependence. Prozac does not.