From the depths of bankruptcy to the dizzying heights of success, Moorcroft Pottery has seen it all. Lucille Grant reports

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF UTOPIAN LITERATURE by Mary Ellen Snodgrass, ABD-Clio pounds 34.95

One of England's oldest adult education colleges, founded 150 years ago to provide a liberal education for working-class men, is being rocked by an internal dispute over claims that its governors are betraying its socialist roots and succumbing to the pressures of the marketplace.

As `Ivanhoe' begins its series today on BBC1, Clive Wilmer analyses the romantic derring-do in Tony Blair's favourite novel

Despite the orgy of events, conferences and exhibitions earlier in the year to mark the centenary of William Morris' death, Morris actually died 100 years ago this month. One of his relatives explained her dislike of the youthful Morris with the observation that he "seems to see nothing and he observes everything". Both this comment and Alice's mystification about the raven and writing desk came to mind recently while on a pilgrimage to Waltham Abbey, where the youthful Morris rode out to escape from home in nearby Walthamstow.

Sophie Walker on Moorcroft, the pottery that collectors all want

Sony was contemplating the wreckage yesterday from a turbulent few days at its film division which saw the ousting of Mark Canton as chairman of its Columbia TriStar pictures business, and a thoroughly public and embarrassing rejection of an offer to take the newly vacant job from Arnold Rifkin, a top Los Angeles talent agent.

Sir: My experience of visiting the grave of William Morris at Kelmscott contrasts hugely with that expressed by Dorothy Biltcliffe (Letters, 28 August).

Sir: I would like David James (Letters, 31 August) to know that over the last two months I have been studying biographical details of William Morris, and I am fully aware of this great man's ideals. The object of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which he founded in 1877, was to preserve historic buildings and oppose fashionable restoration of churches - in no way was it directed at gravestones in churchyards.

Sir: Dorothy Biltcliffe's letter (28 August) calling for the restoration of William Morris's grave at Kelmscott displays ignorance of Morris's own strongly held views on the subject.

Sir: Last week I attended a five-day study course organised by Birmingham University on William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement. I was sadly dismayed on my party's visit to Kelmscott churchyard to see the dilapidation of the great Victorian's memorial.

UTOPIA (1516) by Thomas More

Liverpool poet Adrian Henri explains how a chance encounter in a junk shop led to a lifelong obsession with Tennyson's poetry

Sir: Certainly William Morris "wanted to integrate the city with the country", as you state in "Art lessons for New Labour", but his backwards- looking dream of a romantic medievalism coupled with the less useful part of the Arts and Crafts movement only gave us suburbia, those long miles of bypass, and Tudorbethan ribbon developments throughout the 1920s and 1930s.