FRANKLIN SMITH of Wisconsin has found that his bottom is worth $1m. Many a fashion model might wonder what a computer analyst has that he hasn't. On joining Phillips Getschaw, he was hazed by the firm's tautologous "chief executive officer", Kurt Getschow. That is, initiated - with a builder's level across the buttocks, for which the court gave damages.

Who was the figure that inspired Camille Paglia to realise her vocation as streetwise intellectual, media motormouth and feminist bete noire? Why Walt Disney, of course

Harold Bloom, scourge of US campus fashion, marks the Brits down too. Boyd Tonkin talks to him

WHEN THE film critic Barry Norman left BBC1's Film 98 and joined Sky Premier last year, the announcement barely ruffled the pages of the British press. In North America, Gene Siskel's death was headline news over the weekend.

Dress historian Aileen Ribeiro has set Jean- Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) up as the Mario Testino or the David Bailey of his day. Ingres's famous portraits - currently displayed at the National Gallery in London - show dark-eyed, solemn-faced women in opulent surroundings. They recline on brightly coloured satin sofas, their plump white arms resting on cushions; or stand next to draped tables, framed by dark, heavily patterned wallpaper. But what stands out is the clothes. Ingres meticulously recreates every detail of every crease, fold, tuck, bow, collar, bead and embroidery of these women's outfits. Looked at in this way, his work can be seen as documenting the subtly shifting fashions of the 19th century. Madame Marcotte de Sainte-Marie, seen above in a sketch for her finished portrait, wears a brown silk pelisse dress typical of the 1820s. The book includes colour plates alongside Ribeiro's essays on how the identities of Ingres's women are defined and moulded by what they wear.

OSCAR WILDE quipped that "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter". But even he may not have envisaged that a century later there would be artists whose oeuvre would consist of little but self-portraits: Gilbert and George, Anthony Gormley, Marc Quinn, Cindy Sherman...

A BRILLIANT schoolboy shot himself in the head after carefully calculating the benefits of life and deciding it was not worth living an inquest heard yesterday.

A BRILLIANT schoolboy shot himself in the head after carefully calculating the benefits of life and deciding it was not worth living, an inquest was told yesterday.

Paymaster General's apology: How a catalogue of mistakes, mishaps and oversights led to his Commons statement

Walker Evans, the great photographer of the Depression era, was also a lifelong collector of signs. For him, the billboards, shopfronts and hand-painted signs of America contained a rough and revealing poetry

Was Tina Brown right to sack this New Yorker star? Tony Gould thinks not; A Ved Mehta Reader: the craft of the essay by Ved Mehta Yale UP, pounds 12.50/ pounds 28, 416pp

PLEASURE WARS The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud by Peter Gay, HarperCollins pounds 20

Michael Laudor is a schizophrenic who battled with his demons and won. Hollywood paid $1.5m for his story; Brad Pitt was going to play him. But a tale of triumph over adversity has become a horror story. Michael Laudor cracked, and stabbed his pregnant girlfriend to death

Students of English social history with even a passing knowledge of recent feminist writing will be familiar with the theory that the industrial revolution spelt the end of productive lives for elite Georgian women. The division of labour between the sexes grew from a gap into a yawning chasm between 1780 and 1850 with the rise of "separate spheres" for men and women. Factory-building husbands effected their wives' transformation into "angels of the hearth" whose days were cramped by custom, corset and crinoline. The struggle to escape from that suffocating cocoon is our contemporary legacy.