Prunella Stack pioneered women's fitness programmes and was dubbed the "perfect girl" by the press.

So, you're at a party. It's a bit different, as everyone's flirting. A disproportionate number of men are detailing their extreme outdoor-leisure activities or sharing snaps of themselves with small children. They are not commitment-phobes. Meanwhile, the women – the most popular of whom may casually mention their yogic talent/Swedish descent/independence (but not their broodiness) – are wondering whether the chaps in hats are hiding bald patches.

Inspired by a real event – the sinking of an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland in 1982 – February tells the story of how one woman's life is irrevocably shaped by the tragedy.

This Romanian policier is less a cops'n'crims chase than a meditation on the actual slog of a police investigation.

A rite of passage is important for many young people It's why I joined the Marines: to prove myself. But societies all over the world use this youthful angst to fight wars. You go to an area such as the Omo Valley, Ethiopia [where Parry stayed with the Nyangatom tribe], and the different tribes are essentially cousins who've developed a separate identity to fight for the scarce resources there. The elders play on the young men's sense of pride, wind them up and send them off on a killing spree. We do that in our society, too, albeit in a more civilized way.

As a young man the ceramicist, Edmund de Waal was fascinated by a set of Japanese thimble-sized figurines ("netsuke") kept by his great-uncle Iggie in a locked vitrine in his Tokyo apartment.

Britain is set to get its first state school dedicated to the values of transcendental meditation. A private school run by followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi will transfer to the state sector in September.

Notebook

Nobel laureate Derek Walcott was honoured with Britain's most prestigious award for poetry last night when he won the TS Eliot prize.

Culture clash, murder mystery, portrait of a place, meditation on the sands of time: Tremain's latest novel packs several genres into its disputed patch of French rural ground. In the lovely, doom-laden hills of the Cévennes, faded London antiques dealer Anthony, lover of handsome furniture and youths, seeks a quaint mas to act as his final rampart of beauty against age.

Free the spirit, but don't get carried away

Ahead of his 600th league game, the United legend tells Ian Herbert of the key decision that prolonged his trophy-laden career

Further to your obituary of Tom Lubbock (10 January), Tom's championship of the painter he regarded as Britain's most important Modernist, Wyndham Lewis, will not be forgotten, writes Paul Edwards, Trustee, the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. Encountering the paintings first in reproduction in a public library in his youth, he was overwhelmed: "I had no idea images could be so glutting: the unimaginably gorgeous colours, the unfathomable imagery, the sharp and eliding textures, that electric line drawing." (Independent, 13 February 2005). Tom understood Lewis's work from the inside, sensing its relation to caricature, fascinated also by its almost Jacobean preoccupation with the metaphysical aspects of mortality: Red Figures Carrying Babies and Visiting Graves and One of the Stations of the Dead were two of his favourite paintings; the latter he listed in The Independent as one of the 10 greatest paintings in the UK, devoting a "Great Works" essay to it, as well. Only Tom could have noticed both its allusion to Thomas Browne's melancholy meditation Urn Burial and its more prosaic evocation of the London Underground.

Looking for the perfect place to recharge body and soul? Rhiannon Batten reveals how to fulfil your New Year's resolution for less stress — on any budget