'I did law - hence my daft name'

Damien Hirst is creating the world's most expensive piece of art - a life-size human skull cast in platinum and encased entirely in diamonds.

HARVEY GOLDSMITH, the flamboyant British promoter who gave the world Live Aid and brought Pavarotti to the parks, has been forced to put his company into receivership after suffering huge losses trying to stage a music festival during August's solar eclipse.

A Life of James Boswell by Peter Martin Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pounds 25, 613pp: Sixteen bouts of gonorrhoea failed to dent a huge appetite for life.

THOUGH HE made his modest living as an art teacher, Eric Austen played a major role in the evolution of a world-famous icon - the CND badge.

THE NEW Information Services building extends and compliments Goldsmiths' existing library with flexible new study and teaching spaces over three floors. The building had the difficult dual role of acting as an open showcase for the activity of the college at the same time as keeping the light levels low enough for the computer screens to be read. Allies & Morrison developed the facade in detail to achieve transparency, so that the computer-based activity in the open-plan study area is visible from the street, without compromising the environmental demands that using a computer generates. Perforated aluminium vertical fins allow appropriately filtered natural light deep into the open-plan study areas. They control glare while maintaining outward views. The fins also contribute to the structural stability of the glazing.

Sir: The K-Bar a "latter-day Algonquin Hotel"? (Review, 25 May.) I don't think so. That hallowed spot in New York was watering hole to some of the finest and most literate minds in 20th-century America. Let us know when Parker Bowles, Goldsmith or Dahl are likely to produce anything to rival Parker, Cerf or Thurber.

A MILLIONAIRE businessman was cleared yesterday of murdering his former common-law wife after the judge said the jury could have found that a key prosecution witness was the killer.

Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing goes job hunting on acid, dances in shopping centres and takes transsexuals to bed with her. But the only thing she thinks is outrageous is advertising agencies `appropriating' her ideas. Oliver Bennett tracks down a true original. Portrait by Gautier Deblonde

WHEN ROSS Chesterman became Warden of Goldsmiths' in 1953, it was a small college beset with academic and financial problems, facing an uncertain future in its relations with London University. Today it is a constitutional and flourishing school of the university. Most of the necessary ground work that made this transformation possible was carried out during Chesterman's 21-year term as warden.

PERHAPS, AS a stamp collector, Paul Fraser is accustomed to people cracking jokes about him. But nothing could quite have prepared him for the cruel humour of the stock market. Nor for a shock worse than finding that your mint condition Twopenny Blues are fakes.

AT FIRST sight it looks simply like a rather plain yellow barrel. But this unprepossessing carbon fibre pod is at the centre of an international row that has embroiled diplomats, policemen, lawyers, environmentalists - and an increasingly harassed museum curator.

From a speech delivered

THE KISSING DANCE