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Most British towns have a Victorian pool or two, thanks to the 1846 Public Baths and Wash Houses Act, which gave local author­ities the power to raise funds to keep the working classes clean and healthy. Since then demand has ebbed: the poor have their own facilities these days and the rich slope off to private clubs.

As every actuary knows, the best way to live for a long time is to pick up your parents carefully.

£ £ Art, books, music, Hollywood, education, media

Who could paint an apple after Cezanne?

Viewers would decide in seven seconds whether or not to watch.

Michelangelo Merisi was omnisexual and died of sunstroke and syphilis, aggravated by lead poisoning from the paints he mixed.

Before the first world war the most exciting artists were French; in the 1990s they were Chinese. Now the hot new place for con­temporary art is Africa.

All you need for a movie is a girl, a gun, lots of singing, melodrama and never-ending dance sequences. Or so a big chunk of the Indian audience believes. Pre-screening rituals include burning camphor inside a sliced pumpkin before smashing it near the big screen to bring good luck.

Vincent Van Gogh died in obscurity, having sold only one painting.

BP will hope that having a new partner will work out better than it did for Anna Karenina, who flung herself in front of a train after the disinte­gration of her relationship with her replacement Russian lover.

Pablo Picasso: "Good artists copy, great artists steal."

No one has ever bothered to explain what "good" or "bad" jazz really is. When you see a live performance, you may be watching a 60-year-old musician playing a 100-year-old piece.

Of Nabokov's 19 fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly con­cern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls.

The painter was also a shrewd businessman; he mixed indigo and mad­der to replicate the effect of the period's most expensive pigment, Tyrian purple, which was extracted from sea snails and worth more than its weight in gold.

CNN's challenge is to attract more viewers when no one is shoot­ing anyone or blowing anything up.

Back when newspapers were king, Charles Brownson, an American con­gressman, used to say that one should never quarrel with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.

Artists came to paint and sculpt, writers to write, deadbeats to die, and a large share to drink and misbehave.

Only twice did George Martin, the Beatles record producer impose him­self: at the start, insisting that they replace Pete Best as their drummer, and at the end, when he agreed to record "Abbey Road" if they stopped fighting.

Socrates's bugbear was the spread of the biggest-ever innova­tion in communications — writing. He feared that relying on written texts, rather than the oral tradition, would "create for- getfulness in the learners' souls... they will trust to the exter­nal written characters and not remember of themselves." Enos Hitchcock voiced a widespread concern about the latest pub­lishing fad in 1790. "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth." (There was a related worry that sofas, introduced at the same time, encour­aged young people to drift off into fantasy worlds.) Cinema was denounced as "an evil pure and simple" in 1910; comic books were said to lead children into delinquency in 1954; rock'n'roll was accused of turning the young into "devil worshippers" in 1956; Hillary Clinton attacked video games for "stealing the in­nocence of our children" in 2005.

James Bond films are almost always the same: Bond is sent to an ex­otic location, meets and seduces a woman, gets caught by the villain, escapes, kills the villain and gets the girl.

Java sparrows are able to distinguish cubist paintings from im­pressionist and Japanese ones, and that pigeons can tell a Chagall from a Van Gogh, as well as discriminating between the Japanese school and the impressionist.

To build his factory, Mr Fazioli moved from Rome to Sacile, near Venice and, more important, near the Val di Fiemme, known as the "musical for­est" for spruce trees yielding especially resonant wood.

This book is a gem, and there are still 91 shopping days till Christ­mas.

"Terminator: Genisys", a flop in America with $90m in takings on a $155m production budget, was a blockbuster overseas, earning $351m, includ­ing $113m in China. Even if big names like these have lost some of their lustre at home, abroad they can be "sort of like supernovas", the stu­dio executive says. "They have flamed out a long time ago but the light shines on past their death."