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Britain exports around 3% of the world's goods and 6% of the world's services, but the country's artists account for around 13% of global mu­sic sales.

A sense of comedy is never far off. "Mount Sepsick! Mount Spit- telboom!" cries the wicked brother in another story, groping for the magic words that will open the cave. "Mount Siccapillydir- cus!" he tries again in desperation.

Some may have been sudoku, tredoku or futoshiki freaks, who buy daily newspapers, extract the puzzle pages and throw away the rest.

Forgers nowadays typically favour 20th-century abstract and ex­pressionist styles. Mimicking Jackson Pollock's drip-and-splatter paintings is easier than faking old masters such as Rembrandt. Swamped with lawsuits, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation stopped authenticating works in 1996, four decades after Pollock's death. Lawsuits continued anyway. A court even entertained a suit from a man with a painting signed "Pollack".

A publicist who specializes in selling sauce to the tabloids.

Dante's complicated ABA, BCB, CDC, DED.

Music is a mystery. It is unique to the human race: no other species pro­duces elaborate sound for no particular reason.

Miss Lena Horne's producers once complained that she opened her mouth too wide to sing. They meant it was a Negro thing.

If you want to get a message down into the soul of a God-fearing, native- to-the-earth, rural-thinking person, one of the surest ways is through traditional country music — anyone who wants to understand the world's most politically influential tribe — the people of Middle America, who pick most American presidents — should pay attention to country music. Country music has always been the best shrink that 15 bucks can buy.

You're not going to sit down and watch the BBC world news in 3-D.

A Hollywood executive is powerful and successful largely because he is viewed as being powerful and successful... A group of terrorists is plan­ning to kill millions of Americans. Only one man can stop them: Jack Bauer. Unfortunately, he has been imprisoned in a secret facility. And tortured. Then decapitated and fed to boars. In a typical day, Agent Bauer is shot and stabbed more often than he takes bathroom breaks, but it never seems to slow him down. That was a spoof of "24" by Dave Barry, a comic writer. All this is harmless fantasy, of course. Or is it? A discon­certing number of Americans take "24" seriously.

Introducing Huck Finn, Mark Twain gave warning: "Persons at­tempting to And a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to And a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to And a plot in it will be shot."

Michelangelo is a sculptor, a painter and an architect, he sees every­thing in three dimensions. It is as though he has put the human body on a spindle and is turning it back to front in one view.

More seasoned PR flacks might have done it differently. First, lunch the journalists concerned, ostensibly to discuss some other story. Then, over dessert, casually slip into the conversation the poison that their secret client wanted them to spread. With luck the reporters would follow up on the scuttlebutt without men­tioning its source, assuring themselves that they had got the sto­ry through their "contacts".

Imagine, further, that every newspaper felt obliged to print such choice items as this: "The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, has sent a reply cable of thanks to Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, Deputy Premier, Minister of Defence and Aviation and Inspector-General, thanking the Crown Prince and all personnel of the armed forces for their congratulations to the King on the occasion of Eid al Fitr, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, in the cable sent earlier to the King by the Crown Prince."

It is too easy to pass the test that determines whether a film is suf­ficiently British to be worthy of state support. Because the criteria include where a film is set and the nationality of its main cha­racters, actors and scriptwriters, film-makers can easily qualify by adding a few minor details, such as shoot-outs in Waterloo station and the assassination in the first few minutes of a Brit­ish journalist (both features of "The Bourne Ultimatum"). Even these literary touches may be unnecessary: films such as "Dark Knight", a Batman movie set in mythical Gotham City, also qualify for subsidy because chunks are filmed in Britain and they em­ploy local people in important positions.

He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.

Virtually every day of the year sees another art biennial opening somewhere in the world.