71.   Maverick English designer John Galliano turned to French history for inspiration for his first winter couture collection for Givenchy on Sunday.

72.   Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney on Tuesday won the prestigious Whitbread Book of the Year Award for his first new collection of poems in five years.

73.   The first collection of Scythian art in Russia in fact came from the loot of a tomb in Siberia at the time of Peter the Great.

74.   The interest of the media and buyers this season will be focussed on the first ready-to-wear collections by John Galliano for Christian Dior and Alexander McQueen for Givenchy.