Hygiene, it seems, is back. After years in which it was cool to be dirty, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) panic has changed the mood almost overnight. In places affected by the virus such as Hong Kong, surfaces in hotels and public transport are being wiped down every hour. In Singapore, this is considered slatternly.

Here in Britain, the sale of hand-wipes and disinfectants has gone through the roof. [...]

Until recently, most of us assumed that the royal household resembled the one in the old black-and- white movie Kind Hearts and Coronets. Stiff, unintentionally funny and given to bouts of Ruritanian pomposity. That was before the Paul Burrell affair. Now it's clear the atmosphere is closer to that of a Carry On film. More Kenneth Williams than Alec Guinness. "Ooooh valet, I think I may have crumpled my boxers [...]

They will soon be putting out the tables and chairs in Trafalgar Square. The north side of the square, alongside the National Gallery, is being pedestrianised and this will, the mayor's office assures us, help turn the whole place into a grand piazza. From pigeons to panini in one fell swoop as the sound of coffee machines mingles with the rustle of falling leaves. Or that's the theory. In truth, [...]

Whether or not you like the Hayward Gallery's exhibition "Ansel Adams at 100" probably depends on your attitude to mountains. If the mere sight of a craggy peak has you adopting a reverential pose, then pack your crampons and make your way up the concrete escarpment that is our own very little bit of brutalism on the South Bank. If you know anyone with a beard who spends their time [...]

Harry Wingfield, who died last month, barely managed to scrape into the obituaries. This despite his work being lodged deep in the memories of a whole generation. As the most illustrious of the illustrators for the Ladybird children's books, Wingfield set the tone for the publisher and created a distinctive look: bright primary colours, blue skies, cotton-wool clouds and children running around, limbs akimbo, when they weren't trying to mend [...]

There was a time when the word "curator" conjured up an old bloke or bluestocking with an obsessive interest in a part of the world few people had heard of, and its bronze coins. Scythia, perhaps. Or Illyria. Somewhere at the Victoria and Albert Museum, there are probably still a few of those old buffers left, the sort of person whose life's work will be a learned treatise on Amalasuntha, [...]

Branding has become television's obsession, and its secret weapon. Five years ago, British television executives were terrified. The aggressive new satellite and cable channels were coming, and with them, so everyone thought, an era of unrelenting competition. Audiences were about to be introduced to a world of 600 digital channels. An orgy of choice would devour the old terrestrial broadcasters.

But just as they began to despair and curse their [...]

In 1975, the movie Rollerball imagined a 21st-century society dominated by gladiatorial TV game shows. For a time recently, this dystopic vision began to seem a harbinger of things to come, as participants in "reality TV" fests were set ever more elaborate tests of endurance. If they weren't grappling with food poisoning in Living in the Ice Age, or with Victorian cleaning products in The 1900 House, they were coping [...]

I've always been suspicious of small secretive groups with strange rituals, perhaps because my dad, an ardent Freemason, forced me to listen as he memorised the various hokum incantations of the men who believe God resembles Norman Foster with his trouser leg rolled up. The one thing that kept me awake was the frisson of excitement that if I were one day to reveal any of these solemn secrets I [...]

The campaign to provide cheap drugs for Africa's fight against Aids has lately been on something of a roll. It shared top billing, for example, at last month's World Social Forum, the shadow anti-globalisation conference held in Brazil. One campaigner, Ben Jackson of Action for South Africa, summed up the campaign's case in the Observer when he denounced the west for "witnessing a devastating plague and sitting on a cure".