(10) Julie Burchill's Modern Review (2)See page 41 for details9. (-) "Loyalty" cards (-)Because we're all worth more than 0.001p in the pounds10. (-) The Queen Mother (-)Britain expects a proper lead in London Fashion Week. Pundit, novelist, hobnobber with movers and shakers, Gore Vidal has some bracing points to make about `this unlamented century and failed millennium' in his latest book of essays For our own safety, it is fitting that there should have been a few weeks' interval between the London appearances of septuagenarian literary firebrands Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal.Both men have been accused of monstrous arrogance - Mailer most recently for simply having written an autobiography of Jesus. Vidal has his own unflattering self-portrait ready to hand; "I'm exactly as I appear There is no warm loveable person inside.

Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water."This week, he appears in the role of prophet to take part in the first of three major "Sounding the Century" lectures at the South Bank in association with Radio 3; his brief is to consider the most powerful forces for cultural change at the end of the century. What qualifies him to pronounce on so vast a subject? A brief incursion into Virgin Islands, his latest collection of essays written between 1992 and 1997, reminds us - an undimmed capacity to weave his lifelong learning and hobnobbing with the world's movers and shakers into witty and sceptical overviews. In "Chaos", penned for Amnesty International, Vidal draws his conclusion about "this unlamented century and failed millennium...The larger the political entity the greater the danger for that administrative unit, the citizen."It would be interesting to know what the poets gathered together in Banned Poetry, an anthology for Index On Censorship, would make of that equation. In his introduction, the poet Peter Porter gloomily notes that "a new range of censoring, by market forces and the imposition of the lowest common denominator, has spread through countries which have thrown off the yoke of direct coercion." A London reading, in which Porter is joined by the Yemeni poet Abdullah al-Udhair and the exiled Chinese poet Liu Hong Bin should make for a refreshing antidote to some of the kitsch campaigning of National Poetry Day (Thursday).Post office buses in rural Scotland will play poems to passengers, verse postcards will be distributed to Waterloo commuters And the nation will "vote" for its favourite love poem. As with Gore Vidal's fallible democracies, one dreads the result.Gore Vidal, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, SE1 (0171-960 4242), 6 Oct, 7.30pm; Banned Poetry reading, Waterstone's, London N1 (0171-704 2280) 7 Oct, 7pm, pounds 2; Vidal talks on why the novel has replaced the cinema, ICA, London SW1 (0171-930 3647), 8 Oct, 7pm, pounds 10.

Craft is often seen as the poor relation to fine art. Yet in their new show, Jim Partridge and Kate Blee prove themselves to be artists of note and not just a tablemaker and a milliner The debate between art (that's fine art as in painting and sculpture) and craft (the more useful arts like furniture-making and ceramics) is an old and largely pointless one which, I'm sure, doesn't cause either Jim Partridge or Kate Blee too much concern. He works with wood; she with textiles, and they're both too good at what they do to worry about the terminology. It is, however, one of the art world's larger stupidities that things with a practical purpose (you can sit on or at some of Partridge's larger pieces and wear some of Blee's smaller ones) are often seen as humble cousins to works that offer a purely visual pleasure. This is nonsense, of course, but it's the sort of nonsense that sticks and so their work is undervalued.