The money lender of today does not have to break the law or your legs to make

The money lender of today does not have to break the law (or your legs) to make a killing. He's more likely to use intimidation and the legal system to make sure you pay him back.Anyone with a credit licence can lend money at interest rates of up to 1,000 per cent, quite legally. As the economy has slowed over the last few years the number of licences issued has increased, from 15,500 in 1995 to nearly 18,000 last year.Tabloid newspapers such as the Sun are stuffed with advertisements by brokers offering to gather up all your debts into one easy loan. The Hollywood plastic surgeon allegedly ridiculed them as they lay unconscious on his operating table 6.

The father of the 14-year-old Earl Percy went to court to delay his son's inheritance in order to protect him from the "pitfalls" of wealth 7. Celebrity guests on Countdown, who he revealed are given answers to conundrums through earpieces 8 The Teletubbies 9. O J Simpson, to raise money towards the pounds 20.6m award made against him by a civil court 10. Genetically modified soya beans, delivered by environmentalist protesters.. The picture above - showing James Mason and Barbara Rush in Bigger Than Life (1956) - was mistakenly used in the Review's television listings last week to illustrate an appreciation of The Last Seduction, starring Linda Fiorentino, right. From today the Independent on Sunday will use this space to correct factual errors..

MRS HILARY Jolly has written a fine Millennium Hymn in the style of the great Victorian hymn-writer Chatterton Dix, and has won a prize for it which was organised, if I read the Independent aright, by the Dean of St Paul's. Mrs Jolly slightly spoilt the prize-giving, though, by saying that she was sickened by "millennium hype", which she described as "pagan and unpleasant" I think we all know just what she means But those two adjectives made unusual bedfellows. There was something a bit spinsterish (if you can use such a word of a married woman) about that unpleasant. One can imagine the conversation after a particularly ill-tempered meeting of the parochial church council "How did the parish meeting go?" asks someone. "I'm rather afraid," says someone else in the tones of Miss Marple, "that there was a certain amount of unpleasantness." Pagan, on the other hand, is a full-blooded, fighting word from the days of the early Christians, when people took very seriously St Paul's instruction to put on the whole armour of God You don't hear it often now. There's too much of the us-and-them about it for this age of multiple faiths.

For a pagan was nearly always, quite specifically, someone who disbelieved in Christianity The reason why they were called pagans is a little confused. The Latin paganus meant a dweller in a country district, or pagus, in other words a bumpkin. Smith's Smaller Latin Dictionary says "a term of contempt addressed to soldiers". My edition of the Britannica says that pagans were "raw half-armed rustics" as opposed to regular soldiers, and that Christians thought them not well-disciplined enough to qualify as members of the Church Militant. It refers me to Edward Gibbon, who says in his Decline and Fall that as Christianity gradually took hold in the Roman Empire the old religion "languished in obscure villages".The Germanic version of pagan is heathen, with its clear implication that unbelievers are to be found in the waste places of the earth, a heath being a piece of uncultivated land. Gibbon also points out that the world peasant comes from the same source as pagan.Etymology apart, it all points to a distressingly negative attitude towards innocent country folk, which persisted until modern times. Nowadays, of course, we tend to envy them as we go about our business in stinking cities, doing our best to "get away" by joining them as often as possible at weekends But peasant is still not a nice word to use about a friend.

And in Shakespeare's time, when it was often a perfectly neutral descriptive word, it could also be distinctly unkind. Didn't Hamlet equate peasants with rogues and slaves?Meanwhile we have two different words to convey our attitude to the country in general If we think of it as quaint we say rustic. If we want only to distinguish it from the town we say rural. Both adjectives are from the Latin rus, but the Romans didn't have ruralis - they had to make do with rusticus for both meanings (Nor could they distinguish between urban and urbane.