The proposition is that Umbro is the heart and soul of football

The proposition is that Umbro is the "heart and soul of football". And where does football rouse most passions (and provide the best locations)? In shanty-town South America, of course. So we have a story of a picturesque - ie very poor - nation coming to a halt when The Big Match is on television; we have TV in its rightful place, dominating crowded shacks; we have attractive streets of deserted, crumbly Hispanic houses (see also the BA Holiday ads); we have traffic jams; and we have lithe, brown young lovers halted in mid-clinch while the boy watches that crucial penalty. Everyone in the bar is frozen to the spot, too. And when the ball is in the net, planes fly over holy statues; pigeons scatter from the town square; and the television set flies over the shanty wall. All this orchestrated by frantic samba, halted for a six-gun salute at the critical moment. It's terribly well done and it'll be widely loved by the middle-class, Hornby-reading football fan. But will it go down such a treat with the 12-year-old whose demands for visibly branded kit Umbro is trying to divert away from that supplied by uppity football teams?8 Video supplied by Tellex Commercials..

ORSON WELLES spent his life confounding and clouding the idea of biography His movies tease and deceive our notions of the knowable. "What does it matter what you say about people?," asks Marlene Dietrich at the end of Touch of Evil, as the body of Welles's Hank Quinlan floats down the river. Not a lot, was the answer provided by Citizen Kane, since anything you say can be gainsaid by a myriad other accounts. "I don't think one word can sum up a man's life," concluded the reporter in Kane. How about 300,000 words - Simon Callow's summing up of just the first 26 years of Welles's life, in Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu? I doubt whether Welles, who believed the human personality to be infathomably mysterious, would reckon even that adequate. His own accounts of his life were stronger on legend than logic. Magician, hoaxter, trickster and liar, he always mischievously ensured that a key note was F for Fake Callow is a canny, wary biographer.

He sees his task as to separate Welles from his legend - the man from the myth which was often of his own making. You can understand Callow's concern, when you read the sort of newspaper articles that were floating, on clouds of their own hyperbole, around Hollywood while Welles was making Kane: "He talked like a college professor at two. At three, he looked like Dr Fu Manchu and spouted Shakespeare like a veteran..." Prodigy, genius, innovator: these are the tags most often applied to the young Orson - and the ones that Callow is most chary of. In London, more than 70 adult education courses are on offer. Mainstream universities such as Birkbeck College - which has one of the top philosophy departments in the country, and which specialises in part-time degree courses for mature students - are also having no problems filling their classes.But why are grown-ups going back to the classroom to tackle one of the most intellectually demanding of subjects? Finding answers to Big Questions is part of it; but enlightenment is not instant.

It has been top of the hardback best-seller list for the past two months, and has shifted 55,000 copies at £16.99 a throw. Sophie's World is only one of many new books that attempt to explain the basics for lay readers; others include What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy, by Thomas Nagel, with a seven-page chapter summing up The Meaning of Life, and Icon Books' Wittgenstein for Beginners (far from a barrel of laughs, despite its cartoon format).The School of Economic Science, with around 3,500 students nationwide, reports a definite upward trend in admissions. None of the teachers is paid, and there are no exams; the pupils study simply for the enjoyment of the lessons.This class is not alone in its quest for enlightenment. Booksellers report that, far from being bought by the 13- to 18-year-olds it is aimed at, Sophie's World - a history of philosophy disguised as a teenage novel - is being snapped up by eager 20- to 30-year-olds.