We review results obtained over a period of about a decade on a class of technologically and fundamentally important problems in suspension rheology viz., the dynamics and rheology of dipolar suspensions of orientable particles in simple shear flow. The areas explored in this review include effects such as the fluid flow field, external forcing, Brownian diffusion, hydrodynamic interactions and their impact on the theological properties of the suspension. The main feature of the presentation is the use of a uniform framework in which one or more of the above effects can be studied, based on Langevin type equations for particle orientations combined with a brute-force technique for computing orientational averages. These models are capable of capturing complex dynamical behaviour in the system such as the presence of subharmonics or chaos, both in the dynamics and rheology. The tools developed allow for investigating how chaos in the system is affected by Brownian diffusion and hydrodynamic interactions. The presence of chaos opens up a number of novel possibilities for dynamical and theological behaviour of the system, which can be put to efficient use in many ways, e.g. in separating particles by aspect ratio and possibly developing computer controlled intelligent rheology. The results also have implications for certain areas of chaos theory, such as a new intermittency route to chaos and the possibility of non-trivial collective behaviour in spatially extended systems. These studies highlight certain deficiencies in current techniques in the literature for handling the rheology of dilute and semi-dilute suspensions. In the presence of Brownian motion the proposed method computes the averages by simulating a set of deterministic ordinary differential equations rather than stochastic differential equations. The systems considered may also serve as a paradigm for analysing how microscopic chaotic fluctuations in spatially extended systems affect macroscopic averages. We also attempt to put our results into context with respect to recent work on rheochaos in complex fluids such as liquid crystals and nematic polymers. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.