Selected aspects of strangeness and heavy flavours in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC

The LHC will collide lead beams at the energy of 5.5 TeV per nucleon pair and proton beams at the energy of 14 TeV, starting in 2007. This will open a new chapter of heavy-ion physics, where abundantly produced heavy flavours and other hard probes will allow characterization of the newly created quark-gluon plasma phase. The particular role of charm, and to some degree strangeness, in the physics programme is discussed.