... Superficial look at a superstar I HAVE always thought of Gary Glitter more as a long-running acting role than a real-life rock star. Possibly his alter ego, Paul Gadd (a.k.a. Paul Raven), now feels the same way. The self-styled Leader Of The Gang's final stage name was chosen late one boozy night in 197 1 by Gadd himself and an assorted bunch of aides and mates in the bar of a posh Mayfair ...

... Catch up on a few French lessons for theatre snobs IN THIS country we are inclined to be a bit snooty about the theatre. Even though most of us may not go to it very much, we somehow assume that our theatre is the best developed in the world, forgetting the contribution made to world theatre, not to mention opera and ballet, By rrance. The Theatre Industry in 19th Century France (Cambridge ...

... Yes, women do have a sense of humour ONE OF Macmillan's Women in Society series, Women and Laughter (£10.99) is obviously written from a feminist perspective and often gives the impression of having been devised to fit the construct. The problem is that its author, Frances Gray, Lecturer in Drama at the University of Sheffield, while demolishing satisfactorily the myth that women have no sense ...

... Practical advice from from Honest Ed ED MIRVISH is every American's dream come true. American? Surely Honest Ed is Canadian? Yes, he is, and proud of it, but he was born in Colonial Beach, Virginia, son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had gone to the States to make their fortune. They didn't but Fid did, in Toronto, to where his father had moved when Ed was nine to sell Masonic encyclopaedias ...

... End Threepenny Opera, co-founded Theatre Workshop, and only abandoned the theatre to become a prime mover in the folk music revival. He left school in Salford at the height of the Depression. Suspect as the son of a well-known left-wing union activist, himself a member of the Young Communist League, he found jobs hard to get and even harder to hold. So, along with YCL friends who had been ...

... THERE are those who profess to find reference books dull things indeed, but having spent the first three years of my working life involved with them I realise thp skill, dedication and constant decision-making that goes into their preparation. One first has to understand that they are intended for reference, not reading. They are there when you want them, and few people in the arts and ...

... Strict maverick COMPILED BY PETER HEPPLE Because he has played so many vividly physical characters on stage and a series of villains in films, Steven Berkoff presents a rather frightening image. But his autobiography Free Association (Faber and Faber, £15.99) is revealing in that, although he is not exactly a pussy cat, he has an extraordinarily sensitive side which comes out of both his ...

... 'Bum Actor' is ready good By Peter Hepple Michael Sheard subtitles his book Yes, Mr Bronson (Summersdale, 46 West Street, Chichester, West Sussex P019 1RP, £6.99) Memoirs of a Bum Actor. Not a term, one might think, that the young and earnest might take to. But one sees what he means. It is meant to refer to those who take acting life as it comes, like Sheard himself, who won an award at ...

... BRITS ON BROADWAY Elizabeth Sharland has hit on a neat idea with her theatrical guides, though I feel they would be more useful in pocket size rather than full-page hardback format. She has already tackled London, now she does New York in The British on Broadway (Barbican Press, £12.95). Her style is agreeably discursive but seems to go off at tangents in what is presumably an attempt to put ...

... BLAZING A TRAIL Edwin o sachs is one of the lesser-known names in theatre architecture, possibly because he did not himself design a London theatre. The title of the memoir, Edwin 0 Sachs: Architect Stage hand, Engineer and Fireman, edited by David Willmore (Theatresearch, £20) actually sums up the career of this remarkable man, who died in 1919 when he was only 49, never having received all ...

... MORE MONROE One might have thought that everything one could possibly want to know about Marilyn Monroe had already been written. But Barbara Leaming has unearthed a good deal of new material in her biography, simply called Marilyn Monroe (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £20). Much of it relates to her early life, from which it is easy to determine the seeds of what one has to call her self ...

... TV MISNOMER The Ultimate TV Guide would have details of every television programme ever made, and even if it stuck to only the English- speaking programmes would probably require sufficient vol umes to fill a bookshelf. So Jon E Lewis and Penny Stempels Ultimate TV Guide (Orion, £16.99 paperback) is something of a misnomer, though it is fine for compilers of pub quizzes and makes agreeable ...