... Calling all rock Years ago a band would take the name of its leader. Then along came the rock revolution and the collective name of the band became as important as its music. Nowadays, we take names for granted, it is part of the branding. Mark Beech, in The A-Z of Names In Rock (Robson Books, £12.99, paperback) has pro duced one of those volumes which might be regarded as an ultimate book for ...

... CLEAR SIGNALS The Best of Jazz (Robson Books, £11.99) bears the same title as the Radio 2 programme Humphrey Lyttelton has preserv ted for many years, and is distin guished by the same urbanity and easy knowledge he brings to his broadcast activities. This is, in fact, a combination of two books, the first was pub lished 20 years ago, the second six years later. In it he dissects the styles, ...

... Disney tale shows muscle Preston Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Hunter gets captured by the game of panto as the television Gladiator, aka beefy Yorkshire Woke James Crossley, and makes a muscular centrepiece to this latest offering from New Pantomime Productions Ltd. Although the main requirement of his Prince Valentine is to simply look impressive, he more than holds his own with his lines ...

... PARK LIFE The twin ttalianate towers of the Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne make it one of the most distinctive of our seaside theatres. And at a time when such playhouses have all but disappeared in the form in which we used to know them, it is comfort ing to know that the DP is still thriving, even if it is somewhat overshadowed by the much larger Congress Theatre next door. The ...

... EXPRESS YOURSELF I am as guilty as anybody else at using the term Expressionist to describe something about which I have only the vaguest notion, invariably relating to a play or design from post-First World War Germany. David F Kuhns' German Expressionist Theatre bridge University Press, £40) is a weighty, exhaustive and some times exhausting volume which is incredibly detailed in its ...

... Black from the past COMPILED BY PETER HEPPLE With Black In the British Frame (Cassell. £15.99, paperback) Stephen Bourne confirms that though he is not an academic by background or training he has the field to himself at the moment when it comes te specialised areas of popular entertainment. He is not black but he has made an in-depth study of the work of black people in films, and this is the ...

... GONG WITH THE WIND There is nobody in this country more adept at picking out sub jects for film reference books than Roy Pickard. This time he has come up with Oscar Stars from A to Z (Headline, £12.99 paperback), which has short entries for all those actors and actresses who have either won or been nominated for Oscars since the presentations began in 1929. There are 743 of them in total, ...

... HEAVY READING I here seems to be a little conflict between the author and publisher of Theatre At War, 1914/18 (Macmillan, £42.50). The author, U Collins, obviously regards it as an interesting chronicle of the theatre and entertainment scene during the First World War. But to judge from the hefty price tag for a book of only 250 pages, the publishers have placed it in the academic category, ...

... BROWSE AROUND The Cassell Companion to Theatre (Cassell, £20) is an updated and revised version of Brewer's Theatre, a book which carried on the tradition of Dr Ebenezer Cobham Brewer's famous Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, first published in 1870. This means that it follows its own somewhat quirky path, not particularly strong on biographical entries, for although all the most obvious ones ...

... EARLY DAYS Barbra Streisand suddenly appeared to the British public as a fully developed artist in the sixties, heralded as a great star, even though we had never previously heard of her. Barry Dennen, who played the MC in the first London production of Cabaret and later, I seem to recall, was Titus Andronicus at the Round House, casts new light on Streisand's eariy days in My Life with ...

... TIPPETT THE BALANCE Michael Tippett, who died recently, has not so far received the popular acclaim accorded to his contemporary Benjamin Britten. Michael Tippett (Robson Books, £14.99 paperback), written by his manager, musical associate and close friend Meirion Bowen. is more of an examination of Tippett's music than a biography, though the opening section of the book is of considerable ...

... TRIUMPH OF TINKER Volumes of collected criticism are not everybody's favourite kind of reading, including mine. But one has to make an exception in the case of the late Jack Tinker because the writing was the man. Many of us know without reading Jack Tinker A Life In Review (Oberon Books, £19.99) that Jack was the most perceptive and witty of critics, and the one most in tune with the ...