... young dramatist was only 29 when he was murdered at Deptford-has been prepared for the press by Andrew Butcher from papers left by the Archivist of Canterbury. Urry, early in his impressive career without wealth he subsidised his degree through three years work as a librarian, studying at night noted the import ance of what he termed the trivial details which are really the important things ...

... A new sense of purpose Dana: An Autobiography, with Lucy Elphinstone (Hoddcr and Stoughton, £8.95 hardback, £3.95 paperback) Seldom can a young girl, fresh from a convent school, have been precipitated as rapidly into worldwide fame as was Rosemary Brown, better known to all of us as Dana, when she won the Eurovi- sion Song Contest in 1970 with an innocuous little song called All Kinds of ...

... Self-confessed ham and a survivor Stage-Struck, by Lionel Blair fWeidenfeld and Nicolson. £8.95) Anybody who has ever met Lionel Blair, or just seen him perform, will know that he has picked on the perfect title for his autobiography. He is a survivor, an incredibly hard worker and a self-confessed ham who might well do anything if there is an audience. Though there may be some, even a lot, ...

... forebears in the cello world, for example Pablo Casals, Julian Lloyd Webber is nevertheless a very different kind of person, a child of the sixties, knowledgeable in the pop field as well as the classics, conscious of the media and willing to use it. A performer first and foremost, he is more flamboyant than his brother Andrew, an instantly recognisable per sonality who is as much at home ...

... of the cinema's most enduring hard men. As tough in reality as many of the characters he played on screen, even his own life story reads like the well-worn plot of one of Hollywood's favoured rags to riches movies. The son of poor Russian immigrants, he used the poverty of his childhood to fuel his determination to become a star. Just how Douglas managed to estab lish himself as one of the ...

... has traded in trivia. And why not? In many cases the people have been more interesting than what they had to play, say and sing about, and Penny Stallings has certainly done a thorough job in unearthing memorabilia and curious facts. The commencing photographic sec tion alone is fascinating. Who would have thought that the angelic Vincent Furnier (Detroit, 1957) would grow up to be Alice ...

... HOW FORTUNATELY coincidental it is that three books recently published about the theatre cover between them three of its most important strands- the establishment, the fringe and the committed. What they all have in ;ommon, of course, is a shortage jf money, except that on the Tinge it does not matter quite so nuch, love will find a way. Peter Lewis' The National: a Dream Made Concrete ...

... who is exploiting whom, but from a feminist viewpoint it is inevitable that strippers should become a kind of sisterhood. Actually, it does not always work that way, as Lauri Lewin points out in her honest book about her life as a stripper in Boston. Massachusetts while at the same time studying at college. True, men are the exploiters, in as much as the clubs in which she worked were owned ...

... Neilson Gattey, of prodigious output and encyclopaedic memory, is not entirely concerned with matters theatrical there is enough about the twin worlds of stage and screen to make it diverting reading for those who are mainly interested in the theatre of the past. It is in his chapter 'Some 20th Century Sybarites' that the author, in addition to exposing the excesses of some notorious ...

... the first wife of choreographer George Balanchine. But this is not a show business autobiography. She herself describes it as a remembrance, and a very vivid remembrance it is, the recollection of what it was like to be a small child in the Russia of 1917. She came from a comparatively weal thy family. Her father, of Tartar and Turkish parentage, made vestments and decorations for the ...

... An A to Z of Franco Peter Hepple on Zeffirelli, the 20th century Renaissance man of the arts world Zeffirelli: the Autobiography ofFran co ZelTirelli (Weidenfeld and Nicol- hui. £14.951 The image one often has of Franco Zeffirelli is of a mysterious, somewhat reclusive man who flits between opera houses and film sets. Possibly this is because he is literally a man of the arts world, welcome in ...

... as it is a photographic record of most of his stage and film roles, from an amateur production of As You Like It in Sussex in 1922 to a 1987 film with Michael Caine, The Whistle Blower. Many of the 200 photographs, the finding of which must have taken Tenitch years of delving and research, are published for the first time, and all i are as fully captioned as possible. Moreover, most pages also ...