Celebrity

I feel a twinge of pity for Prince Alwaleed bin Talal — and it’s not often you can say that about a billionaire Saudi businessman. According to Forbes, he’s worth $20 billion, making him the 26th richest man in the world. But is he? The prince has disputed this estimate of his net worth, claiming the true figure is $29.6 billion. That would place him in the world’s top ten. The reason I feel sorry for him is not because his wealth may have been underestimated, obviously. Rather, it’s because Forbes has made him the subject of a pitiless hatchet job in the current issue, ridiculing him for trying to

Hugh Grant’s account of a (secretly-taped!) conversation he had with a former News of the World hack-turned-whistleblower is most entertaining. Credit to our friends at the New Statesman for commissioning* it. There’s plenty to enjoy, including this fine exposition of the mentality of our upstanding truth-seekers in the popular prints: Me Well, I suppose the fact that they’re dragging their feet while investigating a mass of phone-hacking – which is a crime – some people would think is a bit depressing about the police. Him But then – should it be a crime? I mean, scanning never used to be a crime. Why should it be? You’re transmitting your thoughts

There’s no successor to Elizabeth Taylor. No contemporary actress possesses anything like her fame. That’s a consequence of the changing nature of celebrity and the fragmentation of popular culture. The movies got small and so did the stars. But the sensational aspects of the Taylor-Burton saga makes it easy to forget that their celebrity was initially founded upon their brilliance as actors. The work fed a celebrity which would help undermine the validity of the work, and did so right from the beginning in the overblown mess that was Cleopatra. But Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, stagey and overdone itself, remains an extraordinary piece of work: a harrowing, almost grotesque,

‘To tell the truth,’ says Peter Myers, his Cumbrian baritone untouched by four decades of life in Manhattan, ‘I’m glad it’s all over.’ By ‘it’ he means Christmas and new year, when Myers, the sausage-knotter and purveyor of pies to New Yorkers, is at his busiest. ‘It was bedlam. They began to queue up outside the shop ten days before Christmas for their mince pies. We were making thousands a day. Bedlam, I tell you’. Myers of Keswick, the shop on Hudson Street that bears the name of his birthplace, is not your average butcher’s. Looking round the shelves stocked with salad cream, Colman’s mustard, Marmite, Jaffa Cakes, Branston pickle,

I dare say it makes one a bad person to be amused by this: ONE gives only a pittance in direct charitable support to its causes — something Borochoff said the average donor might not realize. The Bono nonprofit took in $14,993,873 in public donations in 2008, the latest year for which tax records are available. Of that, $184,732 was distributed to three charities, according to the IRS filing. Meanwhile, more than $8 million was spent on executive and employee salaries. Like many others then, I guess that makes me a bad person. A spokeswoman for Bono’s “charity” ONE Campaign explained all: ONE  “does advocacy work, not charity work.” True

Director Roman Polanski attends Che Tempo Che Fa TV Show held at RAI Studios on November 23, 2008 in MIlan. Photo: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images. So, what about Roman Polanski, eh? Let me suggest that you can a) acknowledge that his arrest is scarcely an urgent priority, that b) there are questions to be asked about the original handling of the case, c) that the victim’s desire to see the matter dropped is noteworthy, though not of great legal import and that d) Polanski is probably not a threat to the public. Nonetheless, the rush to defend the film-maker has been nauseating. Consider Robert Harris’s piece in the New York