5. William Shatner is the popular one from 1960s cult TV Star Trek – well, with the fans anyway.  According to the actor, he isn’t quite as popular with ex cast members.  He moans all about it in his autobiography Up Till Now (Thomas Dunne, 2008), a book that gossip about these unlovely ex cast members.

4. One of the above is Leonard (Spock) Nimoy who comes in for a teacherly word, or several, because of his irrational alcohol addiction.  Nimoy prefers working in the theatre to TV (particularly London theatres).  It could be that it’s a lot less bitchy, or maybe it’s because, as the Vulcan himself admits, you get to drink during the intermission.

3. Spice woman, Victoria Beckham, when asked for her favourite book, replied ‘fashion magazines’.  Apparently she has never read a book.  No, not even her own.  No, not even one of the hundreds of biographies on her hubby.  All of which is not terribly surprising … apart from her erudite endorsement of ex models Kim Barnouin and Rory Freedman's ‘diet novel’ Skinny Bitch (Running Press, 2005).

2. If her pop and film careers failed, Madonna Ciccone Ritchie still has a colourful literary reputation to fall back on.  Her children’s book series The English Roses (Callaway, 2003) has been criticised for alleged Kabbalah propaganda. Children might find her back catalogue – the aluminium book Sex (Secker & Warburg, 1992) – more liberating.  Meanwhile her latest controversial literary contribution is for the book Vogue Living: House, Garden, People (Knopf, 2007) which sees her romanticising her rural retreat by dyeing her pet sheep all manner of unnatural colours.

1. When British actress Joanna Lumley, former pin-up girl of The New Avengers (1976), donated an entire top shelf of well-read paperbacks to a South London homeless charity, and then hand-signed every last one of them, she might have expected them to fly out like they'd be high-kicked Purdey style.  At a fiver a throw, customers have given the idea a good kicking instead.  Maybe she should stick to signing the books she actually writes.