Performance: Clever girls and naughty boys

Ned Sherrin's death in October robbed the stage of one of its most avuncular chroniclers. His delight in all things theatrical can be savoured again in a new edition of his anecdotes, Voices From the Wings (J R Books 16.99). Barbed compliments and bitchy retorts abound, my favourites being Alan Jay Lerner's reply when Andrew Lloyd Webber asked why people took an instant dislike to him ("It saves time"), and the playwright Charlie MacArthur's desire to punish the gay critic who had savaged his actress wife, Helen Hayes, by "sending him a poisoned choirboy".

Inevitably, several of Coward's witticisms feature in Sherrin's collection. His less familiar side is found in Barry Day's The Letters of Noël Coward (Methuen, 25). Having admitted that "I suppose I am a tremendous celebrity snob," Coward corresponds with the great figures of his age, including Virginia Woolf, who writes him a fan letter, and Greta Garbo, who sends a mock-marriage proposal, as well as the more predictable Larry [Olivier], Gertie [Lawrence] and Marlene [Dietrich]. Despite stodgy patches, this makes a strangely affecting portrait of 20th-century social life.

Coward described Miriam Karlin as "that very clever Jewish girl". In her autobiography, Some Sort of Life (Oberon 19.99), Karlin engagingly describes her roots and current disillusion with Israel, her activism and eating disorders, her 60-year career, acting for Joan Littlewood and Stanley Kubrick, and her defining role in the sitcom, The Rag Trade.

When filming The Entertainer, both Karlin and the young Alan Bates were regularly invited to dinner by Olivier. It was only later that they found they had been used to deflect the press from his romance with Joan Plowright. Bates was to go to similar lengths to hide his own affairs, as described in Donald Spoto's Otherwise Engaged (Hutchinson 18.99), a sympathetic account of Bates's distinguished career and tortuous (often tortured) love life, ranging from a long relationship with the Svengali-like Peter Wyngarde through marriage to the deeply neurotic Victoria Ward, and affairs with both Nickolas Grace and Angharad Rees.

One of Bates's most powerful performances was as Diaghilev in the biopic Nijinsky. As Julie Kavanagh recounts in her authoritative biography, Rudolf Nureyev (Fig Tree, 25), the part was originally intended for Paul Scofield with Nureyev in the title role. Kavanagh tells the story of Nureyev's impoverished background, defection to the West and international superstardom with great verve, even if her subject remains an enigma.

Throughout his time with the Royal Ballet, Nureyev considered himself an outsider; so it was fitting that, at the reopening of the Royal Opera House, another outsider, Carlos Acosta, portrayed him. In his autobiography No Way Home (HarperPress, 20), Acosta describes this as "perhaps the greatest honour I had been given in my career". After his stage autobiography in Tocororo: A Cuban Tale, Acosta now offers a print version which, if less elegant, is more revelatory: his parents who married "for no more reason than to get hold of the crates of beer and extra food", his early delinquency, salvation through dance, troubles with partners and a doomed love affair with a fellow dancer.

One of Acosta's dream roles was Romeo. Just as Shakespeare's plays continue to inspire performers, so his life continues to intrigue scholars. The latest studies are Ren Weis with Shakespeare Revealed (John Murray, 25) and Charles Nicholl with The Lodger (Allen Lane, 20). Weis mines the writing for biographical evidence, taking his cue from Keats's remark, "Shakespeare led a life of allegory: his works are comments on it", whereas Nicholl builds a fascinating portrait from a fragment of Shakespeare's testimony in the case of a disputed dowry.

Shakespeare looms large in Actors Speaking (Oberon 12.99). Based on an initiative by Peter Gill, it transcribes a series of interviews conducted by young actors in the 1980s with 12 distinguished predecessors, including Alec Guinness, Rex Harrison, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies and Athene Seyler. The accounts of their training, influences, relationships with directors and, above all, verse-speaking techniques reveal the opposite approach to theatre tradition to Sherrin's, but one that is equally fascinating.

Michael Arditti's novel 'A Sea Change' is published by Maia