Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier; sex and murder; swanky Parisian boardrooms and bedrooms. Sounds enticing, doesn't it?

Gillian Flynn used her experience of being laid off after a decade as a journalist to “find a way into” her protagonist Nick, who suffers the same fate in Gone Girl.

In academic circles now, said Cambridge History professor  Christopher Clark, it’s calculated that you need to have read 25,000 books and articles to really get to grips with the reasons for the first world war.

Mysteries unsolved by a sanctified English gumshoe

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Grasscut push the electropop envelope in intriguing new directions with Unearth, its songs inspired by alliances of people, poetry and places.

In 1976, when I was 14, my family migrated to Britain from the Caribbean. We had landed in a cauldron of bitter rhetoric about race and immigration. Unemployment was rising, and a vociferous minority demanded that "coloured" migrants be sent home.

Bethan Roberts's My Policeman was initially billed by its publisher as a novel inspired by E M Forster's relationship with a married constable, Bob Buckingham. Now it appears shorn of any reference to the author of A Passage to India, and it soon becomes clear why. Roberts's account of a polysexual ménage à trois has not simply been transposed to Brighton, but reimagined as a very different story. It is more obviously informed by Peter Wildeblood's Against the Law: the 1955 account of being prosecuted for homosexuality.

It wasn't realism that made the early female detectives successful; after all, Miss Marple was a twinkly, rosy-cheeked old busybody who based her criminal knowledge solely on gossip overheard in her village.

I have a tenuous connection to this author, having gone to school with Daniel Day-Lewis, whose father was our Poet Laureate.

Who knew that Tony Benn is a first cousin of the late lamented Margaret Rutherford? Admittedly their cousinhood was once removed, but this seems strangely fitting because some used to believe that Benn was once removed from reality. According to Kelvin McKenzie's Sun, he was the barmiest man in England. It was a title that, tragically, could have been applied to Rutherford's father, who bludgeoned his own father to death with a chamber pot – Agatha Christie would have certainly approved of the method. And Rutherford was quite an eccentric herself, of course. She built her film career playing up the battiness, happily without murdering anybody.

Sadie Frost and Jaime Winstone have posed naked in photographs at London's Groucho Club to raise money for the National Autistic Society. Frost is stretching naked on a bed and Winstone is sitting on a chair, with nothing but a vintage red gypsy curtain over her lap. Organised by Bernie Katz, the club's manager, this collection of nude and semi-nude portraits of stars of Soho, snapped by Andrea Vecchiato, are on show this week at London's The Gallery Soho.

How many lives can Bernie Gunther have? The dogged Berlin policeman of Philip Kerr is now enjoying – if that's the word – his eighth. The Gunther books appear out of chronological sequence, but the protagonist remains consistent, stoical, appalled by others and himself, carrying the darkly flaming torch of gallows humour. After South America, Cuba and the US in the 1950s, he's back in the Second World War, this time in the service of the monster Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotector of Bohemia. It is September 1941.

Another memoir from a former member of Brown's government adds brushstroke detail and depth to his monster status