Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has unveiled a £415 million deal to buy the TV production company set up by his daughter.

New biography claims West End producer could have suppressed story of actor's arrest

Friends, Romans, and thugs

"Who's there?" cries Hamlet on the battlements of Elsinore, kick-starting the greatest revenge tragedy in the language. "Who's there?" cries Linda Marlowe as an old cleaning lady, sweeping up back stage.

A detailed, chatty biography of an author who wrote detailed, chatty diaries may seem superfluous, but, as with Pepys, a fuller picture emerges.

Some writers are forgotten because they are chameleons. Tracking their work becomes a slippery business. They change names, switch genres and leave behind their work scattered through library systems and traceable only by ISBN number. In the history of this column, one name has remained on my list from the outset. Hugh Callingham Wheeler was also known as Patrick Quentin, Jonathan Stagge and Q Patrick, and facts about him are hopelessly few, perhaps because he remained single and lived privately.

Raven-haired, stop-you-in-your-stride-eyed Diana Quick is just the kind of memoirist who would have readers flicking to the index for a pagination of juicy bits.

Three fire engines raced to Tony and Cherie Blair's home in Buckinghamshire after smoke was seen billowing from the £6m property. The cause of the alarm: four incinerated slices of toast.

The theatre world is littered with self-styled gurus and shamans, but it is rare to find a director who is also an Anglican priest. In this charming and insightful memoir, 82-year-old James Roose-Evans takes us on a spiritual and creative journey from his literally tortured adolescence (he was prone to self-flagellation) to the twin heights of ordination in Hereford cathedral and Broadway success.

When TV drama focuses on higher education, the results are excellent. Why, then, has it so often ignored academia? Gerard Gilbert reports

Like Hermia in The Dream, I am amazed and know not what to say: the seething mob takes a bow at the end of the new RSC Julius Caesar – but they are on film. The video empire strikes back, assuming a reality of relationship with a theatre audience that cannot possibly exist. Or can it?

Sympathy for that talented devil

It must, I feel sure, have been Evelyn Waugh who said you should always think of those less fortunate than yourself. How much more entertaining for most of us to think of those more fortunate than ourselves getting it in the neck. Brideshead Revisited seems likely to be an abiding delight, not just because the noble house of Marchmain get what is coming to them, but because it is a book of great splendour, splendidly done. I am particularly grateful to John Mortimer, who adapted the book, for his remarkable fidelity to Waugh. I noticed only one ripple of Rumpole. "There is no Mrs Lunt," said Mr Lunt, with notable satisfaction.

Elizabeth Mackintosh, who published mysteries under the name Josephine Tey, is now best remembered for her classic whodunit The Daughter of Time. In her day, however, she was more celebrated as the author of the West End hit, Richard of Bordeaux – a historical drama that starred John Gielgud and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies. In this polished debut, Upson appropriates the persona of Tey, turning her into a fictional character of her own.