Amis Jr was raised amid a hellish, endless cocktail party that helps explain the contradictions of his character and his work

Your weekly guide to what's really going on inside the world of books

Back in the bard olde days

One cook decided to settle the question for good - with surprising results.

Having served his sentence for fiddling his expenses, the former Tory peer John Taylor made a bad mistake when he insouciantly told The Daily Telegraph how he was looking forward to resuming his seat next summer, and giving their lordships the benefit of his hard-earned experience of prison life.

Brent residents crowded into the Court of Appeal yesterday for the latest stage in their legal attempt to prevent the closure of six "treasured" libraries by the local authority.

It's no longer enough just to give: you must wear your support on your sleeve (or lapel, wrist, etc)

Julie Walters overacts wildly in Peter Morgan's latest television drama. She's hammy, melodramatic, and goes so far over the top at times that it's a wonder she doesn't black out from oxygen deprivation. Fortunately, there's an explanation. She's wearing a horsehair wig at the time of the most grievous offences, playing a defence barrister in The Jury.

Erudite to the very last

Mourid Barghouti's first volume of memoir, I Saw Ramallah, is a classic of the genre and a uniquely clear-eyed account of returning home after 30 years of serial expulsion. Barghouti is also the poet of displacement in general as well as its specific Palestinian form. In between the first and this second volume of memoir came Midnight & Other Poems – a first selection from many volumes of his poetry.

Starring: James Marsden, Kate Bosworth

From Beaumont and Fletcher to Kaufman and Hart, there have been many cases of playwrights working in tandem. But Stalin and Bulgakov? Surely some mistake. The General Secretary of the Communist Party and the era's greatest (if often slyly so) dissident dramatist sound unlikely co-authors. That, however, is the scenario we are asked to envisage in the savagely funny, darkly fantastical play that screenwriter John Hodge has concocted for his stage debut.