The publisher Caroline Michel explained the new business model to me over lunch last week. The important thing to grasp was that a book was no longer the starting point. These days the deal could begin with something as instant as a video clip. The video clip could lead to a book. The book could lead to a film.

Eminem looked like he had put aside the humiliating events of the MTV Movie Awards as he performed with Jay-Z.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a British comedian posing as a gay Austrian fashionista landing on Eminem's face.

Eminem stormed out of the MTV Movie Awards after an incident with Sacha Baron Cohen's flamboyant alter ego Bruno.

George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, once amused journalists at a Conservative fringe meeting by regaling them with tales of his ability to retain odd facts. Perhaps, one of them asked, he was "faintly autistic"? Referring in turn to a much-touted rumour that had been doing the Westminster rounds, Osborne replied: "We're not getting on to Gordon Brown yet."

"Why another book?" asks Simon Louvish, at the beginning of this dense tome. It's more than 30 years since Charles Chaplin died, there's no anniversary in the offing, and there are lots of books about him, as the bibliography at the back of this one confirms. Louvish's sources are mainly secondary and he makes no boasts about new revelations. Yet it's a mark of his rich scholarship (and the richness of his subject) that you finish this book feeling glad he wrote it, rather than wondering why he did.

Channel Four claimed a landmark victory yesterday when a US judge ruled that Ali G, the character created by Sacha Baron Cohen, is so absurd that "no reasonable person" would take him literally.

Ever been attracted to or put off a place just by its name?

There are, it would seem, further twists to be negotiated in Madonna's Long Road to Adoption – this time in the daunting form of an emergency injunction by her opponents. Pandora hears that a collection of almost 90 Malawian civil rights groups met yesterday, hatching the plan of a court order preventing the child-gathering singer (shown here with an earlier aquisition) from adding a four-year-old girl to her toy box.