The first time I admitted publicly to having been brought up in Chelsea I was 35 and at the launch party for my first novel, which was being held in a Tapas bar in Clapham. At that stage in my writing career I wasn’t aware that I was allowed guests of my own, so it was just myself, the sales team from my publishing house, a handful of book reps and some booksellers.

What makes a good rock biography? Sex, naturally. Drugs, frequently. Rock’n’roll, obviously. None of the above are in short supply in Rod Stewart’s account of a long life spent howling into microphones and knocking up blondes. He came, he snorted, he conquered across four decades, in a variety of outfits from tartan to spandex, from the Eel Pie Island to Vegas. And the way he delivers it, this tall tale of wine, women and song has the flavour of a splendid lock-in down the boozer.

When I first mentioned to a colleague that I was embarking on a biography of the doctor/director Jonathan Miller, he instantly yelped, “My God, your work’s cut out! The man must have met half the famous names in the twentieth century!"

The return of The Rolling Stones to the world stage is headline news, but the man who put them there in the first place has decided to reveal the tricks of being an impresario, the hustler that can make or break a band. In this poignant, exclusive extract from Stone Free, their former manager Andrew Loog Oldham contemplates Phil Spector, one of his inspirations with whom he was reunited in the wake of the death of Lana Clarkson, the woman Spector was convicted of murdering in 2009.

When Zachary C noticed his audience were no longer beguiled by his best Zachary B smile, he arranged for his chargrilled-sweetcorn teeth to be replaced by a mouthful of ultraviolet-sensitive acrylic. Much to his delight, shop windows, car windscreens – even a puddle he awkwardly traversed on the way to the gig – all threw back at him a grin of searchlight intensity.

On arriving at the Kings Theatre, Portsmouth, he found Fountain – his backing vocalist wife – immersed in her own reflection in the dressing room mirror. He sat down beside her and grinned his new grin.

Michael Frayn (b 1933) has been having an annus mirabilis. The play the hapless actors of Noises Off are touring is called Nothing On. In the playwright’s case, almost everything has been on. Frayn’s best-known farce spent the first half of the year tickling ribs at the Old Vic and then in the West End. A season in Sheffield featuring his more serious plays furrowed brows while one of them - Democracy, his play about federal politics in 1970s West Germany – had a run down in London.

Eighteen months before her death from lung cancer at the age of 51, Angela Carter talked to Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. She had just edited The Virago Book of Fairy Tales (1990), a rich stew of stories – Eskimo, Swahili, Armenian – which she had grouped in provocative sections: "Brave, Bold and Wilful"; "Good Girls and Where it Gets Them". She talked about the difference between the work undertaken by "chaps" – the novel and the epic – and the kind of stories often referred to as "old wives’ tales".

This Friday afternoon at five o’clock, the National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke will recite a new poem and initiate a seismic week of Welsh cultural exploration. The inaugural Dinefwr Literary Festival will bring writers and musicians from Wales and beyond to a National Trust house and park in Carmarthenshire. Unlike other literary festivals in Wales – notably Hay and Laugharne – this one will straddle the border between English and Welsh.

There is film footage of those opening magical, transformative moments: of Brown intoning, “The time, the time is now. Do it now, do it now.” Film, however, could not capture the effect the band’s arrival had on the mood of the crowd; it was a jaw-dropping biblical reaction, of relief, amazement, worship and unadulterated joy. “It was like a massive pilgrimage to witness,” said Roddy McKenna, the man who had been instrumental in signing the band to Jive/Zomba.

Apart from “I did not have sex with that woman” and maybe “It’s the economy, stupid”, Bill Clinton seems never to have said anything quite as memorable. Indeed, of all the phrases with his name attached, none is quoted quite so tremulously as Clinton's description of an event that takes place annually on the border between England and Wales as May makes way for June.