Something has just happened to make Clint Eastwood's day. We refer, of course, not to the fact that he was yesterday made a Commander of the French Legion of Honour in Paris by President Sarkozky, but to the publication of Clint Eastwood, Icon, a gorgeous assembly of artwork from around the world commemorating an incredibly long-lived career.

Throughout the 60s and 70s, when Soviet reality was based on observation, supervision, communality, destruction of sense of self and  concealed from the West, Sutkus’s portraits quietly revealed details in images quite at odds with the official convention for portraits of smiling, women working on farms, respectful teenage soldiers atop tanks, and intense factory workers lunching in vast canteens – all designed to convince the vast population that “everything’s OK.” 

Helen Chase’s biography of post-punk band Magazine is in some ways a textbook example of how to do the job correctly. In fact, with its classically austere cover (designed by Malcolm Garrett, who did many record sleeves for the band) this handsome paperback even looks like a textbook. Back in the late 1970s Magazine never quite made the same impact as the grim and intense Joy Division or the emptily anthemic Simple Minds, who went on to huge cult status and stadium glory, respectively.

Frank Johnson, the great parliamentary sketch-writer who died in 2006, was a passionate fan of opera and ballet. While intensely admiring certain artists, he kept eye and pen sharp for his observations of cultural matters, mocking cabals of opinion-formers in the arts as ruthlessly as he quilled politicians. These extracts from a newly published collection of his writings, edited by his widow Virginia Fraser, show both sides of him.

5 March 1989: Benjamin Britten's whimsicalities

Michael Palin (b 1943) has had - is having - an amazing multi-pronged career. One of the original members of the Monty Python team, he has subsequently reinvented himself as a prolific author, a film and television actor and, more recently, a hugely popular and successful travel show presenter and writer. Palin has a lot to celebrate these next few weeks with the publication of the second volume of his diaries, Halfway to Hollywood, and, next month, Python's 40th birthday (can it really be possible?) Tomorrow Palin is giving a public interview in Ely Cathedral for the Cambridge Film Festival; on 15 October he will be honoured, along with his four surviving fellow Pythons, at New York's Ziegfeld Theater. In the meantime, this tireless globetrotter discourses, over tea in Turin, on all of the above.