We meet the first celebrity couple with a compound name. With chapters such as ‘What the Hell is a Celebrity Anyway?’ and ‘The Fandom Menace?’ it tries to assemble an anatomy of celebrity through the ages while taking a determinedly larky, non-threatening tone.
This book pursues the butterfly of popular culture with a double shotgun.
Every time I grappled with an idea, another seven would curl menacingly around my throat.’Īlas, when a writer asks for sympathy, the one who usually needs it is the reader. ‘But trying to formally define it was like wrestling an octopus. ‘You may think you know what a celebrity is, because I thought I did too,’ he pants in his introduction. Writing this book, he tells us, took him four years, 1.4 million words of notes and five editors. Despite his previous achievements in making history palatable to children (he was the fact-checker on the team that created the all-conquering Horrible Histories on TV), this personable, self-styled ‘public historian’ had something of a shock here. As a magazine interviewer myself, I’ve learnt to expect anyone blabbing about their marital bliss and vegan awakening to be divorced and setting up a burger chain by the time the piece comes out.Īfter celebrities die they are stratified the very good or very bad get biographers. It all runs the risk of becoming instantly dated. It has few poets, because it takes depth to go truly shallow (I’d nominate Roland Barthes, Peter Conrad, Kenneth Tynan, Clive James, Marina Hyde, Lynn Barber and the New Yorker’s Lauren Collins).
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