There is a case for photographing horrors, since not all torturers are as keen as Hitler's and Pol Pot's to keep their own pictorial record of what they get up to. Snapping celebrities with their pants down is harder to justify, but in his preface to Private Pictures Anthony Burgess does his best to convince us that the paparazzi are engaged in some­thing valuable. From the photographs you can't find out much beyond a few variously startling physical facts about the firmness of Romy Schneider's behind, the pliancy of Elton John's wrist, and the magnitude of Giovanni Agnelli's virile member. It is also sensationally revealed that Orson Welles has a fat gut and Yul Brynner a bald head. Burgess is pretty scathing about Brigitte Bardot's breasts, but to me she looks in better shape than Burgess was when I last saw him.

Apparently Burgess shares the gutter press assumption that those who achieve fame should be made to suffer from it. But many of this book's victims are famous only as a side-effect of pursuing honourable careers. 'This book,’ growls Burgess, 'in bringing stars down to the human level, is a kind of visual poem on the theme of expendability.’ One night before a Cambridge Union debate I saw Burgess get angry because Glenda Jackson had not turned up to lead the opposing team. Burgess made it clear that to meet her ranked high among his reasons for being in attendance. Not even such unexpendable philosophers as Burgess are always entirely innocent of the star-fucking impulse. Private Pictures supplies additional evidence for the already well-documented theory that those who fuck the stars are the same people who enjoy sticking it to them.