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WHAT was 19-year-old Robert Hawkins thinking as he looked down the sights of his rifle at the anonymous shoppers in the Westroads shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska? What was going through his mind last week as in just a few minutes he picked off eight of them, one by one, and took their lives, before ending his own? Was he feeling anger that his family didn't want him, frustration that he'd broken up with his girlfriend, or depression that he'd lost his job? Probably all three played some part. But according to the suicide note he left, there was something else on the mind of this disturbed young man. 'At least now I will be famous,' he is said to have written. Of course! FAME! He wanted fame. The desire for fame is the addiction of our age. Indeed, celebrity for itself alone often seems a sole ambition for many young people. Traditionally-fame came as a reward for outstanding achievement. It usually suggested great merit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE DESTINATION on our airline tickets might have read Istanbul, but our main destination was a city which ceased to exist more than 500 years ago. Constantinople was the capital of the Byzantine and east Roman empire until it had its name and religion changed when it was overrun by the Turks in 1453. So off we went, back in time along the streets of Istanbul -- whose other names (Byzantium and Constantinople among them) were only officially banned in 1930. Poking around in rubble and shoeless in carpeted mosques, we were looking for the Byzantine under the Ottoman, as it were, trying to see how a Christian culture became an Islamic one. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FOR more than 40 years, the name Pete Best has been synonymous with the notion of the man who so nearly had it all. One day he was the drummer with The Beatles; the next he wasn't. On the very brink of fame, the other three band members ditched him. And he never saw it coming. And yet as we talked this week, surrounded by drums and recording equipment, and with a photograph of John Lennon staring at us from a wall, there was not one trace of bitterness. 'What's the point in saying, "I should have been this", or "I could have been that?"' he says simply. 'That's yesterday. Forty years ago. What's important is what's happening today and tomorrow. When you realise that, you get on with it.' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

EVERYONE in Hollywood knows the old joke about the Polish actress who was so dumb that she slept with the screenwriter, thinking it would benefit her career. It's a screenwriters' joke, of course, bemoaning the fact that while stars and directors are rich and powerful people, as well as often being much-loved household names, few people know or care who writes a movie. Naturally screenwriters have always thought this unfair, for without the script there's nothing for the actors to act, nothing for the directors to direct. But, unable to change things, they've taken their wages, stayed discreet, missed out on the girls and privately whinged and gossiped to each other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHO would have believed it? Bob Dylan, the sage of the Saga generation, is suddenly the hippest rock star in the world. Again. The times they certainly must be a-changing. But as someone of exactly the same bus-pass age as the great man, I'd like to say: Thank you, Bob. May we both, in your words, stay for ever young. And the reason for celebration among the grey multitudes and creaking baby-boomers? Only that Dylan is to make a star turn as a presenter on BBC Radio 2 -- Britain's most popular station, let us not forget -- and 6 Music, a digital station at the cutting edge of what's hot and what's not. The shows, to be broadcast over Christmas and New Year, will be a mix of music, interviews and commentary, all with Dylan's hand firmly on the tiller. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FIRST the bad news. I'm 64 today. Now the good news. I still think I'm 25, the age I was when The Beatles recorded When I'm Sixty-Four. That was in 1966, the year Plum and I were married. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This is a book about a nerd, written by a nerd, for nerds. So it suits me perfectly. It is also a short book, more of a primer really. But then Buddy Holly, whose voice will inevitably swamp the radio airwaves on February 3, the 50th anniversary of his death, had a short life and a very short career. Only 22 when he died, his part in rock music's development was, however, enormous. John Gribbin, who has a PhD in astrophysics from Cambridge, believes this was partly because Holly 'essentially invented the now classic group line-up of two guitars, bass and drums'. This is the one point on which I would beg to differ. Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and others had had the same line-up for two years before anyone had heard of Buddy Holly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ONCE upon a time old men were granddads. There they were, benign old blokes deadheading the roses and being silly with small children. Then along came Victor Meldrew, the archetypal grumpy old man from One Foot In The Grave, and a new demographic slice was mapped in the national psyche. Personally, I've never been convinced that Grumpy Old Men are anything more than argumentative younger men gone grey. But the classification caught on, and now any poor chap who, like me, is in his 60s and dares register any kind of complaint is condescendingly considered grumpy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE trouble with getting older isn't the getting older part: it's the watching everyone else getting younger. In my mind's eye, I'm permanently 25, until, travelling on the Underground, I suddenly realise that everyone else is considerably younger than I am. They've probably paid their own fares, too. But not to worry, because people like me -- that is, over 60 -- have a special day. It's called the United Nations International Day of Older Persons, and 600 million of us around the world celebrated until, oh, at least 10.30pm on Wednesday, knocking back the cocoa like there was no tomorrow. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SO ARMAGEDDON has arrived. Spiv City traders have been short-selling our lives and now we're all billions of pounds in debt. And it's raining again -- after the dullest September for 14 years. But hang on … there are plenty of things we can enjoy that don't involve spending money. Here, RAY CONNOLLY and DAVID THOMAS tell you how to enjoy the best of them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHAT do you do about your surroundings if you already live in one of the most beautiful corners in Europe? If you're Swiss, you embroider that beauty. While the people of other similarly blessed places might be happy to let nature take care of itself, the Swiss like to embellish every little corner of their towns and villages, where no terrace or windowsill is allowed a single plant pot with a pretty flower if two or three, or even ten, can be put there instead. This struck me particularly as we recently drove from France into that jutting appendix of Switzerland that is Geneva. I'm a Francophile, and I love the unfinished, rustic look of so much of France. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FOR THOUSANDS of young people around the country, a dream came true yesterday. Their A-level results told them they had the grades they needed to begin their glittering careers at the universities of their choice. Congratulations to all of them. They worked hard and they've been rewarded. No matter if some question the value of A-grades these days. That isn't their problem. They took the exams they were set, and they excelled. They couldn't do better than that. But for all the successful candidates, there are also unsuccessful ones -- the girls and boys who didn't get the results they needed. For them the future is suddenly less certain, their tears will be those of disappointment, not euphoria. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WE ARE in the middle of an epidemic of casual violence. A knife attack now takes place somewhere in Britain every 24 minutes, and more than 20 young people have already been stabbed to death this year in London alone. Lawmakers, teachers and parents shake their heads in despair as an explanation is sought for this upsurge in barbarity. But perhaps the reason is depressingly simple: knives have become cool. After all, what is the most popular movie of the moment and the fastest-earning film of all time? It's The Dark Knight, the new Batman blockbuster, in which a one-time comic book character, the Joker, played manically by the late Heath Ledger, explains why he prefers killing with a knife. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

NOW IT'S only a small thing, and it matters not a mite in the great sweep of our lives, but hands up all those who this week imagined they heard the toll of their own funeral bell when they read that Woolworths is to no longer sell CD singles. That's it, we thought, we really are from a bygone age now. Soon, at the summary wave of some barbarian accountant's pen, the record shop, one of the last outposts of innocent adolescent delight will be gone. There will be no more gawping at the photographs of the stars on the record covers, no more studiously examining the details of the recording before buying. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHAT will you do this Bank Holiday? Will you go to the cinema to see the latest comedydrama, enjoy a Harry Potter DVD or listen to a CD? Perhaps you'll watch a rugby or football match and then relax in the bath with the radio on. Almost certainly you'll watch some television -- maybe quite a lot of television. If you're young you might go to a nightclub and have your ears bashed, while you survey the talent around you. In a pub there may be a TV showing a football game, or even a video juke box. On the other hand, if you're too young for clubs or pubs you may just sit in your bedroom with your PlayStation, or browse through YouTube on your computer. Children younger than that probably go to bed when CBeebies finishes at seven o'clock, getting a good night's sleep before Chucklevision is back on at just after half-past seven tomorrow morning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THERE they sat in the comfort of their Las Vegas ringside seats: the rich, the beautiful, the famous -- and the ugly at heart. Film stars. A singer. And a smattering of tycoons. United by their millions and their moral vacuity, they howled their encouragement as two brave, fighting puppets -- one Welsh, the other American -- pummelled every kind of hell out of each other. With every blow that cut into the black American's face, they roared approval. With every combination of punches that stunned him they rejoiced. When he fought back, they fell silent. What did they want to see? They wanted Welsh fists driving into the American's kidneys, his eyes purpled with blood, gloves pounding into his temples and crashing into his jaw. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHEN in 1959, at the age of 17, Carole King (real name Klein) got pregnant by her first boyfriend, Gerry Goffin, they did what nearly every lower-middle-class Jewish Brooklyn couple did then. They got married, sometimes taking their baby to work with them in New York where they wrote rock'n'roll songs. Five years later, aspiring folk singer Joni Mitchell, aged 19, got pregnant too, but made a different choice. Leaving her home in a Canadian prairie town, she went to Toronto and had her baby without telling her ultra-respectable parents. The baby was adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

HANDS up those who have chosen a regime of self-flagellation and mortification of the flesh for their New Year's resolution. Not too many hands in the air, I suspect. But if I put the question another way -- if I ask how many of us will be starting a detox diet as soon as tonight's celebrations are over, or inquire how many plan to commit themselves to a vicious programme of body pummelling and muscle stretching at a gymnasium or health spa under the smirking supervision of some half-starved tyrant in leggings and a vest -- the answer will, I'm sure, be very different. Because by tomorrow (or, at the latest, by Wednesday morning), the entire country will be knee-deep in guilt. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE printer for my computer broke down just before Christmas. It's been dependable for years and printed beautifully, so I took it to the repair shop to have it mended. The engineer took all of three minutes to examine it, then pushed it back across his desk. 'It doesn't have a serious fault, but unfortunately the time involved in repairing it would make it uneconomic. 'It would be far cheaper for you to go out and buy yourself a new printer. They're very cheap now, you know.' 'But I like this one,' I insisted. He shook his head. 'Sorry.' And so, with much regret, because I grow attached to things I use every day, I have to buy a new one. Luckily, the sales are on, and, yes, the engineer was right. Printers are very cheap. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FOR a woman to have three famous songs written about her can't be bad. And certainly Sixties model Pattie Boyd, who married Beatle George Harrison before leaving him for his friend, guitarist Eric Clapton, was a bewitching-looking girl. Harrison rhapsodised about her by writing Something, while Clapton sobbed in frustrated anguish: 'Layla -- you've got me on my knees', as she at first resisted his invitation to commit adultery. He finally beatified her in Wonderful Tonight when she married him. What a woman, what a life! Or maybe not. Because now, as Pattie Boyd and Eric Clapton publish their separate accounts of what actually happened, all we see is tarnish on Pattie's gilded cages. Brought up in India and then convent boarding schools, Pattie met Harrison during the shooting of A Hard Day's Night. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A QUARTER of a century ago they were the most famous sparring couple on television. She was Audrey fforbes-Hamilton, the bossy aristocrat who, ruined by death duties, had been forced to move to a lodge on what had been her estate. He was Richard DeVere, the nouveau riche, Czech-born immigrant who'd come to Britain as a boy, made millions and bought Audrey's house from her. It was, of course, To The Manor Born. Audrey was played by Penelope Keith and DeVere by Peter Bowles. And as the two rubbed fractiously alongside each other, it developed weekly into a romantic comedy. Watched by an audience of nearly 24 million at its peak, it ran for three series until in the last episode the warring couple finally melted, married, and Audrey returned to her grand house. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

YOU won't find a place called the North Devon Riviera on any map or in a guidebook because it doesn't actually exist. I made the name up to describe a beautiful stretch of the coast for a novel I've written called Love Out Of Season. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

He hung a rival out of a window, stubbed a cigar out on another's head and didn't speak to his daughter Sharon Osbourne for 15 years. No wonder Don Arden, who has died at 81, was the most feared man in music … WE'RE always taught that it isn't good to speak ill of the recently departed, but in the case of Don Arden, the rock manager and promoter whose death was announced yesterday, I think an exception can be made. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE HUSTLERS by Douglas Thompson (Sidgwick & Jackson, £16.99) IT COULDN'T have looked more respectable. A smart address in an 18th-century mansion in London's Berkeley Square, well- spoken young toffs in dinner jackets, champagne and pheasant pie, beautiful women straight out of Debrett's, and a clientele of the rich and aristocratic. This was John Aspinall's Clermont Club in 1964. But all wasn't as it appeared. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THERE'S an old adage that says 'God loves a trier'. But if you've been watching Britain's Got Talent for the past week you'll know now that it isn't only God who favours them. Most of the rest of us love triers, too. There on ITV every night, people as ordinary as you and me, young and old, talented, ludicrous and crackers, have been competing against each other to entertain us by doing the one thing in life they think they're good at. And even before last night's tears were shed as we were torn apart watching the shy, but giant voiced tenor Paul Potts vying for our votes against the tiny, gap-toothed six-year-old Connie Talbot, huge audience figures showed that the programme has touched a deep nerve of affection in the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What Sean Lennon feels about how close he came to never existing we don't know. But if he listened to what his mother had to say on yesterday's Desert Island Discs he might have had more than a moment's pause for thought. Yoko explained to Kirsty Young how, when she found that she was pregnant at the age of 42 in 1975, she considered having an abortion. She and John Lennon had just become reconciled after an 18-month separation, and, as she explained on the programme, she 'didn't know if it was the right moment to have a child. I just didn't want to burden him with something he didn't want.' Lennon's response was, she said: 'Of course we're gonna keep it.' It was 'like he was really upset with my remark. And, I thought, well, we'll go ahead with this.' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

JOHNNIE WALKER might not have been the inspiration for the Henry Chapin line 'I am the morning DJ on W*O*L*D… feeling all of 45 going on 15,' but when you consider the rollercoaster ride of his life, he could well have been. The broken marriage, drink, drugs, a suicide attempt, walk-outs, sackings -- they're all here, not to mention the lifelong attitude of self-justifying adolescence. The phenomenon of the popular disc jockey as a star really only took hold in Britain with the arrival of the pirate radio stations in 1964. And although Johnnie Walker wasn't one of the first, he was to become one of the best. With a friendly on-air manner and a classless voice, he was made for radio. And, better than that, he didn't just play the music, he loved it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WE ALL recognise the moment. We're going along more or less happily in life when suddenly the road forks and we're presented with a choice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BEYOND the world of rock folklore, no one remembers the band Grunt Futtock. That's probably because all they ever consisted of was a reel of tape, a few moody photographs and a couple of quick-talking, very persuasive managers. Grunt Futtock were, in fact, a clever, jokey con dreamed up in the early Seventies, when Andrew Loog Oldham, who had discovered the Rolling Stones, and hard man Don Arden, who managed the Small Faces, decided to cash in on their reputations as talent spotters. Gathering together a few musician pals, including Roy Wood, Peter Frampton and Steve Marriott, they went into a studio and made a quick audition tape of them playing together. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WE'VE ALL got them. They lurk clogged with dust, either in the backs of cupboards and drawers or stored under our beds in battered college trunks, along with old exam papers, love letters, barely remembered essays and all the memorabilia of our younger selves. I'm talking about audio cassettes, that innovation of the mid Sixties which made it possible for the first time to rerecord favourite tracks from our albums and take the music with us wherever we went. Overnight, car journeys became the greatest concerts we ever heard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THEY don't make rock stars like Keith Richards any more. They can't. Because Keith Richards, or Keef, as he's popularly known, isn't just a one off, he's a self-creation. For the 40-odd years he's played guitar with the Rolling Stones, he's balanced the public image of a drug-wasted eccentric who is forever on the brink of his own destruction, with one of the smartest brains in rock music. He knows exactly what to say to draw attention to himself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ONE SUMMER holiday when I was eight I made myself a den in the back garden. It was a modest enough place. Dug a couple of feet into the earth, its low walls were lined with planks and old lino, and its roof was made from bamboo canes which I then camouflaged with clippings from a rambling rose. But it was mine and I was very proud of it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Not so many years ago, February 14 was a coy, giggly date on the calendar -- a day of hope, perhaps mystery and occasionally a little disappointment. A day when there was just a possibility that an envelope might drop through your letterbox containing a bright, red, sponge, velour outline of a heart, two trite lines of verse, and sometimes a scrawled question mark, it marked for generations an initiation into the hazards of the heart. That was the tradition of Valentine's Day as most people knew it. No doubt some well-off, older suitors sent their fancies bouquets of red roses or expensive jewellery, bought them candle-lit dinners, or even whisked them away to Paris to propose marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

. . . ARE YOU READING NOW? Two books, actually. There's Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, much of which I find myself disagreeing with, and then there's The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. This is at once both highly original and quite silly, but when one gets used to the idea that it's about a woman in a relationship with a guy who zips backwards and forwards in time throughout their lives, it becomes a moving love story. I can't help wondering how the author is going to end it, though. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

HE WAS always considered the least talented of the four, the one who only joined the band when they were on the very cusp of fame, the one to whom Lennon and McCartney gave the easiest songs because he didn't have a very wide vocal range; and the one non-musicians would sometimes snidely describe as the 'lucky Beatle'. But mention his name and it's enough to make an entire generation smile in affection. Because Ringo Starr, unassuming, plainly spoken, sad-eyed and lugubrious behind his drums, was the Beatle with whom ordinary people could best identify: the little man grandmothers and small children loved. And soon, so his admirers hope, he may be kneeling before the Queen to receive the ultimate honour: a rock and roll knighthood in the fashion of Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Cliff Richard. Will it be 'Arise, Sir Ringo, the people's Beatle?' You never know. Stranger things have happened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HE WANTED to be an opera singer but, on realising that his baritone voice was 'good, but not good enough', he became a disc jockey. Some might think that to go from opera to chatting between three-minute slices of rock and roll would be a bit of a comedown, but not Alan Freeman, who died this week, aged 79. Because 'Fluff', as he was universally known, just didn't see the snobbish cultural divides that separate music. If it was good he loved it, and his enthusiasm infected all of us. For more than 40 years we were kept abreast of the changing musical times by this happy Australian for whom every day seemed sunny. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

AROUND this time of year there used to be a 100-yard-long ridged mountain of leaves collected by the gardeners in London's Hyde Park, which would smoulder on all through the autumn. Occasionally it would burst into little, red eddies of fire. But mainly it just kept quietly smoking away, turning rain drops into pungent, warm clouds, and endowing the entire park with its comforting smell of country in the city. Winter was on its way, we would think as we passed, with some small thrill of anticipation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

THE PROSPECT of seven days without a television, a radio, an internet connection or a phone may be enough to get many prospective tourists salivating. But to a news junkie like me, it sounded like a living nightmare. It would be like going on holiday in a hole. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LET'S look on the bright side. At least they can't disappoint us any more, because, in truth, that's the only emotion most of us have felt about our team these past few World Cup weeks. It's all over for them and us now, and can't you just feel the relief. The bubble has burst and reality rules again. There'll be no more dreaming of the impossible, no more feeling let down because we never saw our boys play as well as they could and should. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A sad old duffer of a show, Top of the Pops has long belonged to another age. Now, in finally putting it down, the mystery is: why wasn't it mercifully killed a generation ago, before it suffered the ignominy of being ridiculed and ignored? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FOR almost 40 years, it's been a song that nearly everyone knows. We hear it at anniversaries, karaoke nights and overwhelmingly in retirement homes. Its lyrics have been seen on birthday cards and used in thousands of newspaper headlines. Cherie Blair even sang it to a group of Chinese students. It's When I'm Sixty Four, of course, and next Sunday its composer, Paul McCartney, will turn 64 himself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

RAY CONNOLLY looks beyond the amazing triumph of his beloved team and finds a metaphor for life in Wednesday's game as the little guys manage to turn the tables [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

MY WIFE and I went to Paris a couple of weeks ago, 40 years on, having a second honeymoon in the city of the first honeymoon to celebrate our ruby wedding. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

ONE OF the most puzzling crime stories of the past 30 years was the kidnapping of Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs in Brazil in 1980 by a gang of mainly British ex-soldiers, and their attempt to bring him back to Britain to finish his 30-year prison sentence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

NO ONE ever said it to her face, but Rowena McCartney heard about the gossip. She knew that people who didn't know him in her village of Heswall on the Wirral were saying that her husband Mike McCartney wasn't a very nice man, that he'd touched up a teenage girl. But, though she also knew it wasn't true, there was nothing she could do about it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A COUPLE of years ago, I became worried that the celebrity of David and Victoria Beckham would inadvertently ruin one of the most unspoilt corners of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

HOW much is a song worth? To its composer it can mean millions, as Paul McCartney -- now reckoned to be worth more than £700million -- can testify. But how much to a fan, to you and me, say? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SITTING around their turntable for their monthly meeting in January 1956, the marketing heads of EMI Records had a problem. They held the rights to sell American RCA Records in Britain, and usually this meant something wholesome and friendly like Magic Moments or Catch A Falling Star by Perry Como. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]