The special celebrity guest, a common enough creature on our TV screens, is a rarer bird on the books pages of the nation's newspapers and magazines. But a tip for twitchers (should there be any) would be to keep half an eye on the New Statesman. A couple of years ago, in an inspired piece of commissioning, they asked Christine Hamilton to review An Accidental MP, Martin Bell's account of how he ended up wearing nothing but white suits. And now they've got Honor Fraser, a supermodel, to write about Nicholas Blincoe's latest novel, White Mice (Sceptre, £10.99), because it's set in the world of fashion. The thinking behind the title is helpfully spelled out on the back of the book (above a picture of Blincoe wearing, of all things, a white suit): 'Models are like white mice - they are cute, they all look identical, and they all sleep with each other.'

LRB 21 March 2002 | PDF Download