From White Teeth to Swing Time: Zadie Smith’s best books - ranked!

How do you follow a smash hit like White Teeth, which, as everyone now knows, sold for a six-figure sum while the author was still at university, and turned Zadie Smith into a literary superstar and poster girl for multi­culturalism at 24? With a novel about a pot-smoking Chinese‑Jewish autograph hunter, the dangers of fame and the shallowness of pop culture, of course.The Autograph Man begins in full wisecracking throttle with three boys in the back of a car on their way to watch a wrestling match between Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks at the Royal Festival Hall. As 12-year-old Alex-Li Tandem gets Big Daddy’s autograph (the start of an obsession), his own daddy drops dead from a brain tumour. Unfortunately, the rest of the novel doesn’t quite live up to the prologue. The critical heavyweights of the time didn’t pull their punches: “A poky, pallid successor” (Michiko Kakutani, who had rapturously reviewed White Teeth, in the New York Times), “cartoonish” and full of “misplaced ironies and grinning complicities” (James Wood in the LRB)

Ardal O’Hanlon: ‘I fell asleep on stage once – I could hear someone doing my material, got annoyed and woke up’

What’s the longest word you can make out of the letters A-R-D-A-L-O-H-A-N-L-O-N in 30 seconds?“Anal” springs to mind, because I was doing a show in Limerick in Ireland and the stage manager genuinely thought my name was Anal. He called me over the Tannoy [PA system]: “Could Anal please come to the stage door?” But there must be a bigger word than that. I’m usually good at Countdown. This is quite annoying. This is how I define myself – by my ability to conjure up words from random letters

My cultural awakening: A Jim Carrey series made me embrace baldness – and shave my head on the spot

I was a mess of insecurities, trying to hide thinning hair, worried I was ageing too quickly. Then a scene in the TV show Kidding changed everythingGrowing up, I was obsessed with Jim Carrey. I was just entering my teens when The Mask came out, and I can still picture myself watching Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls on TV one weekend afternoon, absolutely howling at the silliness of it. His elastic facial expressions, the energy, the stunts – it was the perfect tenor of humour for a young boy.By the time I was in college, I had moved on to his more thoughtful films

From Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere to IT: Welcome to Derry – your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

Jeremy Allen White channels the Boss in a hotly tipped new biopic, and Pennywise the clown returns to terrorise unsuspecting children in a spooky horror prequel seriesSpringsteen: Deliver Me from NowhereOut now The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White plays the Boss in this buzzed-about Bruce Springsteen biopic focusing on the period when he was making his 1982 album Nebraska (so, post-Born to Run but pre-Born in the USA), with Jeremy Strong playing critic turned producer Jon Landau.The MastermindOut now Kelly Reichardt returns with an art heist movie inspired by a real robbery in 1970s Massachusetts, in which two Gauguins, a Picasso and a Rembrandt were nicked. Here, it’s Arthur Dove paintings that catch the eye of Josh O’Connor’s art thief James Blaine Mooney.ParaNormanOut now An odd dearth of family films has left a gap in the market into which this rerelease of 2012’s animated adventure ParaNorman has decided to slip. Norman Babcock (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is the misfit 11-year-old who speaks with the dead, enabling a spooky adventure to unfold in time for Halloween

John Deere obituary

My father, John Deere, who has died aged 89, was the arts director of Nottingham county council for 20 years. A passionate advocate for the arts, he was appointed to the post in the council’s newly established leisure services department in 1975, following the national reorganisation of local authorities.There, for 20 years, he transformed the artistic life of Nottinghamshire through development and funding of arts activities across the county. In the town of Retford, he supported the internationally famous Cantamus girls choir and, in Mansfield, the Mansfield Palace theatre.Events ranged from concerts by world-renowned musicians such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, André Previn and the pianist John Ogdon, a native of Nottinghamshire, to poetry readings by established poets such as Aeronwy Thomas, Dylan’s daughter

Timely assurance from Lear’s Kent | Letters

The passing of John Woodvine (Obituary, 13 October) reminded me of the time when four of us University of East Anglia students went to the Norwich Theatre Royal to see the Actors’ Company touring King Lear in June 1974.We were early and went for a something to eat at a newly opened “burger” style restaurant with booths and partitions so you couldn’t see who was at adjacent tables – a novelty at the time. The service was very slow and we were concerned that we would be late for the theatre.Suddenly a head appeared over the partition and said: “Don’t worry – they won’t start without me!” It was John Woodvine, who turned out to be the Earl of Kent and was the first to speak in the play. Needless to say we made it in time