No photo insert for the actor who is the American Laurence Olivier? The dullest book cover this side of a 1956 textbook for his first foray into print? Tsk tsk, HarperCollins. Do publishers have to be so ultra-economical these days?

OK, so maybe Frank Langella himself didn’t want pictures inside his new memoir, Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them. (You can add “in the Biblical sense” to the subtitle and it will apply to many of the essays.) The flap photo is current and fine, but the back cover image is a tease. Ostensibly taken by his daughter, it shows Langella under a sun tent on a Puerto Rican beach, writing on a legal pad with apparent relish.… Read More