WHAT TO MAKE OF John Osborne? According to John Heilpern’s John Osborne: A Patriot for Us (Vintage, £9.99/offer £8.99), he could be cracking company, and would open a bottle of champagne almost before saying hello.

But on a slender pretext he threw his 16-year-old daughter out of his house, writing her such a toxic character assassination that she must have needed tongs to hold the paper. (She never spoke to him again.) A friend got a similarly stinking letter. His mother, while still alive, was excoriated in a volume of autobiography, and he added a chapter to another volume to celebrate the suicide of a former wife. Something is not quite right there. Heilpern makes the whole grim tale compulsive reading.

Criticism of Samuel Beckett is much thinner on the ground in Beckett Remembering: Remembering Beckett (Bloomsbury, £8.99/£8.09), James and Elizabeth Knowlson’s collection of interviews with him and reminiscences by friends, family and theatre folk. His legendary patience and acts of kindness are amplified here. On the minus side, some found him a little uncommunicative – although given the increasing thinness and large typefaces of his later works this shouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Actors could be frustrated by his refusal to reveal the “meaning” of his plays – he claimed not to know any more than they did. So no answers to the riddles of the plays, but plenty of light on the life of an extraordinary man.

In Orson Welles: Hello Americans (Vintage, £8.99/ £8.09), the second volume of his gargantuan biography, Simon Callow by and large avoids the trap that has swallowed other biographers, hung up on the fact that Welles’s account of his life did not always tally with the documentary record. So he was forgetful, wishful, or mischievous. Far more interesting is the wealth of what Welles achieved, not just in films: as a radio comedian, political speaker, newspaper columnist, magician, campaigner against fascism, theatre director and so on. Callow gives a gratifyingly detailed account of Welles’s industry and imagination that makes you gasp.

Walt Disney arguably had the sort of career Welles should have had. Resisting all temptations, he kept his independence from the clutches of Hollywood and owned a studio in which to exercise it. In the exhaustive Walt Disney: The Biography (Aurum, £25/£22.50), Neal Gabler expertly deconstructs the contradictions within the Disney myth: the saccharine effects and the turning of junior Americans into ardent consumers, against the promotion of environmentalism and questioning of authority and money. Disney emerges as something more than a reactionary Blimp and the fortunate creator of a wildly successful cartoon mouse.

A holiday book for anyone not planning to travel far is J. W. Rinzler’s The Making of Star Wars (Ebury, £39.99/ £35.99), a tombstone of a volume marking the 30th anniversary of the film, with recently discovered interviews, sumptuous production stills and photographs of the special-effects troglodytes fiddling with toy spacecraft. For anyone who has the force with them, this awesomely nerdy tome is a gift from heaven.

Buy the books here

Celebrity choice: Preeya Kalidas, actress

I love MARILYN MONROE by Eve Arnold. Arnold had written an appreciation of Marlene Dietrich, and when Marilyn Monroe met her, she asked if she would write one of her, too. It’s an interesting picture of a woman smart and skilled enough to create her own style, who stopped at nothing to become the megastar that she still is today.

Preeya Kalidas will appear in Joseph, opening at the Adelphi Theatre, London WC2, on July 17

Reader choice: I always think of Evelyn Waugh on hot hazy English summer days. Maybe it's the nostalgic romantic in me. So BRIDESHEAD will once more be REVISITED. Kitty Buchanan-Gregory, London

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