Even with the 20-20 vision of hindsight, the failure of the major record labels to grasp the implications of the internet seems extraordinary. As Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper explains in this pacey account of corporate greed and myopia, they certainly had enough warning.

Michael Deeley, the veteran British producer, has a theory about how the Academy Awards are decided (and he is eminently well-placed to know, having won the Best Picture Oscar for The Deer Hunter in 1979). "There are four bases upon which the average member decides his vote," according to Deeley, and Hollywood myth. 

Hunter S Thompson always had one beady, sun-bespectacled eye on posterity. At 21, living in poverty in a remote cabin in the Catskills and toiling away at an autobiographical first novel, Prince Jellyfish (still unpublished), he would immodestly compare his own progress to that of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, two other writers who came late to public recognition.

In dance heaven, poor Agnes de Mille is resigned to being jostled by nobler colleagues. "Sprightly but peripheral" was her own assessment of her work, yet, with her 1942 ballet Rodeo and her musicals Oklahoma!, Carousel, Brigadoon and more, she invented a genre of popular stage dance that came to dominate the Western public's theatre-going for half the century.

At first sight, it seems extraordinary that there has never been a serious biography dedicated to the Supremes before now. They achieved more than enough to deserve a shelf-ful. In their heyday from 1964 to 1969  America loved them to distraction: only Elvis and the Beatles bettered the 12 number ones the Supremes racked up on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.