He is a devoted sounding board for his friend Ruby Wax, and is blown away by the talents of Emma Thompson, with whom he appeared in Sense and Sensibility and Love Actually.

The ultimate Valentine's Day countdown - here are 10 romantic gestures to help sweep your partner off their feet! A couple working as chauffeurs have been accused of stealing millions from the founder of Tin House Books. Can you imagine the Harry Potter films without the late Alan Rickman's deliciously dour Severus Snape? He is the author of Appointment in Arezzo: A Friendship with Muriel Spark and is the series editor of Spark’s collected novels. I enjoyed but wasn’t overly enamoured with this diary, perhaps being spoilt by David Suchet’s autobiography Poirot and Me.It’s possible to go through this book, as if with a metal detector, and retrieve shreds of tabloid coin . Rickman, who went on to play Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films, became known as one of the great movie villains, an actor who was magnetic in his menace and fury. Alan Rickman is the luvvie’s luvvie, so much so that at times the book reads like one of the satirist Craig Brown’s parodies of a celebrity diary. The editor had more than a million words of entries to work with and condensing them to 500 pages can’t have been an easy job, but if only he had added some context and background information it would be a less maddeningly opaque read . Huge sigh of relief that these are being published with the approval of not only Alan Rickman's widow but of Rickman himself since he wrote his volumes of diaries with the intention of having them published one day.

Fully, openly, joyfully - truly, madly and, yes, deeply - he put his energies into the present moment . You can tell in his writing that these were for him and him alone, and never intended they be put out for public consumption. Yes there are footnotes to explain who everyone is but it’s just not enough doesn’t give any more background information.Finally, it is Rickman who is operated on for prostate cancer and who then finds out he has inoperable pancreatic cancer. Maureen Paton's biography uncovers the tracks of his professional, political and emotional past to finally reveal this most secret of stars.

This is partly because Rickman didn’t regard them as his finest work – on collecting a Bafta for Robin Hood, he said: “This will be a healthy reminder to me that subtlety isn’t everything” – but also because of the interviewers who insisted on quizzing him about them, years later. Having established himself as a major classical stage actor Rickman transferred to the Hollywood screen with a glint in his eye and a sly smile.What was interesting was the information about the film, "Mesmer", which I hadn't realised had ever been completed. There were some parts that were enjoyable, such as his thoughts on Tim Allen while working on Galaxy Quest.