Ian Hargreaves

In Shooting Stars, Ian Hargreaves, former editor of the Independent newspaper and New Statesman, asks how we use the celebrity lives whose ubiquitous appearances now dominate our media.

No magazine expects to pull in readers unless it announces the names of half a dozen famous - if only slightly - names on the cover. And while celebrity has always been with us, the trend seems to be towards an ever-more frenzied pursuit of big names to give status to everything from political campaigns to the most worthy charitable appeals or the most brazen commercial opportunism.

Celebrities. Like flies in a summer forest, you can't move for them.

Ian Hargreaves

Perhaps it's because celebrity lives have become new ethical parables of our times - their well publicised trials and tribulations being the disposable prompts to our own self reflection.

Perhaps, in their emphasis on the personal and the particular, they mark a revolt against bloodless and abstract political ideas. Or are they examples of nothing but their own trivial and alien selves?