One great thing about the Daily Mail is the way it can take a half-baked book and turn it, in three short episodes, into a gripping read. That’s what they did with Vidal Sassoon’s autobiography, filleting out all the fascinating bits and presenting them as a rattling good story. 

Unfortunately, when you get to read the real thing, you find 456 pages of name-dropping, descriptions of shows, business deals, trips to Israel and failed marriages, all delivered with the same cheery attitude until we reach Sassoon’s eighty-second year. Even the potentially hair-raising beginning in Petticoat Lane, from