It was obvious that the germ of a new story was there: 'The main thing,' he said, 'is to keep all the fixed elements, the magic potion, the banquet at the end, but to surprise yourself as well as the potential reader in how you get there.'In the meantime though, he has his duties as the Asterix and Co executive. There is a new full-length cartoon film adventure, which Uderzo hopes will finally mean success in the United States. There are video games, CD-Rom language teaching courses, more translations in Eastern Europe, and of course, the tantalising possibility of dressing up Depardieu in skins and letting him loose on the wild boar Je dis, plutot.(Photograph omitted). JOAN BRADY's first novel, Theory of War, was a comet out of the blue, a complete surprise from a largely unknown writer in Devon. It was based on her grandfather's childhood as a white slave in the American South, and its imaginative mastery over such scalding events won it last year's Whitbread Prize. To learn that she had once been a ballerina in San Francisco and New York was odd; ballerinas may be associated with rigour, but not always of the intellectual kind. In her memoir, Prologue, we learn that ballerinas were encouraged to be dumb In this Brady was a complete failure.

However, she did succeed in sticking to stoic work schedules and weathering the grinding competitiveness. In her rise to the top she demonstrates something of the same steeliness apparent in Theory of War. Her ideological parents practised 'the Open Door Policy' which meant that she and her sister were doomed to witness marital strife and nakedness, both physical and emotional. Ballet was a cooler universe, despite being riddled with envy. By the time she was 20, Brady was dancing with the most important ballet company in the Western world, George Balanchine's New York City Ballet, where she was photographed at the barre under the vigilant eye of her master by Cartier Bresson, who was crawling around on the floor to get the right shots.She charts her rise through the system step by step. But the darkest competitive struggle is with her beautiful mother, an intelligent, strong-willed but vengeful woman who sets about trying to destroy her daughter's career Brady, in her moment of stardom, muffs it.