And Daniel? Elice wants to see more of her mother, a “termagant” according to her father. Finally there’s the question of Luke, who begins to ask questions about his absent father. Can Marie cope with being needed so much?This is the kind of novel-by-numbers that may well have some readers, probably parents, sighing and giggling from the first page; but for those without kids, it can only be recommended as a contraceptive.State Building by Francis Fukuyama (PROFILE £6.99)When the Berlin Wall fell, Fukuyama proclaimed it as the end of history; rampant liberal democracy had swallowed up communism and, in vanquishing the last great rival ideology, had achieved the final, ideal form of human governance. His computer shows he’s been reading the work of a certain Reverend Tibworth: Why Not Have Sex Before Marriage? Because Waiting For It Works. In addition to being fatally stared at, the goats suffered the “quivering palm”, where a light stroke delivered in a particular fashion results in death; and prisoners in Iraq are tortured by being forced to listen to a children’s song.Ronson can be incredibly funny, but perhaps the urge to entertain has become an obsession in modern journalism. By swallowing whole Hunter S Thompson’s contention that “the writer must be a participant in the scene”, he’s forged for himself a protagonist’s role that is both artificial and distorting.

Bonzo journalism: reporting gone to the dogs.Single Men by Dave Hill (REVIEW £6.99)Marie is a 22-year-old cleaner with a five-year-old son, Luke. She could have been much more, but was forced to abandon her A-levels when her father died – and of course there’s also Luke. Her clients are an implausible range of dysfunctional single men: “lost soul” Marlon, who has issues surrounding celibacy; Dr Jelly, a brain surgeon with a messy love life; and debonair Daniel, father of precocious Elice. An accidental father after a drunken incident with someone he thought was a TV (naturally he has to explain to Marie that this means transvestite), he’s the kind of stock gay character who’s been cropping up in bad novels for years.While Marie seems to have her own life neatly under control, the men she works for become increasingly demanding Marlon smashes up his flat and disappears.

“Am I destined to stay in this room? Ha, no!” Sadly his experiment failed. An innocuous event, but for the fact that Stubblebine was a Major General in the US army, responsible for controlling military spy units throughout the world. Forces higher up the chain of command considered his unusual ideas, for example psychic healing and training men to stop an animal’s heart by thought power alone, to be excellent ones. At Fort Bragg, known only to a select group of people (not even Stubblebine), was a herd of goats, retained specifically for the kinds of experiment the Major General had in mind.Ronson’s investigations show just how reasonable the paranoia exhibited by your average conspiracy theorist might actually be.

All he had to do, he sincerely believed, was to merge his atoms with those in the wall: “What is destiny?” he thought. As one of my young companions put it, this Willy Wonka “didn’t have enough good things to say”. For this film is constructed around the mystery of Mr Wonka, the chocolate tycoon who for reasons never explained has first neglected his factory and then thought to bring it back to glory days. It may seem odd to criticise Roald Dahl for lack of malign intention, but the original novel (published in 1964) is very short on plot. Charlie Bucket is one of a group of children who go on a tour of the chocolate factory – and really, the book (and this film) are tours, and as bland, monotonous and unfocused as this sounds. Describe the overall career of Roald Dahl to anyone, give them the title – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – and they are going to expect more than a tour.

The chocolate factory will turn into a very ambivalent place – apparently the answer to every child’s prayer, yet really the source of dental trouble, family breakdown and even some great chocolate conspiracy.
It’s the lack of narrative interest or thrust that is most odd about the film, and most likely to leave both the ingenuity of Burton’s visual imagination and Depp’s shady aplomb looking a little stranded. I realise that the book is a classic, and Felicity Dahl was one of the co-producers on this venture, surely determined to keep to the line of her father’s book But, in truth, too little happens in it for a movie. The children entering the factory need to be in a kind of moral danger. One idea would be two Willies: a charlatan Wonka has taken over and has a dark plan – so Charlie must rescue the real Willie. What prompted that idea was nothing less than the way Burton makes the factory exterior resemble Fritz Lang’s great futuristic film, Metropolis, a story in which the saintly leader of the city workers is “cloned” as an evil seductress.Tim Burton is 45 now, and his remarkable promise is beginning to look middle-aged.