A fairy-tale princess
In true fairy-tale fashion, English girl-next-door, Sophie Rhys-Jones, became the wife of a real-life Prince recently when she married Queen Elizabeth's youngest son, Prince Edward. When a tabloid newspaper recently published an old topless photograph of her frolicking with a television presenter, the public relations executive got her first real taste of what an insatiable British media have in store for her. The embarrassing tabloid Splash, coming almost on the eve of her wedding, won the royal bride-to-be much public sympathy and even an apology from the paper's editor. Her bobbed blonde hair, coy smile and bashful glance bear an uncanny likeness to the late Princess Diana — something the tabloids pounced on when the 33-year-old career girl first appeared on Prince Edward's arm in 1993.

World's costliest book
A book on Australian photographer, Helmut Newton, will be the most expensive in the world, retailing at 1,510 Euros ($1,585) a piece, publishers Taschen Verlag said. Entitled “Helmut Newton's Sumo”, it will contain 400 photographs on its 480 pages, some of them hitherto unpublished. Weighing 30 kg and measuring 50 cm by 70, it has a production budget of 5.1 million Euros. The publisher said the aim of the volume was to pay tribute to the most influential, the most exciting and the most controversial photographer of the century. Enclosed in a presentation sleeve designed by France's Philippe Strack, the book will have a run of 10,000 copies, each handbound, numbered and signed by Newton. The first 2,500 will be available by the end of the year, with the rest being published up to next April. Newton, 79, born in Berlin but of Australian nationality, is famous for his fashion photography and portraits of celebrities.