This article titled “For sale: Tony Bennett’s nude sketch of Lady Gaga” was written by Sean Michaels, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 13th December 2011 12.29 UTC

If your living room is missing that certain je ne sais quoi, perhaps you would like a nude portrait of Lady Gaga? Drawn by Tony Bennett. The crooner’s charcoal rendition of Gaga is now up for auction, with proceeds to benefit an arts charity.

“I walked in and said, ‘Well Tony, here we are’, and I dropped my robe and I got into position,” Gaga said during her Thanksgiving TV special. She and Bennett previously collaborated on Lady Is a Tramp, a song from his recent duets album. “I felt shy and thought, ‘It’s Tony Bennett, why am I naked?’”

The sitting was part of a Vanity Fair photoshoot: Bennett stands with his sketch pad while Gaga poses in her birthday suit. “She is the most beautiful person I ever met,” Bennett said later, “but there is something special about her.”

That “but” is a little peculiar. Certainly Bennett’s sketch makes Gaga look sinister and vaguely, er, wrong. Still, if we set aside the wonky eye and weirdly oblong breast, it more or less resembles the Poker Face star. Bennett signed the portrait with his given name, Benedetto, and he is also offering a print of one of his Venice paintings.

Bidding on the Lady Gaga nude sketch begins at ,000 (£3,200).

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This article titled “Enough, Nigella” was written by Alexander Chancellor, for The Guardian on Thursday 8th December 2011 20.30 UTC

The photograph of Nigella Lawson on the cover of Stylist magazine, eyes closed in ecstasy as sticky caramel sauce trickles down her face, rather put me off the whole idea of Christmas. She denies that the picture is erotic, and I tend to agree with her. It is rather disgusting. It makes me want to send her off to the bathroom for a shower. But what it suggests more than sex is a rather unhealthy relationship with food, an addiction to the kind of self-indulgence for which Christmas is famous. In a newspaper interview this week, Nigella acknowledged the existence of a recession by recommending that people on tight budgets buy smaller turkeys than usual, which is good advice, given that no Christmas turkey ever gets finished. But she seems to have said this only to allow that gluttony could be satisfied more cheaply with ladles of sauces, gravy, stuffing and so on.

More in tune with the times is a book called Starvation Recipes recently published in Greece, where times are a good deal harder than here. Written by a high-school teacher called Eleni Nikolaidu, it draws inspiration from the Nazi occupation years, when Greeks found survival even harder than they do now. It tells you how to make do with cheap vegetables, to chew very slowly so as to feel as if you are eating more, and to throw nothing away. It even advises you to sweep all crumbs from the table and keep them in a jar. This may be going a bit far, but it is a refreshing antidote to the Nigella school of overeating.

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