It was Fabio, the cover model of countless paperback romances.Johnny Depp once offered to buy the house we now rent, along with several others on the same street. It overlooks his three-acre estate and a 20- room turreted faux chateau, a pre-war building in the same style as the Chateau Marmont.He is a stickler for privacy. Having failed to buy the surrounding homes, ostensibly for some of his relatives, he built an eight foot high fence of welded industrial-grade steel around the estate, with thick green bushes to obscure the view. Neighbours complained and his managers had to take a foot or two off in places.Shannen Doherty waved to me cheerily last week. I was plodding up the hill, unkempt, sweaty, pushing our daughter's stroller.

Shannen came swooshing down at the wheel of her heavy black Mercedes, her car phone pressed to her ear.Shannen is an absolutely certified star. Either we don't recognise them in time, or we don't know who they are. In a flash of brilliance, he spotted one of the Monkees in the corner. On the way out, we nearly bumped into Christopher Walken.In Hollywood, there is the A list, and then there is the rest of us looking on Occasionally, people swap sighting stories. The first time, a starlet from the film The Mask was doing a photo-shoot, twisting and wriggling at the bar for the photographer while the staff looked on approvingly.I once took the entertainment correspondent of The Scotsman, who had just been to the Academy Awards for Braveheart, wearing a kilt. Unfortunately, neither I nor my wife are very good at celebrities.

This month's Travel and Leisure magazine confirmed it is "the" bar in Los Angeles. If you want to mingle with the stars after dark, you are virtually guaranteed a sighting.We go there early, before the crush and the queue of cars at the valet parking. When we want to titillate visitors with a taste of Hollywood, we take them down the hill to the Bar Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. From the outside, it looks like a low wooden shack with peeling grey paint; the name scrawled carelessly on the fence at the front. He said it several times over.That is all very well, responded an editorial in yesterday's Le Monde, but why is it that judges have to be reminded of these principles so often?Part of the answer was on the screen for all to see.The Prime Minister, being interviewed, narrowly avoided prosecution last winter for allocating select council flats to himself and his family while city treasurer.The chief interviewer, Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, is appealing against his conviction for receiving favours - expensive suits and holidays - from an adviser to the former mayor of Lyons.In such circumstances, French voters could, perhaps, be applauded for still being shocked enough to protest..

The Prime Minister, Alain Juppe, is a former deputy mayor and treasurer of Paris.A poll commissioned by the Parisien newspaper and published yesterday showed the extent of public distrust of politicians and justice in Paris.Some 56 per cent of those asked expressed "little or no confidence" in Mr Tiberi; 68 per cent thought council housing was allocated "according to political or personal considerations", and 64 per cent thought the judge was wrong to have dropped the Tiberi case.Loik Floch-Prigent, the head of the national railway company, SNCF, was yesterday called in for questioning by an investigating judge in connection with allegations of corruption at Elf-Bidermann, the company where he was director before moving to SNCF.If Mr Floch-Prigent is placed under formal investigation, Mr Juppe was asked, would he be expected to resign?"Everyone," replied Mr Juppe, "is innocent until proved guilty." In other words, no."Good justice must be equal for everyone and it must be dispassionate," said the Prime Minister on Wednesday night. "It is an indisputable fact that innocent people were killed here and it is only right that we apologise At last, after all these years, the truth has surfaced.". Paris - When, as yesterday, a staunchly pro-government newspaper devotes the whole of its opinion page to a defence of some fine interpretations of French law, and when the prime minister, as he did the previous evening, devotes part of a rare television interview to a defence of his country's judicial practice, something is afoot. That something is an emergency attempt by the government to avert a full- blown crisis of public confidence in French justice, in particular in its capacity to judge those in power. The problem is not new in France, where political and judicial power are linked by much more than any "old-boy" network and where the prime function of judges has been to uphold "Republican law".Over the past week, how-ever, the perpetually rumbling criticism of the influence of political figures on the judiciary has grown into an outcry.The immediate cause was the decision by a Paris judge to drop a case involving accusations of misuse of public funds and nepotism against the Mayor of Paris, Jean Tiberi.The public fury that greeted that decision was matched by more considered anger and shouts of "political interference" from many lawyers after Parisian police refused to assist a judge's authorised search of Mr Tiberi's apartment.The justice ministry denied interference. In France, though, a request does not need to be overt: everyone knows well how to anticipate the requirements of political power, on which their jobs could depend.Mr Tiberi was deputy mayor for 12 of the 18 years that the present head of state, Jacques Chirac, was mayor. The Justice Minister, Jacques Toubon, who appoints both judges and state prosecutors and is in charge of the police force, is concurrently a city councillor and mayor of one of the capital's 20 districts.

None of the theories was ever proved, and throughout the communist period, the subject was simply taboo.There are many in Kielce who would prefer to keep things that way. Some have piled abuse on those seeking to come clean about the past, while others have resorted to anti-Semitic graffiti.But for many it is a relief that the lid has been lifted on the guilty secret they held so long."Only those with no conscience at all still want to deny the past," said Jadwiga Bedla, an activist in the Solidarity trade union. "Having admitted them, we now hope for some sort of reconciliation.''Of the three million Jews that lived in Poland before the war, only 200,000 survived. Unbelievably, they soon found themselves targeted by Poles envious of their former prosperity.In the first two years after the war, hundreds of Polish Jews were killed in anti-Semitic violence which reached its peak in Kielce.