In Brief: Lady T snapped by Testino

Lady Thatcher, 82, has posed for a series of photographs in Vogue magazine by Mario Testino who has tried – with some success – to soften the Iron Lady’s image. Lady T tells the magazine that, despite suffering a series of minor strokes, she is still a regular at the House of Lords, but doesn’t speak any longer: "I've had a lifetime of speaking. I don’t need to now"... Marilyn Monroe obsessives have the chance to bid on a rare slice of arcania - two reels of silent, eight-millimetre colour film entitled On Set With The Misfits - taken on the set of her final movie which co-starred starring Clark Gable; the 1962 film is expected to fetch more than £1m at auction in Las Vegas... Theatrical titans Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are to co-star in a new West End revival of Samuel Beckett's 1955 classic Waiting for Godot, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket next year... Christian Dior, the Paris fashion house, have dropped Sharon Stone from all their Chinese advertising after her remarks about the Sichuan earthquake, which she said might have been retribution for China's policies in Tibet... Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the world's third richest man, has surprised his peers by buying a 3.2 per cent stake in a UK carpeting company, Carpetright, owned by fellow philanthropist Lord Harris of Peckham; it cost Gates £15m - small change for a man that could have purchased the entire company 50 times over...