If you read one history this holiday Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar by Tom Holland (Little, Brown) R385Riveting account of history's most dysfunctional family. The violence that followed the republic's collapse was of such ferocity that Augustus's relatively benign dictatorship came as a relief. For a brief moment. Then came his successors, all of whom, from Tiberius to Nero, offer up a shocking smorgasbord of psychopathic cruelty, incest, paedophilia, matricide, fratricide, assassination and bloody intrigue.The issueFurther to our round-up of year-end celebrity biographies comes the holiday's grandest stocking stuffer - the second volume of James Kaplan's impressive work on Frank Sinatra. And, at almost 1000 pages, it's going to have to be a fairly large stocking, too. In 2010's Frank: The Voice, Kaplan dealt with the singer's rise to fame, his subsequent failures, and his re-invention as a film star.Sinatra: The Chairman (Sphere) continues the story the day after Ol' Blue Eyes picked up an Academy Award in 1954 for his role in From Here to Eternity. His life from now on was incredibly hectic. Apart from the music he recorded with the arranger Nelson Riddle, he was shooting four or five (mainly rubbish) films a year and doing TV show and nightclub appearances. He also started his own record label, Reprise, while juggling other business interests.And, of course, there were all the women; while Sinatra constantly yearned for ex-wife Ava Gardner, his other romantic encounters, either with showgirls or such luminaries as Lauren Bacall and Juliet Prowse, were all short-lived.Kaplan writes lovingly about Sinatra's music but pulls no punches when it comes to revealing his arrogant hoodlum side - that period of his life, according to the critic Victoria Segal, "that belongs in James Ellroy novels, the darkly mythologised, black ops version of the American Dream, where John F and Bobby Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and the mobster Sam Giancana all weave in and out of each others' lives, Sinatra the common thread". The Rat Pack "super-cool" is also given short shrift. Kaplan suggests the whole Las Vegas gang thing was "a fleeting moment of stage magic dragged out into parody, a relic of pre-feminist manhood".And speaking of parody, his reaction to the 1960s and the threat of rock 'n' roll revealed a true dinosaur. He swallowed his pride and did TV work with Elvis Presley, but he wanted nothing to do with the Beatles - despite his youth-chasing third marriage to Mia Farrow, a flower child 30 years his junior. Age was not a fight he was going to win.The bottom line"It is not common knowledge but Spooner/When he dined at a restaurant in Poona/Ordered one khev samani/A bamb liryani/Dana chal and a hot bicken chuna." - A Lion Was Learning to Ski by Ranjit Bolt (Gibson Square)..