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Several of our Australian readers have alerted us to a front page story in The Sydney Morning Herald, a personal memoir entitled, "When I was Russell Crowe's stooge," written by Jack Marx, a journalist Crowe approached to become a one-man PR machine for his thoroughly unheralded rock band. It's difficult to really choose just one of the many anecdotes that paint Crowe, unsurprisingly, as a moody, childish brat. We'll limit ourselves to Marx's inside view of the events following Crowe's legendary New York hotel phone-throwing incident:

He was in a sombre mood - he had been walking around, he said, with a dartboard on his butt and the world had taken aim. The press had been unfair. So too, he said, had the concierge, who had shown "no intention of being cool about this". It had been humiliating, said Russell, to have had to show remorse in public, when all he was truly sorry about was the fact that he was in so much trouble.

The concierge had said: "Yeah, yeah, whatever" - words, according to Crowe, that constitute the "lowest insult" one can deliver, tantamount to "you are nothing to me, you do not matter". And if you're going to utter those words to another man in these quick-tempered times, said Crowe, you'd better be prepared to put up your dukes.

Or, in the case of the unlucky concierge, be prepared to catch a malfunctioning telephone with your face.