THERE'S a small area in this summer show of Nottingham's great, good, famous and not quite so famous where the public are asked to name people who they think should have been included, but weren't.

And to be honest, as of late last week, the nominations were pretty poor: in fact, the only candidate so named who is actually not in the show is Robert Lindsay, and he's from Ilkeston.

Mind you, being from Ilkeston perhaps shouldn't have barred the actor from Portrait Of The City since the curators have decided that an oil painting of Gladstone (who was MP for Newark) and a small woodcut of Henry VIII's anti-Papal advisor Thomas Cranmer (from Aslockton) have merited inclusion.

This geographical spread suggests that getting a place in the show had much to do with the ready availability of portraits rather than a strict association with Nottingham itself.

How, for example, does an oil painting of the relatively unknown Castle director Clement Fothergill Pitman deserve inclusion when the late author and Booker Prize winner Stanley Middleton doesn't?

Why does David Love, who wrote doggerel verse in the 18th and 19th centuries, get a place when The Dam Busters composer Eric Coates doesn't? Or Dr John Thoroton, who wrote the first county history? Or prize-winning (and very much alive) author Jon McGregor? Or even, gasp, former education secretary Ed Balls, who attended Nottingham High School for Boys?

The point is, you could mount a second exhibition of people who have been left out. But perhaps that is unfair to the curators, who have spread their net to private owners, the National Portrait Gallery and the Castle's own considerable collections to create this always interesting exhibition of around 100 local personalities.

It seems to be loosely arranged around themes such as sport, literature, acting and so on.

In sport, two large, moody, black and white photographs of boxer Carl Froch are dominant, shadowing the strangely subdued section on Brian Clough, who is remembered by a small maquette of the city centre statue and a video interview.

And like Froch and Clough, a few other favoured folks benefit from more than one portrait here.

The late Alan Sillitoe, for example, gets four photographs including one of the finest images in the entire exhibition, Dom Henry's shot of the late-model Sillitoe in black leather waistcoat and trenchcoat, festooned with various bags and straps.

Henry's jokily pugilistic portrait of chef Sat Bains, armed with a meat cleaver, greets viewers at the entrance. By contrast, the opener in room two is James Lloyd's slightly mystifying portrait of Paul Smith, armed with a roll of green damask. Is Smith supposed to look determined or is he just grumpy? Like Paul Smith, many of the personalities and paintings in the show will not be surprising.

The fiery upright of Salvation Army founder William Booth is well known, as is the seated portrait of Jesse Boot.

However, loans by the National Portrait Gallery have provided some nice surprises. These include a fine self-portrait by the painter Harold Knight and a striking 1936 black and white photograph of his wife Dame Laura Knight by the Bassano studio.

Separately, illustrator Jon Burgerman's animated self-portrait, on a Sony digital player, is a nice touch too.

Finally, it is worth saying that an area here could have been set aside for portraits of Nottingham eccentrics. You'd have to put Benjamin Mayo, the "Old General", in this section since he was "often seen drilling small boys in the town centre, dressed in a red military coat and later a military cap".

Oil painting or not, social services would be on top of that one straight away now.