Modern-minded Tories do things differently. They consult. They make sincere speeches in which words that traditional Conservatives used to avoid – “community”, “society”, “partnership”, “delivery” – are deployed. They present their plans in a cosily inclusive manner. But take away the presentational skills, and the actuality of those plans can sometimes seem strikingly Thatcherite.

The culture minister Ed Vaizey has this week launched “The Future Libraries Programme”. At first glance, it seems a sensible pre-emptive initiative at a time when the library service is under severe and growing pressure – there are predictions that up to 1,000 libraries are likely to close over the next year. Vaizey, unlike his predecessor Margaret Hodge, prides himself on being a champion of the library service.

His programme nominates 10 areas across the country where “new governance models” will be tested. In Suffolk, the running of libraries will be transferred to local community groups. In Hereford, they will be run on the same basis as charity shops. Supermarkets will be involved in Bradford. Vaizey particularly recommends the example of Hounslow, where a private company now runs the library service. In North Yorkshire, a pub called The George and Dragon is “delivering a library service and a pint” to the community.

Do you hear what I hear? It is the sound of a back door being quietly opened to the privatisation of the library service. The timing is perfect. Radical cuts, it will be argued, demand radical solutions. Significantly, Lewisham, one of the 10 areas chosen by Vaizey, has recently closed five of its libraries. Then there is Cameron’s favourite idea; what could be more Big Society than to encourage local people to look after their own libraries?

Beyond the warm message (”Libraries are natural partners and are delivering across a whole range of different areas at national and local level”), the 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act is being dismantled by stealth. Under that act, the library service is under the superintendence of the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. It is the responsibility of central government to take action if a local library authority defaults on its statutory obligations to the public.

All of that will become utterly irrelevant if those services are allowed to slip out of the public sector into the hands of private companies, voluntary or community bodies, or supermarkets. The Government, while claiming to be empowering local groups, will in fact be wriggling out of its own responsibilities.

No one who has seen the lifeline offered by libraries, particularly in deprived areas and particularly to children, will be in any doubt as to the extent of this betrayal. Public libraries are not a luxury, a social add-on, but a necessity. They are never more desperately needed than in times of economic hardship.

Pass the running of them over to private enterprise, local bodies or charities – or to a fashionable muddle of all three – and the effect will be to dismantle it beyond repair. Indeed, the areas where books and reading are most desperately needed are precisely those where communities are enfeebled and private companies are uninterested.

A country’s public library service is a sure indicator of how highly it values its citizens, its children and its future. There may well be a place for the new localism around the outer fringes of the service – the library is a focus of local life, after all – but, if the Government allows it to slip into decline in the hollow name of community, Ed Vaizey’s promises and his boss’s Big Society will be exposed as a heartless sham.

The Campaign for the Book is fighting on behalf of Britain’s beleaguered library service. The campaign’s Facebook page is here.

Independent, Friday, 20 August 2010

The idea emerges between the lines of a policy statement just issued by the Rural Coalition, a new body which speaks for a number of influential public and voluntary organisations including the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the Local Government Association. When it comes to economic hardship and budget cuts, the coalition argues, people who live in the country will take the hardest hit.

The increasing cost of transport and the reduction in bus routes will affect anyone who has to travel to shop, work or even post a parcel. The job market within the rural economy is more fragile than ever. Now, according to the chairman of the Rural Coalition, Lord Taylor, the Government’s new Community Right to Build programme is likely to provide a “do-or-die” moment for villages.

The requirement that at least 80 per cent of all local residents should approve the building of houses will create, says Lord Taylor, “not a right to build, but a right to block for a very small number of ‘Nimbys’.” It will divide communities. Instead, the important planning decisions should be made by the elected members of a parish council.

It is a sensible point, badly made. Behind the lazy, journalistic reference to Nimbys lies the awkward reality that those who care most about their communal back yard, campaigning against the closure of a post office or library, who pick up litter, who report farmers who grub up hedges – these are precisely the people on whom David Cameron’s Big Society idea will depend. Almost invariably, the true Nimby is simply someone who cares about the community in which he or she resides and is prepared to do something about it.

In fact, it is not the selfishness of the few which will cause problems for the Community Right to Build scheme but a more general apathy. In the past, it has been difficult to prevent a cycle of social indifference being repeated generation after generation.

The average parish council is a perfect representation of that lack of involvement and interest. An elected body which has considerable powers over the way a neighbourhood is run, it is still something of a joke. Those who serve on it are thought to be – and indeed very often are – worthy, retired folk keen to do some community- minded good works in their twilight years.

If the Government truly wishes to unleash what it calls localism, its first step should be to enliven and invigorate parish councils. They have an image problem, being more closely (and wrongly) associated with the church or some vague voluntary body than being seen as part of local democracy. There needs to be more competition for places; at the moment there are so few candidates it is almost impossible not to be elected. The idea that councillors should be above the business of politics now looks rather odd, as does the casual co-option of an unelected replacement councillor if one happens to stand down between elections.

The Rural Coalition is right to warn of stagnation in villages, making the countryside, in Lord Taylor’s words, “part dormitory, part theme park and part retirement home”, but it is also under-estimating the energy and resourcefulness of those who have learned to expect little from central government.

Spreading the word of community involvement, David Cameron may have hit upon an idea whose time has come. Away from the big cities, there are signs people are beginning to appreciate the satisfaction of independence from government, of taking action rather than complaining. Where the Big Society meets the village hall, something interesting is happening. Having been marginal for too long in the political life of the nation, those who live in the countryside may be about to lead the way.

These dragons may need slaying

There has always been something distinctly whiffy about the TV programme Dragons’ Den. It is not just that the set-up is unpleasant: a sweating member of the public with a business idea is sneeringly interrogated by a panel of sleek, smug millionaires whose brief seems to be to follow the humiliation-and-humour formula of reality shows. The financial basis of the programme seems more than a little ambiguous, too.

The BBC pays its well-heeled pundits to consider invitations to invest their own money in projects pitched to them. Much emphasis is put on the fact that the millionaires are risking their own capital. The programme is punctuated by loving, lingering shots of banknotes. If the investments make the experts more millions, we can safely assume not a single a penny is paid to the BBC which brokered it in the first place.

If, on the other hand, things go awry after the cameras have been switched off, the situation seems even murkier. A woman whose Dragons’ Den experience led to conflict, misery and a nervous breakdown has been telling her story. An £80,000 “investment” turned out to be loan. There were endless problems in receiving the money. The “dragons” who had bought into the company sent in an invoice for time spent on it. A contract gave one of the investors a casting vote on all decisions. “I felt like a piece of raw meat, and that the vultures were all attacking me,” she has said.

The BBC, predictably, has said the negotiations which took place after the programme were outside its remit. It seems that, just because it introduced those involved to one another and made a successful programme out of a deal which turned out to be rather less than it seemed, there is absolutely no reason for it to bear the slightest responsibility for what happened later.

For further reading: Commission for Rural Communities, http://ruralcommunities.gov.uk

 Independent, Tuesday, 17 August 2010

Oddly, because I was born on a farm and take an interest in rural matters, I have a troubled relationship with farmers.

Every few days, while enjoying looking at the birds and the trees on a country lane, I get harangued by the local farmer or his gamekeeper. For me, walking down a lane enjoying the blessings of nature is part of normal country life; for them it is trespassing. They are as hysterically protective of their 5000 acres of East Anglian landscape as the most prissy suburbanite of the lawn in front of his house.

Why are  so many farmers hostile towards other people who live in the countryside? Is it because they believe themselves to be the unappointed guardians of the landscape? If that is the case, why  do so many of them do their damnedest to mess it up?

Recently, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England came up with a gloomy statistic: between 1998 and 2007, six per cent of our natural hedgerow was lost.

What is peculiarly depressing about this report is that the great degradation of hedgerows in the 1970s and 1980s was known to have contributed to the dramatic decline of wildlife – insects, birds and mammals. Considerable EU subsidies have been paid to encourage farmers to look after the environment. In spite of all that, an astonishing 16,000 miles of hedgerow were lost in that decade. While not all  were grubbed up by farmers, they doubtless played their part.

Of course, I do have farmer friends. One recently told me of a man who farmed arable and grazing land and who had such  dislike of dogs that, if he saw one on his land, he would shoot on sight. He gave my friend a tip: always carry some sheep’s wool in your pocket.

Why?

It provided an alibi. After he had shot the dog, the farmer would put some wool between the animal’s teeth, rather like a dodgy copper planting drugs. Nobody, after all, could complain if he protected his livestock from a sheep-worrier.

My farmer friend rather approved of this approach. Bloody dogs are a nuisance, he said.

To me, it was just a typical story from the land. Farmers like to think of themselves as sturdy outsiders with a rough, tough attitude to the conventional world of townies and do-gooding environmentalists but, when it suits them, they play the establishment game ,  cheerfully banking their hand-outs from the state.

Perhaps it is time they recognised that with these subsidies – not to mention, the privilege of owning land   -  comes responsibility.

Yet still these people are missing a trick. Only one of them, David Blunkett, has admitted to undergoing the ultimate British holiday experience, and he admitted defeat after 24 hours. “One soggy night under canvas and why I hate camping” was the headline of an article he wrote a few days later.

There may be one or two security problems but, if the Prime Minister wishes to promote tourism at home, he should try camping. Nothing is so purely British, offering an almost unlimited potential for embarrassment, discomfort and an edgy proximity to nature. A good camping holiday (or even a bad one) will be remembered long after cushier breaks have faded from the memory, but a few basic rules should always be borne in mind.

You will need the right campsite. Poor old Blunkett’s night of horror was on a site where drunkards stumbled noisily back to their tents at 3am. Such behaviour would be unthinkable on a proper site, preferably run on gentle, bourgeois lines. There silence will descend at 10pm, apart from the sound of murmured conversation around a fire and perhaps the plucking of a guitar playing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”.

My favoured campsite in Cornwall is reassuringly middle-class. Carrying one’s bowl of washing up through the site, one picks up conversation (the Big Society, fringe theatre, McEwan’s new novel, BBC4) in which one likes to take part, and occasionally does. It is an intense and intimate experience in communal living. Every angry word muttered at a child, every note of family discord, every fart and burp, is shared with strangers, so that soon a weird sort of domestic openness – almost French in its lack of embarrassment – sets in.

Camping is not the means to have a holiday; it is the holiday. Other activities are there merely to fill in the few small gaps in the daily routine spent doing things which, back in civilisation, are taken for granted – cooking, washing up, keeping things cool (or hot), shaving, staying dry. It is not restful but, like skiing, this round of mindless activity offers a sort of therapy of busyness.

Another general rule: there will be no sex. There should be lots of it – you are on holiday, in the wilds, at one with nature – but, for all but the most exhibitionist, the proximity of other families will act as a powerful detumescent. If you hear heavy breathing beyond your tent, it will almost certainly be a hedgehog.

You become an expert in cloud formations. Weather is important on all holidays; when you camp, it will become an obsession. Every ray of sunshine will feel like a blessing from the gods. Rain will not just be mildly annoying – it will be a catastrophe, sending thousands of other miserable campers to the nearest stately home where they will eat expensive cream teas while trying not to think of how miserable they feel. As a result, much of the day will be spent gazing upwards and discussing whether a small patch of blue in the grey canopy is moving towards or away from you.

After a couple of days, you will find you have changed. Private daily routines, normally undiscussed, become a regular subject of conversation. The children turn feral, making inappropriate friendships and discovering startling information from other tents. Returning home, you will appreciate the kettle, the hot tap, the walls, the bed and, above all, the bath as never before. You have seen quite enough of the lives of others to know that your own is really not so bad. What other holiday could offer all that

Independent, Friday, 13 August 2010

Vaizey is now the Mr Big of libraries in the government, and his department has recently released a document called “The Future Libraries Programme”. Writing in the Independent last week, I suggested that one did not have to look too far into what was being proposed to see that, behind the warm words about the Big Society, a stealthy privatisation of the library service was being considered.

There was a lively exchange on the Independent message-board, one thread of which completely mystified me. The article had been written as if the internet had never been invented, complained one reader. The computer revolution was – altogether now – the elephant in the room.

Weird. In a piece on libraries I could indeed have mentioned what another reader called “Google and all his cohorts”. I could also have explored the DVD versus books question, whether quietness is commendable in libraries, the coffee shop debate, how populist library books should be, the decline in book stock, censorship of children’s titles, whether authors should be paid for visits, etc etc. A whole herd of elephants are in the library.

In my 700 word piece, I simply made the point that the government may be trying to wriggle out of its responsibilities to publicly available learning and reading, and that this was a serious matter.

Why the obsession with Google and his cohorts? Does every argument have to revolve around the new technology? If anything, the great computer revolution makes the availability of books, particularly to children and particularly in economically deprived areas, more important than ever.

He is almost right, but has carefully omitted three key words: “in the wild”. It is indeed a truly moving and awe-inspiring experience to see these extraordinary creatures in their natural habitat. Looking at them in a zoo is as different as it could possibly be. It makes one faintly ashamed to be a human being.

The eye of a gorilla is expressive. Gorillas in the wild who’ve been habituated to human presence will glance at them with a patient, slightly superior air. Those in captivity express only the misery of boredom. Apart from the money-making business of providing entertainment for humans, there are two arguments for this cruelty, and both are feeble. One is that breeding in captivity has a conservation purpose for endangered mountain and lowland gorillas.

The truth is that no gorilla used to life in captivity can be introduced into the wild. Significantly, the gorillas kept in London Zoo have reproduced only once over the past 22 years. What we are essentially doing is producing a sub-species, bred exclusively for human amusement. Some would say extinction would be preferable. London Zoo boasts that 10 per cent of the £5.3m budget for its Gorilla Kingdom goes towards conservation on the ground. In other words, nine-tenths of their cash goes towards imprisoned rather than wild gorillas.

The real message provided to visitors by places like Gorilla Kingdom is simple, reassuring and profoundly harmful: even the most magnificent of animals exist for the diversion of our own superior species.

Independent, Tuesday, 10 August 2010

This weekend the England manager, Fabio Capello, was interviewed and, according to the papers, expressed regret (make that “shame”) for the World Cup failure (make that “disgrace”) of himself and his players (make that “the team that broke a nation’s heart”). Elsewhere, on an altogether humbler scale, there was the inevitable sex story. The gangly Spurs striker Peter Crouch’s moment of shame occurred when it was claimed in a Sunday paper he had enjoyed a quick olé, not once but twice (back of a taxi, then a hotel room) with a Spanish prostitute while at a stag party in Madrid.

Those who moan about the moral decline of football like to complain about those who play it professionally. On the pitch, the modern player is said to be dishonest, petulant and either not committed enough or too committed. Off it, he is greedier, more pampered, vainer and randier than his noble forbears.

In fact, given the celebrity madness and the money which is now part of Premier League football, it is odd that players have not changed more. They have always had egos, been unreliable and moody, have been drunk at the wrong times, and have found themselves in bed with the wrong women. They are young, well off, fit and the object of attention from those who can offer fun and temptation; what else would you expect?

On the other hand, the effect of this new, glossy, jetset style of football on those who watch it and comment on it has been disastrous. The modern game has brought out the very worst in our national character.

We habitually delude ourselves, for example, that our national team is better than it is, and then rage pathetically when that absurd optimism is confounded, searching angrily for someone to blame. Consistent with previous setbacks, the England team’s performance in the World Cup this summer was a disappointment, an under-performance, but only a nation whose collective brain has been addled by over-expectation would attach the word “shame” to it.

Shrewdly, Capello has played the media game, delivering the obligatory apology, but, like his predecessor, he must quietly wonder to himself at the oddness, the proneness to emotional hysteria, of the nation whose team he now manages. Much of the emotionally dysfunctional attitude towards the players themselves comes from the same source – envy. Peter Crouch is hardly the first young Englishman to have misbehaved, even twice, in a sozzled moment at a stag party, and yet, according to the stern moralists of the media (who of course would never dream of doing such a thing), he deserves the kind of sanctimonious scolding in which the British press specialises.

Sex-and-football stories are published to titillate sexually frustrated readers, but that hardly explains or excuses the level of moral disapproval. Few of us, given the opportunities on offer to Premier League footballers, would reach for the smelling-salts and run away. Once one remembers that jealousy, that most familiar and under-estimated of vices, is behind much of what is written and spoken about football, then the emotion and the nastiness become easier to understand.

It is a sport. When a team loses, even unexpectedly, it is not a national scandal or a matter for shame. Those who play it are humans; it is absurd to expect them to behave like members of the Synod of the Church of England. In English football, it is not the managers and the players who are on a terrible slide into moral decay. The problem is with those who watch them, torn between adoration and envy, loyalty and resentment.

 Independent, Tuesday, 10 August 2010

The indicator of these various declines and disappointments tends to be the same: the career of Sir Jonathan Miller. For some time, he has been bemoaning the fact that the calls to direct never come. “I do get pushed down, pushed down particularly in these years when I get asked less and less to do things,” he said in an Independent interview last year. “I find that inconsistent with my own estimation.”

Miller’s most ardent admirer, in fact, would struggle to match his own estimation. By allowing himself to be diverted from neuroscience, he had wasted “a brilliant mind”, he told Desert Island Discs. Some of the non-medical work he has subsequently done has been “as deep as you can get”. Even a gently amusing Channel Five documentary about his scrap-yard sculptures had moments of casual boastfulness.

There are reasons for his professional setbacks, according to the Miller version. Private Eye has had a vendetta against him. There is an in-built national snobbery towards anyone who is talented in different areas. His critics, journalists in particular, have failed to work on the same level of thought as he is.

Because Sir Jonathan has brought originality and often brilliance to his work, these views have generally been taken seriously. Perhaps, though, the moment has come to look at the life and opinions of Sir Jonathan Miller in a different way: as a terrible warning, a grim model of the unhappiness that can happen when a person of supreme gifts – a forensic intelligence, a wild imagination, wit and presence – becomes inward-looking, defensive and self-pitying. The truly creative are rarely content – someone once said that the best writing is done in a mood of low-grade depression – but there is nothing low-grade about Sir Jonathan’s gloom, at least as expressed in his public persona.

Past achievements, notably the superbly funny sketches of the Beyond the Fringe period, are either dismissed with distaste or are held up as towering achievements that have been misunderstood or under-estimated by lesser beings.

There is something odd and melancholy about all this. Sir Jonathan’s achievements over the past 50 years are real and enduring. His jeremiads against British society and culture have been invigorating and necessary. In the past, one could always depend on him to come up with an awkward, unpredictable insight whenever he was interviewed. For years, I accepted his beleaguered view of critics. The British, after all, have an age-old distrust of flashy intellect.

I changed my mind when I had a telephone conversation with Sir Jonathan while writing a biography of Willie Donaldson, who, in his days as a producer, had brought Beyond the Fringe from the Edinburgh Festival to London. Willie, although he had not seen Jonathan Miller for years, revered his seriousness: compared to someone like himself (or Peter Cook), Miller was a grown-up.

The respect, I quickly discovered, was not reciprocated. Four and a half decades on, the mere mention of Willie’s name produced something of an eruption from Sir Jonathan. Donaldson had represented the worst of the 1960s. He had cheated them of money (a story told by Willie with wild and typically self-lacerating exaggeration). Sir Jonathan sneered at Willie’s writings, none of which he had read.

At the time, I felt that the bollocking I had received on behalf of the shade of Willie Donaldson was a touch unfair. Willie had recently died alone and in penury; his ferocious critic was a knight of the realm and was soon to be the subject of a biography written by Kate Bassett (scheduled for publication in 2007 but still, mysteriously, unpublished).

Now I wonder whether they represented two sides of the same coin. One had the lowest opinion of himself, the other the highest. One worked hard to be excluded from the good opinion of the Establishment; the other longed to be embraced by it. Sir Jonathan, comparing himself to others in the Cambridge group of intellectuals who called themselves “the Apostles”, feared that, by working in the theatre, he would be seen as a “vulgar drop-out”; the phrase is one which Willie would gleefully have bestowed upon himself.

The restless discontent of a man of achievement should not be wasted. What can be learnt from this life by a Jonathan Miller of the future, perhaps even now making people laugh at the Edinburgh Fringe while wondering whether he should be doing something more serious?

Do not be hung up on the past. Your greatest triumph, your most shattering disappointment, matters less than what is in the present and the future. The truth is that your contemporaries – for example, the great and good men of the Apostles – may be more solemn and respectable than you are but they are not necessarily leading more worthwhile lives.

Enjoy your successes. Take at least a little pleasure in what you have done or are still doing. No one engaged in creative work feels as appreciated as he should be, but who, in the end, really cares? It is the work that matters. Whingeing about the way it was received makes you, not your critics, seem small and silly.

There are other little lessons. It can get lonely up on Mount Olympus; dismissing others (even journalists) as being intellectually inferior and therefore a waste of time is simply stupid. Not all critics are morons; even the vulgar can be interesting. To be dissatisfied with a life so rich in experience and success is a sort of self-betrayal. By showing a touch of generosity to the outside world, particularly as your grow older, you might just possibly make your world a warmer, more enjoyable place.

Independent, Friday, 6 August 2010

A book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, written by a couple of high-flying experts in entrepreneurialism, is about to be published. Next year a competing volume, Professor Barry Barnes’s Wisdom from the Grateful Dead, will be in the shops. Other works on the general theme of making bread from the Dead are on their way.

According to the business experts, the way Jerry Garcia and his band related to their audience from the late 1960s onwards has influenced Apple, Google and others. The Grateful Dead had what Barnes calls “dynamic synchronicity”. There was no obvious leader. In order to prove its freedom from financial greed, the band allowed itself to be ripped off now and then.

In the same spirit, there was no ban on taping at concerts, nor – at least until straight lawyers put a stop to it – was there any control of merchandising. By offering their followers those freedoms while ensuring that every public performance was a new and largely improvised experience, they established fierce loyalty among the Deadheads. Today’s breadhead business leaders would like some of that magic to work on their consumers. Or so the argument goes. To the non-entrepreneur, there is little sign of the Grateful Dead’s zonked-out altruism in today’s commercial world. In fact, without too much effort, one could probably manage to produce a whole library of inspirational business guides from 1960’s pop music – Creating New Markets The Dave Clark Five Way would be jostling for space in the bookshops with The Key Management Skills of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.

There is, it seems, a desperate hunger among business types for some code that will help them make more money. In recent years, an addiction to metaphor has been in evidence – business only understands how it works through the prism of an entirely different world. Before writers raided the hippie archive, there were management manuals based on Greek mythology, on classical history, on war.

Next it will be the turn of the natural world. Just as historically based business guides offer the comfort of the past, so wildlife can be seen as a model for management methods which are tough yet beneficial, providing rewards for the strongest while ensuring the survival of the species as a whole. This week a collection of lessons from nature will be published under the title Smart Swarms. According to the book’s author, Peter Miller, the way certain insects, birds, mammals and fish interact with one another can help businesses survive and prosper. Bees, for example, reveal the importance of seeking diversity within a team. When a bees’ nest becomes too large, members of the colony search the neighbourhood for another suitable site. They return to the nest, perform a “dance”. Those with the best dance will persuade the other bees to follow them. Companies could learn from the dancing thing, apparently.

Ants provide another lesson. For each task, precisely the right number of ants is involved, providing a model of efficiency. What the ants are telling us, in their own little way, is that bureaucracy is a bad thing. There are more lessons from termites (on handling the climate), reindeer (on sticking together as a herd) and fish (turning together at the same time).

It all sounds interesting enough but, as with the Deadheads, the application to the business world seems, shall we say, a little stretched. With a bit of ingenuity, one can find management lessons almost anywhere. I could argue without too much difficulty that the great unwritten management guide is The Wisdom of Chickens: Business Lessons from the Henhouse.

Everything that a modern manager needs to know can be learned from poultry, the book would reveal. A good manager will establish his authority with cockerel-like efficiency, crowing regularly, herding his staff together occasionally with showy little gestures, looking out for predators, and offering favours briskly and on an equal basis to all members of staff. The Wisdom of Chickens would provide an answer to the tricky question of maternity leave. As soon as a member of staff becomes broody, she should be ignored, apart from being sat on now and then. When she returns to the flock, she should be given a hard time for a day or so until she has settled back in. When the profitable world of business books tires of Jerry Garcia, termites and reindeer, it will the moment for chicken management to rule the roost.

Why is such a twerp taken to be interesting?

Anyone wishing to make the case against the English obsession with social class can do so in two words: Lord Bath. The owner of a hereditary title, the family seat of Longleat and an estimated wealth of £157m, Bath was born with certain advantages. He has used his money to write light, pointless novels, to daub rude pictures on the ceiling of his house and have a rackety private life. He goes about in studiously zany clothes, makes silly remarks about his “wifelets” and wears his hair in a pigtail.

There is nothing wrong in being a twerp, or even spending inherited wealth on your twerpish pursuits. What is truly bewildering, and reveals how deeply a cringing class-consciousness is part of the English character, is that this very ordinary man is taken seriously. He appears on chat shows, is mentioned in gossip columns. Now, unbelievably, Nesta Wyn Ellis has researched and written a biography, to be published this autumn. I hope she was well paid for her efforts. A man is deemed to be interesting and newsworthy simply because he is mildly dotty and was born with a title. So much for the classless society.

For further reading: ‘Smart Swarms : Using Animal Behaviour to Organise Our World’, by Peter Miller (Collins)

Blog link: http://www.webinknow.com/

Independent. Tuesday, 3 August 2010

He was, admittedly, such a brilliant editor that he has been a touchstone of quality and seriousness for those in the books business for over 60 years (“He’s not exactly Max Perkins, is he?” one author might say to another when asked about an editor).

As Scott Berg describes in his brilliant biography, Perkins did all the things a publisher should do, but rarely does. He was a brilliant judge of talent, editing among others, Thomas Wolfe, Erskine Caldwell, Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald.  He had a good eye and a flawless sense of structure. He helped his authors through personal crises. He even lent them money.

On the other hand, he was a publisher, and the books business has stubbornly resisted all attempts by cinema or TV to make it seem interesting. Apart from the pervy character played by Frank Finlay in the 1970s TV serial Bouquet of Barbed Wire, there have been few major screen protagonists  who worked in books. In both film and television, publishers tend to be bit-part players, small cogs in the machinery of a plot – eccentric or dull, urbane or nerdish, but never heroic.

Perhaps that is all about to change and producers will be looking to the books business for new storylines. The lunches with agents! The tricky negotiations over digital rights! The furtive bunk-ups during sales conferences! The power-point presentations to Waterstones!

I can hardly wait.