The most influential authors, retailers, critics, agents, publishers, broadcasters and poets were all listed in The Guardian Book 100 this weekend. First prize went to the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos who – in addition to diversifying from books to groceries – is currently setting up Blue Origin, a company which offers space travel to the general public. Author JK Rowling; Google CEO, Larry Page; Waterstone’s last chance, the Daunt/Mamut team and Chief Executive of Hachette UK, Tim Hely Hutchinson, followed close behind. Richard & Judy continue to slip down the rankings while Stieg Laarson won’t let death get in the way; his ghost checked in at number 18.
Charles Dickens also manages to extend his influence beyond the grave. The Boz is back in town. As part of the celebration of his bicentenary, the Guardian breathed life into the birthday boy with a podcast. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst talked about the difficulties of getting to grips with the author in The Telegraph:
Few people lead as many lives as Dickens, who enjoyed coining extra nicknames for himself, including “The Sparkler of Albion”, “Revolver” and “The Inimitable”, and was keen to push his reputation in as many directions as possible. Novelist, playwright, actor, social campaigner, journalist, editor, philanthropist, amateur conjurer, celebrity – trying to pin him down is like putting your thumb on a blob of mercury.
But in 2012, according to the Sunday Times’ critic Bryan Appleyard, everyone is going to give it a jolly good try; Claire Tomalin’s eagerly awaited biography is out next week, the BBC have two series in the pipeline, the BFI have a season planned and Simon Callow is going to tell us at length about Dicken’s love for theatre. If that weren’t enough, you could also jet off to California: “The week-long Dickens Universe is a kind of immersive summer camp in which one book is studied — Bleak House next year — and there is a general air of Dickensian jollity”.
Jollity also seems to be code of practice at Private Eye. Adam Macqueen (who joined in 1997 on work experience and never left) relays the office’s “slightly anarchic and bohemian spirit” in his book Private Eye: The First 50 Years, an A-Z. Roland White in the Sunday Times picked out this – slightly torturous if highly effective – classic(al) pun:
One of the most effective uses of a pun in Private Eye occurred during the Profumo scandal of 1963. Though gossip about the affair between war minister John Profumo and call girl Christine Keeler, who had met under the auspicies orgy-organiser Stephen Ward at Lord Astor’s country estate, were rife, the national newspapers initially found it difficult to report the story. But when Private Eye included in a cartoon about Harold Macmillan the telling phrase ‘Per Wardua Ad Astor’ (a pun on ‘per ardua ad astra’), Ward assumed incorrectly that they knew the whole scandal and came to the offices ‘to put my side of the story’.
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