Book Reviews

Don’t be fooled by the incessant rain and your resurgent rheumatism, the summer literary festival season is upon us. The line-up at the Hay Festival is old news; the hotels of Edinburgh are preparing; and anticipation fills tea rooms from Warwick to St. Ives. The festival market is flooded, but there is one new festival to which I will draw your attention. It is in London, so you may be able to go to it at the drop of a hat. The team responsible for Way With Words (the very highly regarded show in Devon) are taking over the canopy of Opera Holland Park from 18th to 20th May. It

Nigeria is called ‘God’s own country’, and well it might be because no one else is on its side. Eliza Griswold, who has spent several years exploring religious divisions in the country’s interior, tells me that billions of oil dollars are embezzled each year, leaving the vast majority of the population to fend for themselves on a couple of dollars a day — that’s to say nothing of the millions of unemployed vagrants. The government oscillates between inertia and rapacity, so competing religious organisations have emerged in its place. But while religious communities provide legal services and schools, they can also incite sectarian violence as Nigerians contest their country’s dwindling

Classics were predicted to be one of the first things to fall at the feet of eBooks. Traditional booksellers — like me — have been in a perpetual cold sweat, wondering how to make up the lost revenue for around a third of our sales. Classics publishers must have been positively feverish with worry. The reason for the panic is thus: the great majority of classic works of literature are old — think Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, the Brontes — and, therefore, out of copyright. That means that anyone who has the time and inclination can publish Dickens online and nobody can come after them screaming copyright theft. So an eBook

Editor-in-chief of The Lady, judge of the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year Award, author of Shire Hell and a keen skier, Rachel Johnson is this week’s Shelf Lifer. She has eminently sensible suggestions for the English curriculum, reveals the guilty literary secrets of the Johnson dynasty and tells us about the downside of having a famous brother. 1) What are you reading at the moment? The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright, Frances Osborne’s Park Lane, just finished Philip Gould’s When I Die. Off the record – Fifty Shades of Grey. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Enid Blyton.

An elderly woman receives a phone call from a once eminent publishing house. The nice man on the phone tells her that his company is going to reprint her deceased father’s books. Wonderful news, she says — delighted that her old man is not quite dead and buried yet. Hope for us, she thinks. The publisher adds that they want a party to mark this important literary event, a proper knees up with champagne and canapés. She’s all for this. What generosity, she thinks. Then they say that want to make a small contribution to the party costs, maybe fifty quid. Traditional publishers are in extremis. Print continues to collapse; eBook sales

St. George’s Day, 23rd April, is Shakespeare’s birthday. You may get a present, if you are in the right place at the right time. World Book Night, the event where enthusiasts give a book to passers-by, will take place this evening. The organisers hope that 2.5 million copies of 25 books will be given away by 78,000 volunteers in the United States, Britain, Germany and Ireland. This massive undertaking is laudable, even though the selection of books is wholly unimaginative. Martina Cole, Audrey Niffenegger and Bernard Cornwell may not need more readers, but their best-selling pot-boilers might get more people reading. Like all the best things in life, one book leads to another. There are readings