Books

The secret British history of South America
In Small Earthquakes, Shafik Meghji uncovers Britain’s forgotten connections with Latin America, from Welsh tea rooms to red phone boxes

Minha Tresavo (so, avo, grandfather, tres, great great grand, so my great great grandfather) is buried up at La Oroya in Peru. There’s a little Anglican church and an English graveyard. The railways of South America were built by the British, largely enough, he was one of the engineers on the suspension bridge there.

And then Mexico still makes pasties, brought over by the Cornish tin miners. They were, at the time, the world’s finest hard rock miners and so were hired all around….

Dame Emma Thompson has said that sex should be recommended by the NHS.

The Academy Award-winning actress explained sex is “so good for you” as she also revealed her friends had started to hire escorts after realising how integral it was to their health and wellbeing.”

“You need sex because it’s part of our health plan, if you like,” Dame Emma said, adding: “It should really be on the NHS. It should. It’s so good for you.”

She added: “We need to learn about our own response to: ‘What if when you’re unwell, you can’t make connections, but you need sex?’”

Dame Emma, 66, speaking at a screening of her 2022 film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, also called for the stigma around the topic of sex workers to be addressed.

The film, which sees the actress portray a retired schoolteacher who hires a young sex worker, had inspired her friends, MailOnline reported.

Remarkable how her views are so directly aligned with the story of the movie, eh? Just astonishing.

There’s a very good Alan Coren column from back in the day on this. Sex on the NHS. Very funny. Think it’s in the Omnibus – which is, of course, a book everyone should have. If you don’t you must get it.

Writing and publishing in the UK is in crisis, with a growing marginalisation of working-class people whose stories and experiences are not being heard, the backers of a new literary magazine and platform have argued.

So, fire every middle class publisher and agent in the country. Job done.

Go-to author on White House reverses take on Biden and slams former president
Chris Whipple’s third book, Uncharted, hits Biden and aides like a bludgeon, with key sources who speak on the record

At the time of the last book there was money to be made by claiming Biden was really sharp, energetic and raring to go for a second term.

Today there’s money to be made by explaining that he wasn’t.

You know, American politics, White House, “follow the money”?

The James Bond franchise will no longer be controlled by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, its long-time custodians, after they handed creative control to Amazon.

Members of the Broccoli family have controlled the franchise since the first 007 film, Dr No, in 1962. Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman bought the rights to Ian Fleming’s spy novels in 1961 and set up the British studio Eon Productions, in London.

But on Thursday, the Broccoli family and Amazon MGM Studios said they had “formed a new joint venture to house the James Bond intellectual property rights, and those parties will remain co-owners of the franchise”.

A statement added: “Under the terms of the new venture, Amazon MGM Studios will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise following closing of the transaction.”

And it’s going to be worse than the recent films, is it?

the way in which electoral systems devalue the votes of people who live in densely populated areas.

Constituencies are deliberately weighted by total population size.

But, then, Ash Sarkar, right?

Kate Mosse: I wrote a global smash hit but male authors are taken more seriously
As Labyrinth turns 20, the author reveals what its success means to her – and why female writers are still being discriminated against

Right, OK.

A furiously paced female-fronted time-slip adventure that splices the persecution of the 12th-century Cathars by the Catholic North with the legends of the Holy Grail, it has now sold more than 10 million copies in 41 countries.

Bestselling chick lit is still chick lit, no?

As to this:

The next frontier, she says, is non-fiction. Last year she launched a sister prize, The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, with the inaugural winner Naomi Klein for Doppelganger, a memoir about shifting political allegiances in the age of big tech.

That’s really edgy and norm-defying. no?

As I sometimes do, just dipped into a Pratchett last night. I know the plots well enough, it’s just a joy to see how he incorporates some of the jokes again. One of which is how the Post Office has stopped putting mongeese (mongooses?) into the post boxes. They now agree that that was a bit of an overreaction. But they were put there for good reason, to eat the toads which they’d introduced to them, the toads to eat the snails which were eating the glue from the cabbage flavoured stamps. Along those lines at least.

Rod Liddle today:

Residents in Storrington, West Sussex, are displeased that the Royal Mail has ripped out a 100-year-old postbox, leaving them without one. According to the Royal Mail, the problem was that the box was infested with “wildlife”. What fearsome creatures could it be? Tigers? Rats? No, it’s snails that Postman Pat and his friends are worried about.

Apparently these pulmonate gastropods enjoy feasting on the gum used to seal envelopes and so the postbox has to go. If I were a cynic I might venture that Royal Mail operatives had, in the small hours, been shoving snails into the pillar box to ensure they could close it down.

Non-fiction I tell ‘ee.

A drag queen who criticised JK Rowling over her views on trans people was invited to celebrate Burns Night at No 10.

It’s is possible to think that JK is a bit of a top one. You know, pretty good etc? And still think that even people who criticise her might still be sufficeintly within the bounds of polite society to get to go to No 10?

You know, maybe?

Unity Mitford was known as the “English girlfriend” of Adolf Hitler and scandalised British society by fawning over the man who threatened her country’s liberty.

The discovery of her long-lost diaries has now revealed how infatuated the 1930s socialite was with the fuhrer.

Her leather-bound journal, which has been found after more than 80 years and serialised by the Mail Online,

So there was that book, Invisible Doctrine, by Monbiot and Hutchison. Which, basically, said that neoliberalism – and by extention, the ASI. Madsen Pirie and, in spear carrier role, me – were the source of all modern evil.

So, an examination of the claim.

And a link here:

Available in Kindle and paperback.

Or the normal page here.

It can also be read, chapter by chapter, by subscribing to the Substack. Which is more expensive but there might well be more books this year on the same basis.

So how do we get those little Amazon ads these days?

Amazon itself says get a link. So:

https://amzn.to/4j5fFe4

Which is fuck all use to anyone

How to get those links with a little ad attached to them?

Ah, “full link”.

Uploading a book to Amazon is not easy.

Fortunately, I do know someone who knows. But just the responses you get from it. It goes from “this isn’t quite right” to “here are 13 pages on bleed of titles” and yer wha?

Sigh.

I know I used to load stuff up for UK and separately for US (for .co.uk and .com). Has that now changed?

And, if there is someone who really grasps all this stuff then perhaps I might be interested in someone stepping up here. I’ve the book, the cover, etc. But the necxt bits baffle a bit.

With his space business and passing resemblance to Thunderball’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Jeff Bezos could easily be mistaken for a Bond villain.

But the founder of Amazon is now in a real-life struggle against the family who control the rights to 007.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Barbara Broccoli believes that Amazon is run by “f—ing idiots” – and the feud is holding up the release of the next film in the franchise.

Mr Bezos’s corporation bought the rights to release any Bond film when it purchased Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio for $6.5 billion in 2022.

But Ms Broccoli, 64, owns the copyright to Britain’s most famous secret agent and has the final say on script, casting and when a film can go into production.

The daughter of Hollywood legend Albert “Cubby” Broccoli is delaying any move to release another film, the Wall Street Journal reported, over concerns that Amazon is too focused on algorithm-driven “content”.

The producer of Bond movies is complaining about algorithm- driven content?

Rilly?

Writers and publishers are criticising a startup that plans to publish up to 8,000 books next year using AI.

The company, Spines, will charge authors between $1,200 and $5,000 to have their books edited, proofread, formatted, designed and distributed with the help of AI.

Independent publisher Canongate said “these dingbats … don’t care about writing or books”, in a Bluesky post. Spines is charging “hopeful would-be authors to automate the process of flinging their book out into the world, with the least possible attention, care or craft”.

“These aren’t people who care about books or reading or anything remotely related,” said author Suyi Davies Okungbowa, whose most recent book is Lost Ark Dreaming, in a post on Bluesky. “These are opportunists and extractive capitalists.”

They’re extractive capitalists.

And?

If readers buy and enjoy these books then that’s an increase in human happiniess. If they don’t it’ll all soon go away.

And?

The curse of celebrity authors

In regard to Catherine Bennett’s article, the huge advances paid to celebrity “authors” drains the pool of money that publishers have to pay other, full-time authors (“There is a moral in Jamie Oliver’s story of stereotypical folk, just not one he intended”, Comment). I made a reasonable living writing more than 100 books for children, but couldn’t do it now because the money offered to middle-ranking authors has shrunk as the advances paid to celebrities have risen. When I retired I was being offered the same advances as at the start of my career 35 years earlier.
Richard Platt
Hastings, Kent

A publisher, might, at some point, hope you’ll earn out your advance, no? And if, 50 books in, you show no signs of that then advances are unlikely to, erm, advance.

But just for a little context. Freelance rates – producing an article, a column, that sort of thing – have not changed in the 25 years I’ve been doing this sort of thing. Not changed in nominal terms that is. In real terms they’re down, what, 50%?

At elections held in October 1954 the candidates of the Communist-controlled National Front, which comprises the Socialist Unity, the Liberal Democractic, The Christian Democratic, the Democratic Peasant and the National Democratic Parties, obtained ninety nine percent of the votes. Electors voted publicly for the single list of candidates by placing it, unmarked, in a ballot box.

One of the reasons I like reading old books – here The Penguin Dictionary of Politics, 1957 – is that you pick up the sort of detail unlikely in more modern productions. Also, a certain dryness in the description of election practices.

Richard Seymour, the unthinking man’s Marxist, is back:

For Seymour, then, comradeship isn’t just between humans, but between species and the living world. This is surely the bedrock of not just socialism, but eco socialism.

To better understand this and what we’re losing, it makes more sense to talk about mass extinction than just climate change, he tells me. “It pertains to the destruction and decay and etiolation of life across the board and all the evidence suggests we’re in what some call the end – Holocene mass extinction.” And extinctions reveal all our unacknowledged dependencies; we need plants and other animals. We, human beings, do not sit at the top of a grand hierarchy. Continuing as we are, exploiting other animals and the rest of nature, is unsustainable.

“If you want a less fancy way of putting it: love,” says Seymour. This isn’t necessarily where all Marxists might end up but he adds, “if we’re talking about socialism, what else are we talking about?”

That’s the product of 9 years of deep thinking on hte subject of climate change and the rise of the far right.

This shit is going to be everywhere over the next fwe months.

Sigh.

‘It’s quite galling’: children’s authors frustrated by rise in celebrity-penned titles
Keira Knightley is latest star to publish a children’s book, but some say trend pushes aside genuine writers and makes it harder to find great children’s fiction

What is a genuine writer? Someone who’s done the right degree? Been on the right creative writing courses?