Anna Baddeley

Up: BAD HABITS 500K to spare? Four pages of calfskin, 1,300 year old manuscript could be yours in the Sotheby’s summer sale next month. In De Laude Virginitatis [In Praise of Virginity], Anglo-Saxon cleric Aldhelm advises the nuns of Barking Abbey to avoid garments which might ‘set off’ the body and ‘nourish the fires of sexual anticipation.’ But call off the Slutwalk: given this is the first known text aimed exclusively at a female readership, the proto-feminist bishop is doing it for the sisters. Up: PUPPY LOVE Hands up who wants to see a video of Somerset Maugham cuddling puppies? The footage is especially poignant in light of the notorious dog-frisbeeing incident revealed in Selina Hastings’ 2009 biography.

The Orange Prize longlist has just been announced, followed by the perennial hoo-ha over its right to exist. Is it sexist to have a prize just for women? Is sexism the reason why we need a prize just for women? Does anyone outside the comment boards on the Guardian website actually care? All it is, really, is a wheeze to sell more books, something it manages pretty well. One problem with the Orange Prize is that the quality is often not that great. The shortlist and the winner sometimes seem like they’ve been chosen by a group of book publicists thinking, “Ooh, the media’s going to love this author’s interesting backstory!” or “Wouldn’t this novel be fab for bookclubs?!

More bad news for people who like their reading matter to come with a spine: January sales for printed books were down 16 per cent on last year's. There are lots of reasons for this — ebooks, better telly, a global pandemic of attention deficit disorder — but what’s often overlooked is modern publishing's tendency to value quantity over quality.   Over 150,000 books were published in the UK last year, an increase of nearly 50 per cent on a decade ago. Not all of this is down to the growth in self-publishing. The book industry appears to have taken trendy longtail theory — increase profits by selling less of more — and swallowed it the wrong way.

Every summer when the exam results come out, besides the obligatory photos of bouncing schoolgirls, there's a story about a five-year-old who's become the youngest person ever to pass a GCSE. Little Liam, his parents boast, has been doing sums since before he could talk and is now raking in the dosh from his million-selling iPhone app. His dream is to go to Oxford or, failing that, Cambridge. To stave off the nausea, you imagine Liam's future — the bullying, the drugs, the gender confusion — until you get to the part where it says what grade he got. Hang on a minute, you think, he only got a D! A foetus could get a D in GCSE Maths. What were his numskull parents trying to prove by making him do it early and get a rubbish grade?

After a lacklustre year of books programming, the low point being a serialisation of a middle-class family’s failed attempt to live without internet, Radio 4 has lately come into its own. Already this month we’ve been treated to Beware of Pity (which I wrote about here), the surprisingly enjoyable Gargantua and Pantagruel, Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens and Craig Taylor’s Londoners. This week it’s a Timberlake Wertenbaker adaptation of Possession and an early Christmas present, The Pusuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. Many of us will have a comfort book, something we return to in times of illness, romantic strife, double dip recession and so on.

Is it possible to hold a literary award these days without igniting some sort of controversy? The latest storm in an inkwell surrounds the TS Eliot Prize, whose shortlist shrunk after two poets dropped out in protest at its sponsor, the hedgefund Aurum.   John Kinsella and Alice Oswald have boycotted the prize, explaining ‘the business of Aurum does not sit with my personal politics and ethics.’ The poetry world is holding its breath to see if any remaining shortlistees, which include heavyweights Carol Ann Duffy and John Burnside, will follow suit.   The news has been met with an inevitable online backlash. ‘Pagey’, a commenter on the Guardian website asked ‘How can someone who writes for profit be anti-capitalist?

Gentleman shopkeeper James Daunt has given a cringeworthy interview to the Independent where he calls Amazon ‘a ruthless, money-making devil, the consumer’s enemy’. I wouldn’t be surprised if the manger of “Quills ‘R’ Us” had said something similar about William Caxton in 1476. Poor James Daunt. He clearly had a certain degree of business acumen to set up his successful mini-chain of London bookshops, but since taking over Waterstone’s he has yet to prove he knows what he’s doing. His only real achievement so far is to get rid of that notorious three-for-two. If I were a Waterstone’s bookseller reading the Independent interview online, my next click would be straight onto Guardian Jobs.

Eurozone crisis, what eurozone crisis? According to Spanish newspaper El País, the real global emergency is the state of literary criticism. British book pages, however, won’t need bailing out any time soon — at least if these splenetic offerings are anything to go by. Tibor Fischer on Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas, Guardian It's a great historical soup, with bits of this and that bobbing around, seemingly thrown in randomly by the chef — or, more succinctly, a mess. Hungary's literature had a puritanical 1950s, a sober 1960s, and they largely missed out on all the Henry Miller, Lady Chatterley, Jean Genet, William Burroughs jazz. It's almost as if Nádas is trying to catch up in one bound.

Full marks to Radio 4 for deciding to dramatise Stefan Zweig's masterpiece, Beware of Pity (listen on BBC iPlayer). This is a rare example of a "neglected classic" that actually lives up to the hype. Born in Austria in 1881, Zweig was one of the most famous writers of the twenties and thirties, his novellas and biographies translated into more languages than any other contemporary author. Despite being friends with Freud and living the rarefied life of a mittel-European intellectual, his style and subject matter were avowedly populist (a crime registered in this London Review of Books essay). Beware of Pity — his only full-length novel — was published just before the second world war.