David Blackburn

Belle de Jour has returned for another series. Well, that’s not wholly true. Dr Brooke Magnati, the forensic scientist who worked as a high-class tart during her PhD course, has written a book called The Sex Myth. It blends science and statistical analysis with her intimate knowledge of prostitution to challenge received wisdom about the sex industry. Female reviewers (they have all been female so far by my reckoning) have described the book as ‘important’. (The Times (£) and the Telegraph both carry detailed and favourable reviews.

Bond is back. William Boyd has agreed to don the garb of Ian Fleming and write the latest tale in 007’s story. Boyd will not be aping Fleming’s style. The recent franchise revivals by Sebastian Faulks and Jeffrey Deaver are singularly different to each other and the original canon, while remaining faithful to the (anti-)hero in some fundamental way. They match the Bond film series in that regard. Daniel Craig, Sean Connery and Roger Moore could not be more dissimilar in their depictions of the character, yet each is recognisably shaken not stirred.  Deaver and Faulks wrote slightly psychological Bond thrillers — I can’t really remember where they were set.

I wanted to find a YouTube clip of a classical British actor reading of Christ’s Passion from the KJV. There must be such a thing, but I can’t find it among the morass of American, Spanish and Pentecostal recordings. That seems to signify the growing irrelevance of Anglicanism and Englishness in this digital world. But, who needs Ken Branagh when you can read the greatest book ever written at the click of a mouse. As it is Easter, here is ‘The Suffering Servant’ prophesy — taken from the book of Isaiah, chapter 53. 1Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?

Acclaimed author Evgeny Morozov is in London promoting the new edition of his book, The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. It argues that internet freedom is an illusion and that everyone’s freedom is at stake. It is timely, then, that his trip has coincided with the web surveillance row that has been shaking the coalition. Morozov met with the Spectator this afternoon, and this is what he said about ‘email snooping’:  DB: With email snooping, I’d assumed that the security services did that already? EM: They do it already, but they do it retroactively.

Ben Macintyre is back. Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies is the last instalment in his trilogy about British espionage in World War Two, following the hugely successful Agent Zig-Zag and Operation Mincemeat. In Double Cross, Macintrye tells of how a cabal of eccentric double agents hoodwinked the Nazis into believing that the allied invasion of Europe would come through Norway or the Pays de Calais. Or that is the narrative he presents in his uniquely compelling and humorous style. Here is what reviewers have made of it so far. Sir Max Hastings was ecstatic, but not uncritical, in the Sunday Times (£): 'I quibble with this book’s subtitle The True Story of the D-Day Spies.

Voldemort was second division as an adversary; Amazon was Harry Potter’s most implacable foe. But the bespectacled wizard has seen off the virtual giant. The major books story this week is the arrival of official eBook editions of the Harry Potter novels. But these books are not for sale through Amazon's e-commerce system (or Barnes and Noble’s and Waterstones’). Click on any Amazon link to the Potter eBooks and this message will appear: ‘Harry Potter Kindle books can be purchased at JK Rowling's Pottermore Shop, a third-party site. Clicking on "Buy at Pottermore" will take you to Pottermore Shop, where you will need to create a separate account.

The march of David Mitchell continues. The author of Cloud Atlas and other acclaimed novels has won the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s E.M. Forster Award, worth a princely $20,000. The prize is intended to assist a ‘young writer from the United Kingdom or Ireland for a stay in the United States.’ Every little helps, but Mitchell (43) is hardly a ‘young writer’ whose horizons are limited to the British Isles. He is international; an author who has lived in Japan and written about the country and the history of its relationship with Europeans. Mitchell is commercially successful. Cloud Atlas was a global bestseller, and it has been adapted for the screen.

Everywhere one goes these days, people are talking about John Updike. Death, it seems, concentrates the mind. Updike died more than 2 years ago, but he is the talk of the town. His name crops up at book launches and at literary events around London, usually accompanied by words like ‘genius’ or ‘under-appreciated’. That last word is strange. You might imagine that Updike sold novels in bulk, bought by the Main Street masses of whom he wrote. But Updike sold quite modestly in his lifetime — Couples was a major commercial success, earning him a place on the cover of Time in April 1968, but beyond that he struggled to crack the top 50 in America.

Guardian HQ visited the future this weekend. The newspaper group hosted its inaugural ‘Open Weekend’ — a ‘festival of debates, workshops, music, comedy, poetry, food and fun’, according to the blurb. There was live music (banjos and interpretative dance, naturally). A farmers’ market ran along the adjacent canal and a selection of seedlings for sale from the garden centre. There were also some talks about urgent issues, poetry readings and exclusive access to the editorial offices. The Guardian loses £1 million a week by some estimates: alternative income must be found. It’s the same story for most media organisations these days. Writers are good value at this sort of junket.

On 13th March 1938, judgment was passed in the political show trial of Nikolai Bukharin, former head of the Soviet Politburo. He was sentenced to death. Bukharin was taken in silence from the dock to the exit to the cells. He paused at the door and cast his eyes up to the gallery that contained the free world’s press. Fitzroy Maclean was sitting there. As Bukharin stepped into the darkness, Maclean looked across the courtroom. Joseph Stalin had appeared in the gallery opposite. The dictator gazed impassively after the vanishing Bukharin, his paranoia quelled for the moment. That scene of terrifying injustice explains why Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour, written of so brilliantly by Steven McGregor yesterday, descends into bitterness and despair.

There’s a cracking story in the Bookseller this morning. The Publisher’s Association is calling on the government to cut VAT on eBooks to the zero rate enjoyed by print books. eBooks currently attract 20 per cent VAT, whereas print books are exempt on the grounds that they promote education. The Publishers’ Association complains that eBooks provide the same social value as print books, and demand that the playing field be levelled. There is a further complication in that some digital companies, Amazon among them, are selling English eBooks from Luxembourg, which only levies 3 per cent VAT on eBooks. This puts British retailers at a competitive disadvantage at a time when the digital economy in books is booming.

Attention all those who commute through King’s Cross. A new bookshop has opened on the concourse near platforms 9-11, next to the shrine for Platform 9¾ of Harry Potter fame.  This is the first Watermark store to open in Europe. Watermark is an Australian firm that specialises in filling small spaces in major travel hubs. It is a traditional bookseller in the sense that well educated, book-loving staff are on hand to offer customers the expertise that is usually unavailable in a travel terminal newsagent like WHSmith. (Smiths seem to be the only such retailer in Britain.) Staff sometimes have a foreign language — a useful bonus in an arena where tourists should be a major source of revenue.

Noam Chomsky versus Daniel Everett, it is a literary spat with a difference: they specialise in language. Chomsky is the high priest of modern linguistics, progenitor of ‘universal grammar’. Everett has spent 30 years among remote Amazonian tribes and concludes that language is learned. He says that it is unique to a specific culture, which means that human cultures may be totally unknown to each other. There is a Wauvian flavour to Everett’s experience. He sailed up the Amazon both as an anthropologist in search of subjects and as a missionary in search of converts. He lived among the Pirahã and slowly learned their language. But he did not learn all of their customs, nor them his. Everett translated St.