David Blackburn

The political battle over library closures has intensified. Earlier this morning, shadow culture secretary Dan Jarvis chastised libraries minister Ed Vaizey for being the ‘Dr Beeching of libraries’. Jarvis said that Vaizey should not be so ‘short-sighted’ as to permit 600 libraries to shut in England. He urged the government to intervene to save these ‘vital assets’, adding that not to do so would make a ‘mockery of the 1964 Public Libraries and Museums Act’. The Act allows the secretary of state to intervene if local authorities are in breach of their statutory requirement to provide a ‘comprehensive and efficient’ library service in local communities.

It is literary festival season, and there seem to be more than ever. In the next three months, there will be gatherings at Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick, Swindon, Oxford, Cambridge, Hay, Glasgow — I could go on and on and on. The second wave of festivals comes in the high summer, before the final and long hurrah in the autumn. The proliferation is perplexing. These are hardly the best of times for the consumer; you would expect demand to be relatively low, especially as these events are populated by the same authors saying the same things about the same books. Was Martin Bell, for instance, more or less interesting at Guildford than he was at Cheltenham last year?

Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper is an extraordinary book. It is not perfect — it is repetitive, opinionated and long — but it is extraordinary nonetheless. Perlman unites the Holocaust and the civil rights movement as themes in a narrative that runs from rural Lithuania in the early ‘30s to modern day New York. Calls are made at Auschwitz, Little Rock and downtown Chicago along the way, as chance meetings connect a barely literate black street sweeper in Manhattan with the last of Sonderkommando (the handful Jews who were coerced into assisting the Nazis deliver the Final Solution, and clean up afterwards). They are both victims, Perlman says in the dedication, of ‘the same disease’.

Who remembers Chips Channon? Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon was an American born Conservative MP, a Bright Young Thing, and a marvellously indiscreet diarist. Or so he is alleged to have been. His diaries have never been published in full, so scandalous was their content — particularly of his promiscuous liaisons with many of the great men of the day. The editor of the expurgated version (1967), Robert Rhodes James, remarked that the Great and the Good shuddered when told that Channon had a kept a diary. The word is that the diaries are soon to be published in full, although this has been a frequent rumour over the years. I hope that it’s true.

It’s not a bad time to be a journalist, not wholly bad. Sure, the industry is in apparently irrevocable decline and it is being flagellated before Lord Justice Leveson. But, for the first time in years, there is a species more hated than the Hack. The vitriol against bankers is unrelenting — each week brings fresh acrimony and recrimination. The Guardian is running a TV advert that has reworked the nursery rhyme, Three Little Pigs. The pigs commit insurance fraud by framing the wolf for the destruction of their houses after having failed to keep up with their mortgage repayments. The banks, reads one fictional headline, are to blame for the tragedy. John Lanchester’s latest novel, Capital, is a testament against a culture built on acquisitive greed.

The British Empire produced some great books. Both sides of the debate over the empire’s moral worth should be able to agree on that at least. Empire was a major subject the nineteenth century’s great essayists and historians. Macaulay’s History of England is underpinned by the assumption that the history of England was ‘emphatically the history of progress’. The Whig school of history, embodied by G.M. Trevelyan, entrenched Macaulay’s ideas. Britain’s destiny was to bring progress to less fortunate people, which was reflected by the Victorian imperial policy of 'civilising' the globe. J.G.

There is no stopping ‘the Inimitable’ in his bi-centenary year. The Duff Cooper Prize was awarded last night, and the winner was Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. The prize is awarded to the best work of history, biography or political science published in French or English in any given year; it is held at the French ambassador's residence in London. Douglas-Fairhurst beat Susie Harries’ life of Pevsner, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of all Maladies, Anna Reid’s Leningrad and Jonathan Steinberg’s Bismarck. The Spectator has two contrasting reviews of Becoming Dickens.

This week marks Lawrence Durrell’s centenary. Durrell was once the great white hope of British fiction, but the cult has lapsed since his sixties heyday. Richard Davenport-Hines recently reappraised the The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell’s most famous work. He wrote, ‘It is hard now to recapture the impact half a century ago of these novels’ heat, luxuriance and profanity.’ 50 years of sex and social liberalism in the West has obviously tamed Durrell’s ‘profanity’. And the conservative backlash in the Middle East has made his once exotic tale seem slightly fanciful.

A ‘gigantic confidence trick’ — that is how Jeremy Paxman describes the British Empire. The first episode of the TV series which accompanies his book, Empire: What ruling the World Did to the British, aired last night. Paxman’s thesis can be reduced into a string of his trademark soundbites. British imperialism was a ‘protection racket’, based on the conceit that a handful of well-equipped soldiers and well-educated officials could provide stable government for the feckless potentates of India, Africa and the Middle East. Any challenge to British interests was ‘met with savage retaliation’, which invariably resulted in expansion.

John Steinbeck was born 110 years ago today. To mark the occasion, here, courtesy of the always intriguing Letters of Note, is a letter Steinbeck wrote to his son Thom, then a teenager. It speaks for itself. New York November 10, 1958 Dear Thom: We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers. First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you. Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind.

Editorial conferences are fraught affairs. There is a rush of facts, opinions and suggestions. It’s a brave man who trusts his memory to retain all the information. ‘S’, a young Russian journalist who lived between the wars, was one such brave man. He could recall perfectly each name, number and hint that his editor had mentioned. This came naturally to him, but at a cost. S had to try to forget every sight and sound that he encountered in everyday life. He was a savant. S’s gift for memory was phenomenal, but it is not unobtainable. A few years ago, an American journalist called Joshua Foer wrote a book ostensibly about how to improve one’s memory by using self-taught mnemonic tricks.