David Blackburn

What a lot of new books there are about the queen. I count 24 biographies, photograph collections and retrospectives all produced to mark the Diamond Jubilee. There is only so much to say about Her Majesty before writers begin to repeat each other. Either that or a biographer is left to record the inane and the absurd. One such example landed on my desk a few days back. Sally Bedell Smith’s The Queen: The Woman Behind the Throne contains **NEW INFORMATION**, according to the press release, on the well-trodden ground of the Paul Burrell trial, the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death and the Queen’s relationship with Tony Blair. But my favourite of her scoops is revealing the contents of Her Majesty’s handbag.

Much ado about Jonathan Franzen’s appearance at the Hay Festival in Cartegna, where he sounded-off against eBooks, technology and corporate capitalism. The Guardian reports that Franzen said: 'Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that's reassuring. 'Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough.

I hadn’t given my coffin much thought until last Saturday, when I attended the South Bank Centre’s ‘Festival for the Living’. The main exhibit was a selection of coffins from Ghana. They were bizarre: a skip, a mini Mercedes and a giant cream cake. It was an absurd sight. I found myself playing Loyd Grossman in a macabre version of David Frost’s Through the Keyhole: ‘Who’s buried in a coffin like this? David, it’s over to you.’ The coffins were a wonderful distraction, but the show wasn’t about death — not as such. The ‘Festival for the Living’ concerned those who are left to grieve; and there were two literary events that confronted grief directly.

It is Holocaust Memorial Day. Fictionalising the Holocaust has become something of a fashion in recent years — The Reader, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes in the orginal French) to name but three. The first two have been adapted for film, the third has not. Its author, Jonathan Littell, has refused to sell the film rights on the grounds that it would be impossible to adapt the book for the screen. Littell’s statement is strange because The Kindly Ones is cinematic in scope. The action ranges from Stalingrad to Auschwitz, to bombed-out Berlin to the glamour of the Cote d’Azur; and the protagonist encounters all manner of Nazi, not just the monsters.

Last November, Rajni George reported on how Indian authors were becoming increasingly commercialised. Literary festivals, book signings, TV appearances and society parties — these are the staples of writers at the heart of India’s publishing boom. Rajni worried that writers might be exploited or distracted in their glamorous new surroundings. Popular British writers have travelled the same path, and suffered some of the dangers Rajni feared. Susan Hill memorably complained of second-hand book dealers, in their dirty raincoats, crashing her book signings in search of a cash-laden scribble on their dog-eared copies of The Woman in Black. And even the Inimitable Dickens was not immune to the pressure.

It’s Burns Night. A literary blog has to mark the occasion. There was no consoling scotch to hand, so here’s Robert Burns’ ‘Address to a Haggis’ with a translation below for the uninitiated. A good evening to all, especially if you can’t stand Burns's doggerel.

Literary biography is supposed to be dead. Time was when ‘big literary biographies were the goal of every serious editor,’ Faber’s Neil Belton recalls. ‘The bigger they were the better, and they often came in many volumes,’ he says. But these monumental works ‘cost publishers a fortune’, and literary historians were forced to lower their horizons. But Belton has published a book that defies the trend: Matthew Hollis’s All Roads lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. The book was shortlisted for this year's Costa Award, having received so much critical and popular acclaim.

Jodi Kantor is unrepentant: Michelle Obama knew what she was letting herself in for. At a lunch held in Kantor's honour at St. Stephen's Club in London this afternoon, the New York Times political correspondent said that she had been given access to the First Lady’s staff in the East Wing, and had rendered a fair and accurate portrait of Michelle Obama, who has begun ‘pushing back’ against ‘an independent journalistic project’.   According to Kantor, the First Lady is a strong personality, quick to rebuke others but loath to take criticism herself.

Salman Rushdie has withdrawn from the Jaipur Literary Festival. His statement makes for sobering reading. Will this ever end? For the last several days I have made no public comment about my proposed trip to the Jaipur Literary Festival at the request of the local authorities in Rajasthan, hoping that they would put in place such precautions as might be necessary to allow me to come and address the Festival audience in circumstances that were comfortable and safe for all. I have now been informed by intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to "eliminate" me.

Publishers' eyes have been on the Guggenheim Museum in New York today, where Apple has just launched its plan to revolutionise the education publishing market. The company announced that it would produce new digital textbooks, across all disciplines, and make them available to users of apple computers and tablets through the iBooks store. The products are already availbale. The textbooks come in the form of ‘video, documents, apps, books, shared syllabus and assignments', and are priced at $14.99 or less. The major innovation is a new software programme, iBooks Author, which will allow teachers to create or modify textbooks and teaching materials to their own specifications.

The Guardian reports on a fascinating story from across the Atlantic, where an imprint of Penguin USA has reprinted Thomas Jefferson’s Bible. The book is a based on a copy of the Gospels kept by the third President of the United States between 1803 and 1820, from which he expunged those passages which he could not accept. It would appear, at first glance, that Jefferson placed moral philosophy above the miraculous. He called the book ‘The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth’, and redacted the supernatural elements of Christ’s life from his volume. Gone are the virgin birth, the resurrection and the ascension.

A cacophony of opinion broke out across the weekend’s literary pages, all of it eloquent and entertaining. On Thursday, Nick Cohen will publish his anticipated account of England’s pernicious libel law, You Can’t Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom. Cohen condemns the legal establishment that values deference to the mighty above freedom of speech. Yesterday’s Observer carried an extract from the book.

Sir Salman Rushdie has been in the news this week, after his proposed appearance at the Jaipur Literary Festival elicited criticism from what the Guardian described as an ‘influential conservative Indian Muslim cleric’, called Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani. A little over a year ago, Rushdie appeared on American TV (above) and said that the world had moved on from furores and fatwahs caused by The Satanic Verses. Now people can read it as a novel, he said, as it was intended. Rushdie is apparently putting the finishing touches to his memoirs, which will be published later this year. It will be interesting to see how much space Rushdie devotes to the controversy, and how he regards it within the context of his life and writing as a whole.