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‘My friend and I were working out how many more books we’ll read before we die,’ a customer said to me in the bookshop, the other day. ‘We read a book every couple of weeks, so we figured around 500.’ I rapidly did the maths. Twenty years. It seemed a little pessimistic for someone who
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The Exiles Return has been published as a beautiful Persephone Book, with smart dove-grey covers and a riotously colourful endpaper. Before this glorious incarnation, it existed for many years as a ‘yellowing typescript with some tippexed corrections’, one of the few things that Elisabeth de Waal held on to during her ‘life in transit between
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The first time you run out of space for your books is a rite of passage for booklovers. It’s the moment that you realise the extent of your addiction to these papery worlds. It’s also a time of anxiously wondering what on earth you’ll do with all the books you have yet to accumulate. Double
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In they stride, in muddy trainers or wellies, swirls of cold air caught on their clothes, children in off-road buggies, dogs bedraggledly in tow. I’ve always been thrilled that so many of our customers at Daunt Books in Belsize Park and Hampstead come in fresh from Hampstead Heath. Growing up in north London, I’ve spent
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At 3pm this afternoon Radio 4’s Ramblings with Clare Balding will broadcast a programme about The Walking Book Club, to which Emily Rhodes belongs. ‘I love walking in London,’ said Mrs Dalloway. ‘Really it’s better than walking in the country.’ As a keen reader, writer and walker, I am always intrigued when an author writes
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The route was unveiled this week for phase two of HS2 — and those who got hot under the collar about phase one (London to Birmingham) are furious again, on the same economic or environmental grounds. But perhaps they might rediscover some of the joy of a fast train if they read a little Dickens.
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I suspect I might not be the only one who finds it unnerving to be at the start of a year that features, so prominently, the number thirteen. 2013 – it feels like bad luck just to read it in my head, let alone say it aloud! But worry not, I have assuaged my fears
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Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, has announced that her next book will be a picture book. Rather than writing a follow-up dystopian adventure for her teenage readers, she has decided to engage with four-year-olds in Year of the Jungle, a story about how her family coped when her father spent a year serving
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The Conservatives’ next election campaign will be run by Lynton Crosby, an Australian whose success has earned him the title ‘The Wizard of Oz’. On examining L. Frank Baum’s classic children’s book, the nickname seems more pertinent than you might imagine. Lynton Crosby’s skill, according to Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph, is not so much
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Boycott Amazon was the message from Margaret Hodge MP in last weekend’s Observer. This comes in the wake of new revelations about just how little UK tax is paid by Amazon and other corporate giants Starbucks and Google. According to Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke, Amazon’s UK sales amounted to £3.9 billion last year, but it
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As Remembrance Sunday draws closer and we pin poppies to our coats, we can also see them adorning the jackets of books. This powerful symbol of remembrance features on the covers of many books about the First World War, which tend to be put on display at this time of year. The inspiration behind the
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Markus Dohle, Chief Executive of Random House, must have had a long hard think about what a booklover could possibly treasure more than a Kindle. The answer is, of course, a Penguin. Everyone loves Penguin. Their paperback covers have become such a design cult that people flock to buy not just their books, but also
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I suspect that few – if any – of you have heard of Bertram Books. You could be forgiven for thinking that they are a lesser-known series of P.G. Wodehouse novels, but in fact Bertram Books is a book wholesaler, a large yet overlooked part of the book industry. It strikes me as peculiar that
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Everyone was so busy celebrating Hilary Mantel’s second Booker Prize victory last week that it was easy to overlook the announcement that another of our literary prizes has been saved from extinction. The Orange Prize had lost its sponsor — but has been rescued by a group of women sponsors, including Cherie Blair. It ought
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Books – or lack thereof – are the latest manifestation of anti-Japanese sentiment in China. The escalating dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands has provoked some Beijing bookshops to remove Japanese books from their shelves. The most prominent book to be made to disappear is Haruki Murakami’s recent novel 1Q84, a critically acclaimed worldwide bestseller. Rather
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After the record-breaking success of the Fifty Shades trilogy, publishers are desperately trying to answer the multi-million dollar question, what comes next? What will all those millions of readers who have raced through Fifty Shades want to read now? With a depressing lack of imagination, many publishers seem to have landed on the answer of
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Much has already been written of the breathtaking, brilliant and slightly bonkers Olympics opening ceremony, but there is one more thing to say on a literary note. Just after we were treated to hundreds of dancing doctors and nurses, once the children were all settled down for the night, tucked in under their snazzy illuminated
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The Lib Dems have been thoroughly ineffectual in the coalition. So much so that some of us — including Hugo Rifkind in this magazine — have asked why they bother to turn up for work. I wonder whether the Lib Dems press on with the coalition because they can’t face admitting to its failure. They
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When it comes to choosing good books to read on holiday, I am a great believer in selecting reading matter to match the destination. What better to read in Sicily than Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s The Leopard, for instance? And how wonderful to read Laurie Lee’s beautiful As I Walked Out one Midsummer Morning while
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Painful, barbaric and Victorian are the words I think of when someone says corset, and yet these torturous contraptions are enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Rigby & Peller, Marks & Spencer and eBay all report a huge increase in demand — corset sales on eBay, for instance, have risen nearly 200% over recent months. It