James Fergusson

Thursday

James Fergusson

Sharia for feminists

From our UK edition

Is Islam inherently misogynistic? That old charge arose again after the Manchester bombing in May, with the suggestion that Salman Abedi’s choice of target was driven by a deep-seated prejudice against women — above all against young western women, with their supposedly lax morals and corrupting ways. It was a subtext, too, of the timing of the London Bridge attack, 10 p.m. on a warm summer night, when the killers must have known the area would be thronged with young couples out enjoying themselves. Three of the dead were women under the age of 30. The media ‘face’ of the atrocity was Sara Zelenak, a strikingly beautiful 21-year-old from Brisbane.

Wednesday

James Fergusson

The house that Jock built

From our UK edition

When John Murray was sold in 2002 it was billed by the Daily Telegraph as ‘the oldest independent book publisher in the world’. The firm had been in the same family since the first John Murray began selling books in Fleet Street in 1768. It was also, reported the Telegraph, ‘the last of London’s “gentlemen publishing houses” ’. But when were publishers ever gentlemen? The poet Byron wrote of his publisher in 1816, ‘I believe Murray to be a good man with a personal regard for me. But a bargain is in its very essence a hostile transaction . . . Do not all men try to abate the price of all they buy? — I contend that a bargain even between brethren — is a declaration of war.

Wednesday

James Fergusson

John Saumarez Smith at 65

From our UK edition

‘Might it amuse you to see (and perhaps even buy) Gibbon’s spectacles?’ John Saumarez Smith made Bevis Hillier a once-in-a-lifetime offer. It was 1976 and Hillier dithered. He neither saw nor bought Gibbon’s spectacles, but he did make a Saturday column out of it for the Times — characterising Saumarez Smith as ‘perhaps the most know- ledgeable of the younger generation of London booksellers’. Saumarez Smith, then 33, had been running Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street for two years, having joined it in 1965 straight from Cambridge. Now, as his 65th birthday turns, and after purveying knowledge and amusement to Heywood Hill’s worldwide clientele for more than four decades, he is standing down as managing director.