Matthew Richardson

The homes of famous writers have a strange allure. A suggestion of genius in the air, perhaps. In the Telegraph, Claudia FitzHerbert has a beguiling piece on newly-reopened Max Gate (pictured), the house in which Thomas Hardy wrote many of his most celebrated works.   Having the name of a famous writer in the town hall records is a boon for any local authority. Take a bow Stratford-upon-Avon. The recently refurbished RSC theatre is just the start. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust looks after a variety of Bard-related real estate including the Henley Street house in which Shakespeare was born, Anne Hathaway's cottage and the farm once occupied by Shakespeare's mother.

Montaigne has acquired new followers, thanks to Sarah Bakewell’s award winning biography. This has inspired a breath of enthusiasm in the form; the essay is back in vogue.  Writing in the FT, Carl Wilkinson reviews recent efforts from Hanif Kureishi and Alaa Al Aswany. He also mentions the foundation of Notting Hill Editions, an imprint with a brief ‘devoted to the best in essayistic nonfiction writing’. Lucasta Miller, Notting Hill Editions’ editorial director, explained this new venture to me: 'Newspaper articles have got shorter and shorter, and more and more driven by an "instant comment" agenda...In the 19th century the periodical press offered scope for the long, considered essay – more than an article, less than a book.

Martin Amis is emigrating to America, according to a wide-ranging interview in the Times (£) at the weekend. The reasons are primarily personal (being near his mother-in-law primarily among them, as well as best-bud Christopher Hitchens). But the interview reads more like a farewell piece. The forty-year battle of Amis vs the British establishment is all but over. As Ginny Dougary describes it:   'It’s scarcely surprising that Amis, for all his courtesy…seems depressed. In print his answers are full of his usual brio and thoughtfulness but his delivery was uncharacteristically subdued. He talked into his chest and his body seemed etiolated with psychic fatigue.

The book world has been abuzz with the Arabic Booker. High-quality fiction is connecting with political conflict and the convulsions in the Middle East have revealed a literary culture often closed to the West. Boyd Tonkin describes how the ceremony itself was infected by the surrounding political drama: ‘Yet even here, under the obligatory tank-sized chandeliers of a hotel ballroom and with local dignitaries aplenty in the audience, the unsettling new realities could hardly be left outside. Whenever a speaker mentioned the Arab democratic spring, a gunshot crackle of applause rippled through the hall.’ Formal innovation has played its part too, with the novel finally coming to prominence in the Arab world.

Foreign fiction gets a raw deal. It's usually quarantined away in the dustier enclaves of the bookshop, along with all the other worthy but immovable fare: short story collections, regional poetry and non A-level drama.   Perhaps buyers and sellers think that ‘non-UK stuff’ has been dealt with by that merrily inclusive idea of ‘world literature’ – the prose often still in English, but with a refreshingly exotic spice (see Salman Rushdie). But the size of the knowledge gap, mine included, is frightening. The Independent recently announced the long-list for their Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2011. Scanning down the chosen fifteen, the alien names brought a blush to my cheek: Jenny Erpenbeck, Marcelo Figueras, Per Wästberg, Juli Zeh etc.

So, the sun has set on World Book Night. A million books have found new homes. Of course, the notion of giving away books for free was always going to be controversial (see Emily Rhodes) and it inspired some furore. There was a squabble on Newsnight about the event’s deleterious effects on independent booksellers and Boyd Tonkin raised the pertinent point that it burgles valuable airtime from opposing library closures. Because, as one woman said at the Manchester live event: ‘It’s like World Book Night everyday in a library.’   Such niggles were addressed in part during the first offering of Saturday's dedicated evening of books on BBC2, all courtesy of The Culture Show.

The BBC’s Books season started in earnest this week. And, so far at least, my earlier optimism has not been shaken. My Life in Books, the new daily literary chat show with Anne Robinson at the helm, launched on Monday at 6:30 on BBC2. P.D. James and Richard Bacon, an unlikely pairing if ever there was, kicked off proceedings. Bacon provided some blokeish bonhomie, but Baroness James carried the show. Narrating through her list (Pride and Prejudice and A Handful of Dust being the most noticeable choices), the 90-year-old twinkled with grandmotherly charm, a welcome contrast to Robinson’s shrill and starchy turn in the anchor’s chair.   The show is safely middle-brow, perhaps unsurprisingly given the time and channel.

The books have ended, the final film instalment is in the can and the recent valedictory Bafta was collected en masse by cast and crew. But still more, apparently, can be squeezed from the Harry Potter franchise. A Guardian article last week reported that J.K. Rowling is to be the subject of a straight-to-TV biopic called Strange Magic. The magic in question will be purely financial, detailing Rowling's rise to fame and fortune all thanks to her wordy wizardry. Rowling is the latest author, and the youngest by a century or two, to get the silver-screen treatment.

After several breathless promo ads, Faulks on Fiction finally got under way this weekend. The four-part series aims (as Faulks explains during a fetching walk-and-talk shot on the Millennium Bridge) to weaken the mystique of authors; Faulks' emphasis is on characters. The first programme occupied itself with 'the hero' in English fiction, or, more accurately, narrated the decline of swashbuckling brawn from Robinson Crusoe to John Self. With the rise of postmodernism, so the argument goes, the literary hero breathed his last. Inevitably, Faulks has to paint with a pre-school sized brush.

Being anonymous doesn’t immunize you from criticism, as the nameless author of O: A Presidential Novel has discovered recently. Numerous high profile reviewers have been sharpening their critical cutlery and tucking in.   Simon Schama, usually the model of bouncy good humour, was brought to a savage, Swiftian boil by 'this turkey' in the Financial Times over the weekend. And his guess at the reason for anonymity is amusing, if not a little cruel: ‘…if you’d committed something as dull as this you’d want to make sure no one found out either.’ A definite thumbs-down.   Justin Webb, in the Times, is a touch kinder.

Some intriguing literary whispers did the rounds yesterday. Both the Telegraph and the Observer carried the story of Anne Robinson's imminent leap from quiz-master to literary chat-shown host. And today confirmation of such an unlikely move was confirmed by the BBC: My Life In Books, a new daily show hosted by the queen of mean is set to hit our screens with confirmed guests like the Duchess of Devonshire, P.D. James, Giles Coren and Sir Trevor McDonald.

Sherlock Holmes and James Bond are to be resurrected. Anthony Horowitz, children's novelist and TV writer (Foyle's War, Midsomer Murders), is writing the Holmes novel, while Jeffrey Deaver is following up Sebastian Faulk's Bond effort, Devil May Care, with a new 007 thriller - Carte Blanche. A new Holmes volume is intriguing. The cerebral sleuth is out of step with the gruesomeness of modern, hard-boiled detective narratives. Forget Robert Downey, Jr. or Benedict Cumberbatch: Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories are winsome tales, meandering along in a haze of psychology, subterfuge and pipe smoke. The razor-wielding grizzle of Silent Witness, Law and Order or CSI is chalk to its cheese.

A while back, the combined might of Steve Connor, John Mullan and Alex Clark huddled together on the BBC to debate the death of theory. All are veterans of the 1980s: when fiction about writing fiction and ideological subversion were all the rage. Sales and a sizeable readership were old hat. The better you were, the more PhD theses you inspired. However, as the three declared that day, that era seems to be passing. Three-digit sales figures don't make for much of a pension pot. And so rather than letting the James Pattersons of this world have all the fun with story, pace and plot, a new breed of novelist is evolving.   Most noticeably David Nicholls' One Day has been revving up steam recently and reshaping ideas of the literary and the popular.

References to rap, hip-hop, bling and life in 'da hood' are a rare sight on literary pages. But, in his donnish but beery style, Will Self piloted through his love-hate affair with the genre in the Times recently. Decoded, a new book by one of the proponents of rap-as-literature, Jay Z, comes in for some head-patting, while the Guardian critically dissects the book. (You can read excerpts from Decoded here). The debate about lyrics as literature is timeless. Bob Dylan's verbal outpourings are usually cited as proof, none more so than by his most unlikely champion, Sir Christopher Ricks. Whether the men of letters are genuine or just wanting to get all down and happening with the yoof remains to be seen.

‘The coalition’s proposal to slash funding for the arts…and humanities risk not just losing a generation of artists, but also a generation of critical and creative thinkers’. So says an indignant Guardian letter buttressed by a shopping list of academics. A familiar clarion call. But surprise, surprise what unites the subjects threatened with impoverishment? Books. It all, in the end, comes back to books. No matter how celebrated the lecturer, no matter how state-of-the-art the facilities, no matter how revolutionary and innovative the course, arts and humanities degrees at least are all about books.      Lectures are little more than a splash and a skim through material, a verbal snifter instead of the readerly gulp.