Bookend
I am beginning to wonder about the literary editor of the Spectator, one Peter Ackroyd. This year he was invited to be a judge for the £5,000 Booker Prize, one of whose purposes is to give publicity to modern British fiction and especially to the several novels traditionally short-listed before the winner is announced. For the first three years of the prize's life, six novelists enjoyed the attendant benefits of being thus short-listed. In 1972 and 1973 this dropped to four. Last year it crept back to five, and sighs of relief were to be heard in publishers' publicity offices. This year Mr Ackroyd and his co-judges Angus Wilson, Roy Fuller and Susan Hill had a record 83 entries to consider — doubtless a labour of love, although love does have its rewards (in this case £500 each). After months of homework and deliberation their short-list for Britain's major fiction award was published last week: it comprised the grand total of two novels — one Indian, one Australian.
Rivers crossing
Another literary editor, the able and wellliked Rivers Scott of the Sunday Telegraph, has decided to quit the club. He is crossing the street (almost literally) to join Hodder and Stoughton as an editor — a move for which there is at least one precedent, Harold Harris having left the literary editorship and the Standard some years ago to join Hutchinson — and I wish Mr Scott well in his more commercial role. At the time of writing, no successor had been appointed at the Sunday Telegraph. My own tip? Duff Hart-Davies.
Guardian angels
Following my story last week about the apparent poverty of the Financial Times (unwilling to contribute to the cost of a party in honour of its star reviewer C. P. Snow) I discover similar signs in another corner of the Fourth estate. That pioneer in the cause of press freedom, the Guardian, has now started asking publishers to pay the travel costs of its interviewers.
Poet's corner
Michael Horowitz tells me he is hard up and badly needs a plug for Live New Departures, the paperback poetry anthology he has edited and published himself. Not being an authority on the modern bard I shall do no such thing. But anyone interested in absorbing the favour of the book may like to know that several of its contributors — among them Christopher Logue, Brian Patten, Jeff Nuttall and Heathcote Williams — will be giving recitations at London's Unity Theatre on the evenings of 28th and 29th November.
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