As John Self rightly pointed out in an earlier comment, John Sutherland writes well for The Guardian on books, despite being an apparently controversial choice for Chair of the Booker panel this year. Here’s his article in today’s paper.
There was a sad news item last week about 130,00 penguins doomed to die because of the havoc wrought on their environment by climate-warming. Damn George Bush and his SUVs.
It’s been a disastrous year for the other Penguin as well. Last spring the imprint’s super-agglomerated parent group, Pearson, brought on-stream its new, airport-sized warehouse at Rugby. The computer operating system, predictably, crashed. They always do. From April to June the system stayed obstinately down. Penguin books were scarcer than Penguin’s teeth. Delivery, almost a year later, is still constipated and hiccupy.