The latest top five paperback fiction bestsellers in the UK are:
 
1 The Devil Wears Prada - Lauren Weisberger HarperCollins  35,573

2 Looking Good Dead  - Peter James   Pan Bks.   27,654

3 Winter in Madrid - C.J. Sansom   Pan Bks.   19,420

4 False Impression - Jeffrey Archer Pan Bks. 18,781

5 The Island - Victoria Hislop  Headline Review   16,826

and it's great to see a really strong performance from Pan.

Almost as gratifying is to see another top five list where we don't appear.
 
1. Confessions of an Heiress - Paris Hilton

2. Made In Portugal - Jose Mourinho

3. Jordan: A Whole New World - Katie Price

4. Jade's World - Neil Simpson

5. Managing My Life - Alex Ferguson
 
I expect you've already guessed the criteria for this list - the most discarded books in Travelodge hotel rooms!

As Christmas is approaching I thought you might like to switch on the audio on your computer and click here.

On a much more serious note, millions of people in developing countries die each year from diseases that are treatable or preventable and three diseases alone - AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria - kill over five million annually. But standard diagnostic tests which could significantly reduce the death toll are imperfect. For instance, the standard TB test misses half of all cases. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is committed to improving diagnostic health technology for the developing world and has worked with Nature to produce a special report which is available free online to everyone. It is a hugely important publication.

Last night I was fortunate enough to be invited by the private equity group Apax Partners to the Tate Britain for a party and a viewing of the Holbein in England show. The amazing success of private equity in recent years has always baffled me. They seem to make money appear out of nowhere and they continue to do so. I have had the trick explained many times but, rather like watching a brilliant conjuror, I still can't see how they do it!

Apart from marvelling at Holbein's technical expertise I came away certain that Henry VIII would have made an excellent rugby front row forward - see below.

Exact Editions is a company set up by some old friends of mine about a year ago. Much as I dislike vacuous mission statements and straplines I think theirs is both straightforward and true - Bringing magazines into the digital age. Unlike many start-ups they don't have wealthy individual or corporate backers and, as far as I know, they don't have glossy business plans with absurd projections of growth and pretty pictures throughout. They are testing the market for online magazines by spending as little as possible on themselves and using brainpower and hard work to attract readers (and publishers) to their site.

And one of the founders, Adam Hodgkin, posts regular insightful pieces on their blog. Adam is by training a philosopher and the pieces tend to be pretty intellectual. Fortunately he is from the pragmatist school of philosophy which is important when involved in business.

The most entertaining thing about the site at present is the random nature of the magazines represented (inevitable with a start-up) - Baptist Times jostling with The Spectator and Green Parent and Today's Flyfisher for our attention. Actually, it's just like going into a traditional newsagent.

Yesterday I wrote about the problems facing libraries. I should have mentioned two links if you're interested in more information - Tim Coates's Good Library Blog and Karen Christensen's Berkshire Blog which is about much else as well, including the fascinating Love US Hate US debate about what the world (and Americans) really feel about the USA. And if you're in the least bit interested in the challenges and opportunities in book publishing in the coming decade I recommend this special report in Forbes magazine.

You may have noticed that I went to two meetings last week where the 'Chatham House Rule' was applied. It seems that more and more activities are subject to some degree of restraint when it comes to expressing opinions. I sometimes think that leakiness and ill-considered statements are at an all-time high but I was pleased to be sent a copy of a recently declassified letter from Eisenhower to General George Patton sent on 29 April 1944.

Dear General Patton

My attention has been called to a statement of yours in which you expressed an opinion as to the future political position of the United States, Great Britain and Russia. I have examined all available reports in the case, including that brought to my attention by your Chief of Staff, and I thoroughly understand that you thought you were talking privately, and moreover that your statements were made on the spur of the moment. Nevertheless, I must tell you frankly that I regard this incident with the utmost seriousness and you should understand thoroughly that it is still filled with drastic potentialities regarding yourself....

I have warned you time and agan against your impulsiveness in action and speech and have flatly instructed you to say nothing that could possibly be misinterpreted by your own subordinates or by the public....

I am throughly weary of your failure to control your tongue and have begun to doubt your all-round judgment, so essential in high military position....

I want to tell you officially and definitely that if you are again guilty of any indiscretion in speech or action that leads to embarrassment for the War Department, any other part of the Government, or for this Headquarters, I will relieve you instantly from command.

Sincerely,

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Commanding General European Theater of Operations

Phew. That's telling him. I wonder whether there was a reply and, if so, what it said.

Back in September I wrote about a Pan nostalgia website. Just for fun and with the polonium case in mind I reproduce one item.

This great website is run by Tim Kitchen and he wrote to me recently. It seems that people's interest in what his wife calls an obsession and he calls a hobby has encouraged him to do even more:

'I was going to stop at about 1963 when the number was added to the logo on the front cover and I do have all 1500 titles apart from two and these are all on the site. I then carried on with the later titles which still used PAN's eclectic number system. I definitely stop where ISBN comes in. Of the later titles I have over a thousand still to scan in with about 200 left on the wants list.'

On Thursday I attended a round table meeting at the Smith Institute where a group of very senior politicians, librarians, and managers met to discuss how best to ensure a first-class public library system in the UK. The debate was intelligent and constructive and clearly everyone is aware of the issues of efficiency, management and the need to deliver a service which the citizen wants. The Museums, Libraries,and Archives Council is the body charged with strategic oversight of libraries and they have produced a number of excellent reports over the years.

I have two concerns. First that, in spite of much protestation to the contrary, I'm not sure that books are really seen as central to the library system by some of of the participants. These are the objectives for libraries as set out on the MLA website:

Last night I attended one of the regular dinners of this society founded in 1921. It meets eight times a year at the Savile Club in Mayfair.

The Chatham House Rule applies, so I cannot share with you what was said by whom and technically I cannot reveal the name of the speaker (but I do have his permission). It was Stephen Prickett and he gave a fascinating description of his current job which has one of the longest titles in my experience - Director of the Armstrong Browning Library and Margaret Root Brown Professor for Browning Studies and Victorian Poetry, at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, as well as Regius Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland - phew.

But the most embarrassing moment was when neither of us could remember what he'd worked on for Macmillan. He edited the series 'Romanticism in perspective'.

If the Society of Bookmen has a rather traditional feel, the Centre for Creative Business could not be more 21st century. It is a partnership between the London Business School and the University of the Arts London which I represent on their committee. The strange thing is that both the Society and the Centre have very similar aims - to inspire, facilitate, network, enjoy and help sustain creative businesses, the former restricted to writers, booksellers, publishers and other members of the book trade, the latter a wider group.

Off to rainy Basingstoke today. Apparently there are rumours that Basingstoke can deploy nuclear weapons in less than an hour. I'd better check out this new element on the axis of evil.

And finally an excellent piece by Bryan Appleyard in The Times about the importance of popular science books. His last para says it all.

'These new, humble, wondrous books — and, indeed, that great TV testament to wonder, Planet Earth — are an unalloyed good. They restore the true faith, and will, in time, send children to seek out whatever maths and physics courses they can find amid the debris of the science faculties.'

Every now and again I feel moved to do an update on Macmillan New Writing, our programme for finding new fiction talent which was memorably described as a Ryanair (cheap and basic) concept in Charlotte Higgins's piece in The Guardian. The publishing business model is quite simple. If we can avoid losing money on individual titles the occasional discovery will allow us to make a modest profit overall. We've managed the first part of the equation successfully. All the titles have performed decently but none of the authors has 'broken out' into the really big time. We think we may have found our first mega-seller and I've asked Will Atkins, the editor of MNW, to tell us about it.

'Never Admit to Beige puts Jonathan Drapes firmly on the map as one of Australia's most talented new writers.' - The Big Issue

On Wednesday night we launched Jonathan Drapes’s novel Never Admit to Beige. There were canapés, inflatable palm-trees and (this being an Australian novel by an Australian author) plenty of wholly ungracious bragging about the cricket.

BBC Five Live’s Simon Mayo Show has recently begun a Book of the Month slot and Never Admit to Beige is its December selection. It’ll be discussed live on Five today from 3pm, with Jonathan and a panel of guest reviewers; there's also an online forum where listeners can comment on the book.

Never Admit to Beige is the fourteenth Macmillan New Writing novel to be published since our first books appeared in April. It's an anarchic comic romp across Australia's Gold Coast, following guileless young Englishman Trigger Harvey as he searches, with increasing futility/desperation, for his lost luck. (Jonathan, incidentally, tells me he hadn't heard of his character's Only Fools and Horses namesake when he wrote the book). It includes shootouts with Japanese mafia, a run-in with a couple of coke-dealing OAPs, and probably the most violent round of golf in literary history. It's also turned out to be rather hard to classify - on its website, Five Live has a commendable bash: 'A kind of James Bond meets Inspector Clouseau with Men Behaving Badly'.

The Five Live Book of the Month slot is relatively new, so its impact on sales remains to be seen, but we've put through a pretty sizable paperback reprint, and Borders will be carrying the book in their Christmas 3 for 2 promotion.  Never Admit to Beige is funny and loveable and bursting with energy; turns out it's also rather prophetic:

“Next Ashes series,” one of the novel’s minor characters goads Trigger, “you guys don’t stand a bloody chance. Not if Warney’s on form.”

I suugest that non-cricket lovers and anglophiles give this a miss.

When I went to bed on Monday night in the Cotswolds I calculated that the England cricket team would boringly bat until teatime on the last day of the test match in Adelaide thus scuppering any chance of a victory and ensuring a feeble but safe draw. Being an optimist I thought that maybe, just maybe, one of the batsmen would shine and we'd be able to get ourselves into a position where we had more than three hours to bowl Australia out and level the series. It was only when I woke at the ungodly hour of 3.30am that it occurred to me that England's batting might collapse and leave Australia a gettable target. I immediately realised that this was a wholly irrational nightmare and went back to sleep. On awakening I logged into BBC Sport and the excellent ball-by-ball commentary of Ben Dirs. This is what he had to say and there's nothing much I or anyone else can add: