Terence Blacker is musing in the London Independent (August 20th) on the idea of privatising the library service.

It’s not his idea, mind you, more that of the British culture minister, Ed Vaizey, who last week launched “The Future Libraries ...

A sparkling review by Neal Ascherson of Adam Sisman’s biography of the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in the London Review of Books.

“In the 1950s,” Ascherson writes, “there still existed in Britain a few fairylands of ancient privilege and ...

An interview with Pascal Fouché, a noted French historian of the book, is translated and republished from the French review Esprit in Eurozine (www.eurozine.com).

“It’s true,” he says, “that the most important question is what will happen to the publishing process ...

Howard Jacobson, whose new novel The Finkler Question is on the Booker longlist, is interviewed by Lindesay Irvine, for the Guardian’s books Review.

Invited to fulminate about his neglect by literary award-givers, Jacobson chooses instead to make a ...

Pierre Assouline, in his regular Le Monde blog La République des Livres, pays tribute to Tony Judt, who died late last week.

“Provocative? It goes without saying. Tony Judt was one of those fighter-intellectuals, as there are writer-travellers. He ...

It has always been a close-at-hand item in the stock PR of the book trade that booksellers “welcome browsers”. It is, however, an improbable notion when you think about it: booksellers welcome bookbuyers, and indeed why wouldn’t they given that those ...

Not everyone will be rushing out to buy Tom McCarthy’s Booker-longlisted C after an enthusiastic review by Christopher Tayler in the Guardian’s books Review (July 31st).

“In articles, lectures and interviews, McCarthy speaks the language of post-humanism,” writes Tayler. ...

Tony Judt is meditating on education again in the New York Review of Books (August 19th), this time not secondary school but university, and in particular King’s College, Cambridge, which he started to attend in 1966.

“My King’s,” he writes, ...

Matthew d’Ancona in The Daily Telegraph is impressed by Peter Mandelson’s The Third Man: Life at the Heart of New Labour (Harper, £25).

“Fluently written and substantial, this is a serious book by a serious man whose love of theatre, ...

Le Monde continues (July 23^rd) its ambitious thirty-part series on cultural reviews. Numbers eight and nine having been dedicated to two sturdy growths of twentieth century French intellectualism, the Christian “personalist” Emmanuel Mounier’s Esprit and the existentialist and ...