Treat literature savagely - and it will flourish

This is what I am currently doing to Sebastian Faulks: standing back and admiring ... in the same way, and from the same distance, you might stand back and admire the unexploded doodlebug you have just dug out of your rosebed.

Mr Faulks has just given an interview in which - alongside some mildly astringent remarks about the stylistic shortcomings of the Koran - he makes clear that he thinks book reviewers aren't necessarily the best thing about the literary world. Look out!

Worse than that, his new novel, A Week in December, contains a book reviewer called R Tranter, whose sole delight is torching the reputations of writers whose superior talent and success he envies.

Some people think it is modelled on the Norwich-based literary anchorite DJ Taylor.

The explanations given for Mr Faulks's alleged antipathy to "the Deej" are various. Some say it's because he claimed that Sebastian once failed to get a job on the NME.

Others say that they were friends until he wrote a "devastating" review of Faulks's novel Human Traces.

Neither seems to me too convincing. Mr Faulks is in his right mind, mostly, so wouldn't make once not getting a job on the NME the basis for a vendetta.

And the review of Human Traces, while a bit sniffy, was far from a hatchet job. (Crocodile Dundee moment: "Hatchet? That's not a hatchet. THIS... is a hatchet!") Besides, in my experience curly-haired numpty Mr Faulks takes teasing with rather good grace.

He, anyway, says Tranter is not Taylor, and we are bound to believe him. If we're honest, a reviewer seething with envy and thwarted ambition could be any one of them - sorry, us.

The character of Tranter, says our Faulks, is intended to make a wider point.

The interview attributes to him the view that "British novelists cannot deliver the serious novel about their times in a climate of mockery".

It's a properly interesting question, this, and I don't think it's a closed one.

Those of us whose job it is to do the mocking tend to take the view - with unthinking self-assurance, it should be said - that a climate of mockery is good for serious literature.

We imagine serious literature as being like certain sorts of grapevine that do best in flinty soil, or roses that flourish when savagely pruned back.

There is no real evidence for this. But, likewise, there is no evidence - how could there be? - that great novels are suffocating in utero because their authors are scared of getting an unkind review from D J Taylor.

Either way, the one person who has surely now been finessed into giving Sebastian's new book a generous review is the Deej. No fool, that Faulks.

A sign of our rubbish times

It is an experience all too familiar to many Londoners.

In the small hours of the morning you hear vulpine howls, a scrabbling noise at the bottom of the garden, then the sound of the bins clattering over and bin-bags being torn to shreds.

"Oh God, darling. We've got bloody investigative journalists again ..."

Environment secretary Hilary Benn is the latest victim, caught red-handed with "glass, plastic, cardboard, paper and food" in his black bin bags when they should have been in the recycling bin.

I don't pass judgment one way or the other. But it feels like a sign of the smallness of our times. Ten years ago the notorious Benji "the Binman" Pell was selling newspapers scoops based on the contents of documents he found in people's rubbish.

Now the scoop is the fact the documents are in the rubbish at all, never mind what's written on them.

Look, would you buy a book from this woman

Tony and Cherie Blair are photographed this week in Beijing promoting the Chinese-language edition of Mrs Blair's autobiography Speaking For Myself.

They look very happy but it makes me wonder whether they might not both have gone a bit mad.

Would you walk into Waterstone's and buy a copy of Liu Yongqing's autobiography? Of course you wouldn't. You probably haven't even heard of Liu Yongqing.

I had to look on Wikipedia to discover the name of Hu Jintao's wife - and I imagine that for those Chinese people with access to Wikipedia the situation will be pretty much the same in reverse.

It may be objected that Cherie Booth is a relatively senior lawyer in her own right. But there's a rather limited market for memoirs of our legal system over here, let alone in other countries.

Mrs Blair's hardback was the 68,535th best-selling book on Amazon.co.uk yesterday. Her paperback was up at 15,499th.

If she betters their success with a push into the Chinese market, it'll be testament to how much more outward-looking the Chinese are than the Brits, and a credit to Mrs Blair's business acumen. But, like I say, I think she's gone a bit mad.

On being introduced to a goateed designer at a Buckingham Palace party, Prince Philip is reported to have exclaimed: "Well, you didn't design your beard too well, did you?"

That's rather witty for off-the-cuff, I think. We're forever reporting the Duke of Edinburgh's "gaffes", as if he's some great dim lunk of a fellow with his foot constantly plunging into his mouth.

I think it's about time we acknowledged that the opposite is true.

The Duke's not being obnoxious by accident: he's being obnoxious on purpose. Which as we all know is the mark of a gentleman.