News & curiosities

Judge not, that ye may review
The New Statesman's 12th September issue featured John Sutherland's glowing review of Zadie Smith's new novel, On Beauty. So nothing out of the ordinary there. Except for the fact that, as noted at the end of the review, Sutherland is chair of the judges for this year's Booker prize, for which Smith's novel is shortlisted (the announcement was made the day before the NS hit the newsstands). The practice of Booker judges reviewing shortlisted books is not new, but it does seem odd. After all, judges wouldn't dream of telling journalists who they were rooting for from the shortlist, so why do it in a review? The winner will be announced on 10th October.?

Hoi polloi at the library
The British Library's collection of books, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, magazines, prints, drawings and sound recordings totals over 150m items. Lots of people want to look at these things, but the trouble is, according to the writer Judith Flanders, that they are not necessarily the people occupying the BL's reading rooms at St Pancras.

The library's well-meant commitment to "accessibility" means, according to Flanders, that its reading rooms are full of people with no intention of reading. In a recent letter to the TLS, she bemoans how one no longer needs to be a genuine "researcher" to get a reader's card, so that "the library is filled with, among others, people sleeping, students doing their homework, bright young things writing film scripts—in fact, doing almost anything except consulting the library's books." The influx of extra bodies has also meant more competition for seats, lockers and spaces in cycle racks.

Not all "library users" agree. "Isn't there just a touch of intellectual sneering," says one, "in that shot at 'bright young things'?" "And how does she know that the sleepers aren't immensely distinguished scholars?" asks another. The BL itself has responded, sort of, admitting that yes, there are not enough cycle racks.

What you missed in issue one

Few of you will remember the first issue of Prospect ten years ago, but it bears a family resemblance to the one you have in your hand. At 104 pages, it was thicker (attention spans were longer in those days) but printed on less good paper and with less colour. Amartya Sen's first-issue cover story on the link between economic growth and political freedom—focusing on China and India—is the kind of big-picture argument that we might run as a cover story today (although the grand old man would find his piece more tightly edited). Among the other contributors were Sarah Hogg, Frederic Raphael, Aleksa Djilas, Geoff Mulgan and about 15 others. The prize for the most incorrect prediction goes to RW Johnson, who in a piece on British politics said it would be "a miracle" if Labour achieved a majority in the 1997 election. The best prediction was written by the man who made it come true. Andrew Adonis, now an education minister, then an FT journalist, wrote a piece urging Tony Blair to become his own secretary of state for education when he became PM. Adonis went on to become an education adviser to Blair and, many people say, the agent through which Blair was indeed his own education secretary. Take a look for yourself—we've made the whole of our first issue free to read on our website.

Rebranding the gradualists
It seems that it's not only the Grauniad that has been undergoing a fit of rebranding. Our spies at the Fabian Society tell us that the venerable socialist think tank spent several thousand pounds on designers who, on hearing that the Fabians were "gradualists," and that they also liked to be thought of as quite dynamic, came up with a new logo that neatly combined the two ideas: a tortoise sitting atop a Harley Davidson. Whatever would the Webbs have thought?

Not so sure start
New Labour commitment to "evidence-based" policy has been quietly dropped in the case of Sure Start, the £3bn scheme to improve the life chances of deprived pre-school children. An early report on the scheme found no clear evidence of its success, but it is popular among the mothers who use it and the MPs in whose constituencies it operates. Defenders of the scheme say that 18 months is too soon to make a judgement; critics say it suffers from being too unstructured.