Film review: Choke
Mark Crick performs 'Hanging Wallpaper with Ernest Hemmingway' and 'Boarding an Attic with Edgar Allan Poe'
History's missing pages: Iranian academic sliced out sections of priceless collection
These are high times for Gordon Brown. He has been praised for saving the global financial system, and received a welcome respite from his electoral troubles at the Glenrothes byelection.
But not everything is rosy for the prime minister. His latest book, Wartime Courage: Stories of Extraordinary Courage by Ordinary People in World War Two, has sold just 193 copies in the fortnight it has been on sale.
In the same two weeks, Jordan - Pushed to the Limit, the latest instalment of the glamour model's autobiography, sold 4,446 copies, despite having been on sale for 10 months. Wartime Courage currently ranks at 10,646 in the Amazon UK sales chart.
To rub salt into his wounds, the reviews have been rotten. The Independent bemoaned Brown's "robotic neutrality", "engine-drone monotone" and "mealy-mouthed avoidance of 'controversial' issues". Writing in the Spectator, the author James Delingpole went further, describing Wartime Courage as a "leaden, clunken-fisted cuttings job". Brown has an "automaton-like inability either to empathise with his subject ... or to work out which details needed emphasising and which could be safely excluded".
Brown's subjects - which include the Chariots of Fire legend Eric Liddell and Violette Szabo, who worked undercover for the Special Operations Executive during the second world war - were intrinsically thrilling, said Delingpole. Which "makes it all the less excusable that Brown has made them seem so dull".
And that's not all. "His opening and closing essays are waffly, trite and, in so far as they attempt to make political capital from the achievements of people who have nothing whatsoever to do with him or his grisly ideology, offensive," complained Delingpole, who admitted that as a "starving author" he resented "the allocation by the publishing industry of time, money, space and attention to people who can barely write and anyway have well remunerated day jobs".
Not everyone hated it, however. The Jewish Chronicle's reviewer was a lone fan, saying all of the stories in the book were "well told" and made "compelling reading". "Finding time to write this book does the prime minister credit."
The book was due to be published in April, but did not hit the shops until November. A spokeswoman for Bloomsbury, the prime minister's publisher, denied it had been held back because of his low popularity ratings in the spring.
"The reason it was delayed was because he hadn't finished writing it - he didn't have a ghostwriter," said Bloomsbury's publicity director, Katie Bond.
Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of the publishing trade magazine the Bookseller, said that while he was surprised Brown's book had sold so badly, it was not the most tempting proposition.
Denny said: "It would be different if he had written his memoirs. That could be political dynamite. We've had half the story of the Blair years, but Brown's point of view could be fascinating."
But he added: "It is not disastrously bad. Hardback books do not sell in huge quantities any more. When the Booker longlist came out last year, of the 13 books, half had sold less than 1,000 copies."
Gordon Brown's first book on the subject of bravery, Courage: Eight Stories, which was published by Bloomsbury last year, has sold 4,469 copies in the UK, according to Nielsen BookScan.
The Conservatives may be falling back in the polls, but they are easily winning the book war: William Hague's biography of William Pitt the Younger has sold more than 78,000 copies since 2004.
PM's weighty tome
Tirpitz and Godfrey Place
On 11 September six X-craft set out for the thousand-mile journey. Each midget submarine had two crews: one for the passage out - on which they were towed by six larger submarines - and one operational crew to carry out the final attack. Two of the midget submarines broke adrift, one being eventually recovered, the other sinking with all hands. On 19 September the four remaining vessels approached the target area, still under tow. Towing problems delayed HM Submarine Stubborn and her charge X-7 when a floating mine - part of the outer defences of Altafjord - became caught on the tow-line and was then impaled on the bows of the midget submarine. [Godfrey] Place, the commander of X-7, went out on its forward casing and cleared the mine away with his foot.
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To the untrained eye the damage is barely visible. Yet within the handbound pages of books charting how Europeans travelled to Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul empire from the 16th century onwards, the damage caused by one Iranian academic to a priceless British Library collection is irreversible.
Leading scholars at the library are at a loss to explain why Farhad Hakimzadeh, a Harvard-educated businessman, publisher and intellectual, took a scalpel to the leaves of 150 books that have been in the nation's collection for centuries. The monetary damage he caused over seven years is in the region of £400,000 but Dr Kristian Jensen, head of the British and early printed collections at the library, said no price could be placed upon the books and maps that he had defaced and stolen.
"These are historic objects which have been damaged forever," said Jensen. "You cannot undo what he has done and it has compromised a piece of historical evidence which charts the early engagement of Europeans with what we now know as the Middle East and China.
"It makes me extremely angry. This is someone who is extremely rich who has damaged and destroyed something that belongs to everybody."
Hakimzadeh, 60, faces a jail sentence today when he appears at Wood Green magistrates court in London. The Iranian-born academic fled his country after the fall of the Shah and holds a US passport. He has pleaded guilty to 14 specimen charges of stealing maps, pages and illustrations from 10 books at the British Library and four from the Bodleian Library in Oxford dating back to 1998.
When police searched his home in Knightsbridge, west London, last July they discovered some of the missing maps, pages and pictures inserted into less valuable editions of the same books he owned.
Academics at the library were forced to turn detective in June 2006 after a reader who had taken out a copy of Sir Thomas Herbert's book A Relation of Some Yeares Travaille, Begunne Anno 1626 suggested some of its pages had been removed.
Careful examination by experts at the library proved him to be correct and the staff mounted a delicate operation to find out who had been damaging the book and whether other items had suffered the same fate.
Using electronic records, they found all the British Library members who had taken out the book and then examined other works these people had had contact with. They discovered that other works detailing the same periods in history and covering European engagement to the area from modern-day Syria to Bangladesh were also damaged.
Pages had been sliced away close to the spine of the books and maps, one of them worth £32,000, had been removed from chapters, leaving barely noticeable indentations in the paper marking where they had been.
"It was only the books taken out by Hakimzadeh which showed a consistent pattern of damage," said Jensen.
They discovered that Hakimzadeh had taken out 842 books and of these at least 150 had been mutilated. Some of the stolen pages were discovered but many have been lost forever.
The library wrote to Hakimzadeh, who at the time was chief executive of the Iran Heritage Foundation, a charity he formed in 1995 to promote and perserve the history, languages and culture of Iran. He replied saying he had no idea that there was any damage to the books. It was at this point that the library went to the police with the details of the investigation.
Forensic scientists analysed the damaged books and police officers called at Hakimzadeh's Knightsbridge home, where he lived with his wife.
"Some pages were found loose and others had been inserted into books in his own collection," said Jensen, who acccompanied the officers. "Hakimzadeh is eminently characteristic of our traditional groups of readers: he has a profound knowledge of the field. From my point of view, that makes it worse because he actually knew the importance of what he was damaging. What he did was use the cover of serious scholarly purpose to steal historic pieces and abuse our trust."
The library has launched a civil action to sue Hakimzadeh for full compensation.
Defaced books
The rare books that were defaced by Hakimzadeh include:
Historia de la China From the writings of Father Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit who travelled to China in 1582 and became the first western traveller to settle there. First published in Latin in 1615. This copy was printed in Spain in 1621. Ricci learned to speak and write Chinese and his work was the first important and reliable European description of the country.
Novus Orbis An anthology of works by Simon Grynaeus, professor of Greek at Basle. Hakimzadeh removed an engraving of a world map drawn by Hans Holbein the Younger, court painter to Henry VIII.
Mithridates By the English dramatist Nathaniel Lee. Published in 1693.
Ost-indian-und Persianische Reisen By Johann Gottlieb Worm, the German philosopher who accompanied an envoy of the Dutch East India Company sent to the Safavid court in Persia in 1717. He travelled to Isfahan from India via Bandar. Published in 1745.
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