Philip Hensher: What the Dickens is she talking about?

Madame Fu Ying, the Chinese Ambassador to Britain, has written a touching article upbraiding us all for being so perfectly beastly to the poor old Olympic torch the other week. We made small Chinese children cry – "they were running between vehicles for the whole day ... they had only three hours of sleep the previous day and some were having lunch sandwiches just now."

It's all so unfair! Tibet, after all is "a loved land" where everyone is perfectly happy and everyone goes to school (where, she doesn't mention, they have to be Chinese to get an equitable shot at a proper education). They are "well-fed, well-clothed and well-housed". On the other hand, Madame Fu Ying added, continuing this cavalcade of drivel, her starving and exhausted infant minions were shocked at the state of Britain and its poor manners. "One girl remarked she couldn't believe this land nourished Shakespeare and Dickens," she said.

Which just goes to show, that you can prove anything you like by quoting literature. The idea that Dickens would have had the slightest patience with the ridiculous, got-up farce of celebrities running through the streets of London with a gas torch, protected by bodyguards in blue tracksuits, is perfectly incredible. Dickens, all his life, hated injustice more than anything. If his imagination, to us, sometimes doesn't seem to venture beyond Europe with much sympathy – all those jokes about Borrioboola-Gha in Bleak House and the generic Chinese in Edwin Drood – that can only be because it seemed remote and unreal. Faced with the reality, Dickens would certainly have despised this Chinese government. If he hated even the machinery of Victorian government in Little Dorrit, how would he feel about these remote, cruel and autocratic Beijing rulers?

The Chinese ambassador has expressed herself with quite staggering impertinence here. Not satisfied with telling us off for not welcoming Chinese dignitaries with streamers and flowers, she now has the cheek to start telling us that our greatest national novelist would have been on her side, and not on the side of freedom. In the immediate wake of the torch's limping progress through London, the swimmer Duncan Goodhew turned up to remark that the protests were a very bad example to set for children. It was an extraordinarily stupid thing to say. The protesters were in the long, benevolent and admirable traditions of free political debate in England. Mr Goodhew is just somebody who used to swim quite fast. Which, really, is the better thing for a child to engage with – ceaseless pointless physical exertion in 10ft of chlorinated water, or sticking up for freedom? When Madame Fu Ying cites a Dickens who would have been horrified by protest and not at all in favour of personal freedoms, we can only presume that the Chinese are given special translations of his works – ones where David Copperfield stays in the blacking factory, joins the Party and rises to be District Commissar, denouncing Steerforth on the way for his ideological impurity.

Those who go to the Beijing Olympics are going to be regarded, in future, very much like those who went to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. But they could mitigate their moral failing by simply packing copies of Little Dorrit to hand out when they get there. Dickens is such a proponent of individual freedom, it is hard to believe that the Chinese have not banned him. It was a mistake for the Chinese ambassador to mention his name at all.

Youngsters don't have time to read

Miss Lily Allen, the popular chanteuse, has stepped down from judging the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction owing to ill-health. I have shared a judging panel or two with those much-maligned creatures, the celebrity judges. Without exception, they have always been scrupulous, interested, engaged readers who made some of their professional colleagues look narrow and cynical.

The problem with Miss Allen, left, I would hazard, was not her celebrity status. It was almost certainly her age. Education nowadays does not encourage wide and voracious reading, and very few people her age develop the habit on their own. Literature undergraduates find it a struggle to read one novel a week. How are they ever going to read an entire prize shortlist?

* Something calling itself the Queen's English Society has decided to issue a demand for a binding definition of poetry. Fed up with modern poetry, its members have called upon poets to abide by the constraints of rhyme and metre.

"If it doesn't have rhyme or metre," said the QES president, Bernard Lamb, "it is not poetry, it is just prose." Bernard, who is about 120 years late shutting this particular stable door, is a lecturer in genetics.

I wonder why, whenever anyone surfaces to start telling us what poetry is or ought to be, they never seem to be poets themselves. Last year, it was a really grisly book by Stephen Fry, explaining how to write poetry, and inadvertently demonstrating that he couldn't do it himself.

Poor old poetry; it makes so little money for anyone, and is so constantly available to be kicked around by people holding a few invincibly ignorant prejudices.

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