Your weekly guide to what's really going on in the world of books

Your weekly guide to what's really going on in the world of books

For the past 10 years, Philip Lader, who was the US Ambassador here in the Clinton years and who is now an adviser to Morgan Stanley, has hosted thanksgiving lunches in what was once the London home of the Astor family.

Margaret Crick says being given an honour is not what it was

The effortlessly irritating Nick Clegg has done it again. Clegg the would-be writer has stepped forward, as tentative and unsatisfactory as Clegg the politician. In the latest issue of Easy Living, the Deputy Prime Minister reveals that he would like to write a novel one day. "I find writing very therapeutic," he says. "I would love to emulate the style of one of my favourite writers, J M Coetzee, although I don't think I ever could." During his twenties, he embarked on a novel inspired by another of his literary idols, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, but he abandoned it after 120 "shockingly bad" pages.

Hilary Rubinstein lived during a golden age of publishing, when publishers and literary agents (and he'd been both) were gentlemen, kept their words and always answered your letters. His long and mostly happy life was marked by his enthusiasms: for his family, for good books of every sort, for small, owner-run hotels and for chocolate. He was the youngest of three sons of a very old Anglo-Jewish family. One ancestor, a quill-maker, averted an attempt on the life of George III, and was rewarded with the royal warrant for quills.

Where are you now and what can you see?

As the BBC recreates the pairing of Bailey and The Shrimp, Mike Higgins recalls meetings that defined the decade

Jeffrey Archer, who has been the subject of plenty of political send-ups himself, tells Charlotte Cripps why he wants to give his collection to the nation

Almost from the moment that John Yates joined Scotland Yard in 1981, many of his colleagues in Britain's largest police force believed it was only a matter of time before he became Commissioner.

My parents were... my father was a printer, my mother was a journalist and local councillor. I think that possibly influenced my writing career.

Attend the words of the art establishment. "What makes Lowry so popular is the same thing which stops him being the subject of serious critical attention." Chris Stephens speaking, on ITV's documentary Looking for Lowry, shown last week, Chris Stephens being curator of modern British art at Tate Britain. A nasty job, making sure that no popular artist is exhibited, but someone has to do it.

Ten of these short stories are marked with an asterisk, to indicate that Jeffrey Archer didn't invent them; they were told to him by other people. The remaining five are "the result of my imagination". An interesting divide, especially as the majority of the stories told to him seem to concern cons and money, and the ones he made up flash their outcomes on huge neon signs from the outset. (The protagonist of "Blind Date", for example, is a man who is blind, chatting up a woman in a café. And can you guess, when she leaves, that she, too, turns out to be... No, I won't spoil it for you.)

To a gala dinner celebrating the 80th anniversary of the famed Foyles literary luncheon, where I learnt a thing or two about the perils of book signing (which, naturally, I'm filing away for future reference). "The worst thing about being an author," a tired and emotional Tara Palmer-Tompkinson assured me as she arrived, "is having such a bloody long name. My book signings take ages!"