Booker is 40. It now ranks as Britain's second oldest national fiction prize. Pride of place in that league goes to the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, an annual award in the gift of the Regius Professor of English at Edinburgh University. That department plausibly claims to be the first of its kind anywhere, which gives the prize - the first of its kind in Britain - a double lustre. [...]

On one side of the "gr8 db8" stands valiant David: the author - one is told - of a hundred books. He speaks for the motion that "texting is the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative". And "ludic" to boot.

And, on the other side of the "gr8 db8" stands ugly, naysaying Goliath. Philistine Me. To my frank consternation, I find myself quoted, without permission (but [...]

Bestseller lists began in the United States in the 1890s. They were introduced over here, foot-draggingly ("damned Yankee things"), in 1974. Since then, with cultural globalisation, Anglo-American taste in very popular books has converged. No surprise to see Stephen King riding high on both sides of the Atlantic. Or, handy-dandy, J K Rowling.

But recently there has been a symptomatic divergence. Topping the US hardback fiction lists has been Geraldine [...]

Here's a challenge. Think of a famous Mormon - apart from the one who may well be the most powerful man in the world, come next November. No shame in being stumped. There's a good reason that Mormons are the invisible Americans. Mormons are scarred by persecution, and it has made them very shy. In the television drama series Big Love (whose runaway popularity has done Mitt Romney no harm), [...]

The novel can do many things. But rarely can it do them quickly. It takes too long to write, to manufacture, to distribute. As such, the political novel, in our crazy-hurry world, is usually a contradiction in terms. Nonetheless, Henry Holt has declared its new publication The Race, by Richard North Patterson, "the best political novel for years".

The Race, published in the 2007 primary season, takes that same season [...]

The Iraq War has dragged on longer than the Second World War. Soldiers' reportage never caught up with that conflict. Letters were censored; mail deliveries were slow. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead describes the pain of receiving letters weeks after the dreaded telegram had rendered them the cruelest of war's ironies.

Operation Iraqi Freedom is something else. American warplanes and helicopters rule the skies - American servicemen rule [...]

To the mortification, doubtless, of its literary editor, for the past six months the New York Times bestseller list has prominently featured Kevin Trudeau's The Weight Loss Cure "They" Don't Want You to Know About, the follow-up to his 2003 blockbuster Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About.

Trudeau is the kind of quack who gives snake-oil merchants a good name. In earlier life a straight-forward crook, [...]

When my son enrolled in junior school, among his first assignments was to learn by heart the capitals of all 50 states of the Union. Harder than it would seem, given states' preferences for selecting weak cities to stop strong cities getting stronger.

But the best US geography lesson could be taught using crime novels, the cities in which they're set, and the urban characters they bring with them.

The [...]

The UK and US are two countries divided by a common book – or Book. In the UK, the “authorised” King James Bible has, since its publication in 1611, remained the protected property of the crown – like swans and treasure trove. In the republican US, the King James Bible has never been in copyright. And the US approach to merchandising it is refreshingly un-institutional.

Amazon.com (but not its [...]

Nothing measures more precisely the gulf between the two great English-speaking communities than the word they use for their closest family member. Whether you say Mom/Mommy or Mum/Mummy distinguishes two wholly different worlds.

American politicians know that motherhood is a royal route to election. One of the strangest children's books, in this longest of American pre-election seasons, is Why Mommy is a Democrat by Jeremy Zilber and illustrator Yuliya Firsova. [...]