Billionaires Put Their Money into Searching for Answers

Last year, as I started work on my book about the futurologist James Martin, he had just pledged to give another $50-million of his own money to the school he had founded at Oxford University, The James Martin 21st Century School, if other benefactors would be willing to match the money. He had already given the school $100-million to get them started.

There were many who were sceptical that he would be able to find enough people willing to take up the challenge and match his offer during a time of apparent economic meltdown.

A couple of nights ago I went to hear him give The Commonwealth Lecture in the Faraday Theatre at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street and found him bubbling with even more enthusiasm than usual. The pledges were all in and other donors, including such mighty names as George Soros and Bill Gates, had come up with an astonishing $90-million to add to Jim’s promise of $50-million.

The aim of the school is to “foster innovative thinking, deep scholarship and collaborative activity to address the pressing risks and create new opportunities for the 21st Century”.

It’s grand to know that so many people are willing to put their cheque books where their mouths are when it comes to sorting out the problems of the future – if only we could find some political leaders cut from the same cloth.

My book about Jim – currently entitled “The Change Agent – How to Create a Wonderful World” is scheduled for publication by Tonto Books in October.

Dinner With Zippy

People complain about the corporatisation of modern publishing and at the London Book Fair smooth be-suited purveyors of digital wonders did seem to outnumber the traditional tweeds, bow ties and boxes of remaindered titles.

Stuart Wheatman of Tonto Books, however, shines like a beacon of hope for those who like their publishers to be mischievous and eccentric, happier following their own hunches and enthusiasms than attending sales and marketing meetings.

The estimable Wheatman has bought a couple of titles off me and so we arranged to meet for supper in the Earls Court Road after the show had closed its doors, along with his editor in chief, Jill Morris.

Flushed and panting, Wheatman exploded through the crowd of new arrivals waiting around the door a couple of minutes late, lugging what looked like a school trunk, which he dropped beside the table as he sank gratefully into his chair, struggling for breath.

‘It’s Zippy,’ he said, gesturing to the trunk. ‘From Rainbow. I’ve got to guard him for the night and get him back to Soho in the morning.’

Zippy’s alter-ego, puppeteer Ronnie le Drew, is doing a book with Stuart and he and Zippy had been making a personal appearance at the Fair.

This seems a good start towards Stuart’s professed ambition to build a list of ‘quirky left-field lives’ in the style of John Blake. The wisdom of this ambition was born out by the news from the Book Fair that John Blake himself would not be able to attend this year as he was ‘trapped on his yacht in Turkey’ by the volcanic dust crisis.

The following evening I was back in a crowded Earls Court pub with Stuart, who was sandwiched between one of my clients, the colourful rock and country impresario, Mervyn Conn, and one of the pub’s regulars, a mighty seven foot transvestite of African descent.

What a wonderful and varied world book publishing still is.

A Despised and Secretive Breed

Feeling crushed today upon reading in the Daily Mail that Chris Tookey, the esteemed newspaper’s film and theatre critic, believes ghostwriters are “a despised and secretive breed”.

It must be wonderful to belong to two breeds as adored as theatre critics and Daily Mail journalists. Note to self, must try harder to break into a more revered circle of folk.

How the Fabulous Dreams of Melissa Bell Came True

Tomorrow sees the publication of Heart and Soul, a book I have helped Melissa Bell to write.

Melissa is a singer, a kidney dialysis patient and campaigner, and the mother of X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke.

The story takes flight when, as a shy, plump ten year-old, Melissa sees Lena Zavaroni winning Opportunity Knocks and dreams of one day doing the same herself.

Many years later she gets to see her daughter become an overnight star and fulfil all the dreams she herself was chasing so passionately, but by that time she is confined to a kidney dialysis machine for a large part of her life.

It is a story that anyone who has dreamed of being a star, or who has harboured wild ambitions for their children, will understand.

Heart and Soul is being published by John Blake.

Ghostwriter as Scurfy Recluse

Oh, the hubris of it all. In the very same week that the great Horace Bent celebrates the sex appeal of the ghostwriting fraternity in the equally great trade organ, The Bookseller, Terence Blacker writes in The Author that in publishing now scurfy recluses "put the words on paper", while well-scrubbed celebrities "appear on the cover and do the chat show circuit". From “sexy” to “scurfy”, how mortifying.

The eminent Blacker, however, goes on to provide a chink of light by predicting that within a year ghostwriters will be forming their own trade association, Ghostwriters of Britain (GOB), and will be powerful enough to “cripple the book trade for several months” by withdrawing their labour. The revenge of the scurfy recluses; it seems our day of power is nigh.

“Ain’t Ghostwriters Sexy?”

Not my words, obviously, heaven forfend, but those of Horace Bent, éminence grise of the Bookseller magazine, and himself a strangely attractive man. I feel I must thank him, not only on behalf of myself but on behalf of all my fellow literary wall flowers as we shuffle awkwardly in the shadows of the great literary prom dance, too shy and unsure of ourselves to step out into the spotlight. Mr Bent, you see, has also been to a preview of “The Ghost” and has had his heartbeat quickened by the performance of "dapper" Ewan McGregor, our representative in the limelight.

A Viewing Room in Soho

An email out of the blue invites me to a preview of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost”, in a viewing room behind a discreet Soho door and up dark, creaking wooden stairs.

No sign of the email sender when I arrive, just a tiny cinema sparsely populated with professionals. There can be no sign of Polanski during this launch either, or course, because he is under house arrest in Switzerland for crimes too old and too famous to be regurgitated here, except that his fate strangely mirrors that of Pierce Brosnan’s character in the film, an ex British Prime Minister holed up in a rich man’s heavily guarded beach house. Once swept to power on a wave of adoration he is now wanted for war crimes and the publishers who have paid out millions for his memoirs are demanding speedy delivery of a manuscript that will recoup their outlay.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the promotional machine for Tony Blair’s forthcoming memoir is kicking into life with suggestions of publication in the autumn. No one has bothered to make any secret of the fact that Pierce Brosnan’s character was modelled by its creator, novelist Robert Harris, on Blair himself. Blair and Harris used to be friends but, one imagines, not any more.

When Harris’s book, “The Ghost”, was published, bearing quotes from my own book, “Ghostwriting” at the opening of every chapter, I was just starting work on a book for the mysterious futurologist and educationalist, Jim Martin. As I travelled out to his private island in Bermuda the parallels seemed uncanny. But whereas the secret tunnels, fantastical buildings and gardens that riddle Jim Martin’s island are drenched in sunshine, Polanski’s wind and rain-swept landscapes are altogether bleaker and darker, the violent sea grey and menacing rather than brilliant blue and sparkling. In Polanski and Harris’s world there is a body on the beach rather than the sails of millionaires’ yachts bobbing cheerfully off shore.

The ghost of the title is played by Ewan McGregor, a Chandleresque protagonist suddenly transported into a closed, dangerous, mysterious world. Initially, as with many ghostwriting projects in the real world, virtually nothing going on around him makes sense. But then slowly, as he grows familiar with his story and the characters, he sees the terrible truth materialise out of the lies and secrets.

As the film ended and the lights came back on there was still no sign of the e-mail sender who had assured me he was so looking forward to meeting me, and in the bright sunlight of Old Compton Street the darkness and menace of the film begins to fade. But actually Polanski and Harris’s world is all around us. Polanski himself is still under house arrest, Blair’s publishers still have a memoir they have to sell, there is still talk of possible war crimes accusations hanging in the air and still no one can really explain what madness drove us to go to war in Iraq with the Americans. There are conspiracy theories circulating on the internet as to why the authorities should have chosen the moment when Blair was running for European President to resurrect the case against Polanski after so many decades of indifference.

Nothing, as always, is quite as safe as it seems as I head with my wife to Little Italy in Frith Street for a late lunch.