Sam Leith

I’ve long had a theory – despite knowing many clever and nice people who work in the sector – that consultancy firms don’t have a scooby-doo what they’re doing. They radiate immense power and authority as brands, they are fluent in corporate bull-pucky, and they charge truly obscene fees but I suspect their main superpower is getting someone to the C-suite to spend a lot of the company’s money on telling the company what it wants to hear. I mean, in the first place, isn’t it the job of those people in the C-suite to manage stuff themselves? Aren’t they being paid, usually quite well, to be managers?

There is (isn’t there always?) a crisis in nonfiction publishing. But this time it really is a crisis, or at least, it seems more of a crisis than the previous ones. The problem is: not enough people are buying the stuff anymore. Last year’s nonfiction sales were down fully six per cent on the 2024 figures, and the long-term graph gives a picture of consistent, rapid, decline. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, who host the superb podcast The Rest Is History, are part of the problem as well as part of the solution Woe to the world. As someone who has skin in the game – not a lot of skin, admittedly; more like one of those sore bits you get when you’ve been chewing the corner of your thumb – this grieves me.

The parents of Lucy Letby, the nurse currently serving a sentence after being convicted of child murder, have complained to Netflix after seeing the trailer for a new documentary about their daughter’s case. In the first statement they have made publicly since her 2023 conviction, they say that the footage front and centre in the trailer – previously unreleased police video of Letby being arrested in her pyjamas in her bedroom at home – is a “complete invasion of privacy”.

Andy Burnham's bid to stand as an MP – and Keir Starmer's decision to block him from doing just that, means this has been an exciting weekend for news about blokes in glasses. Only yesterday, one bloke in glasses (Starmer) stood accused of doing the dirty on another bloke in glasses (Burnham), because he suspected the second bloke in glasses of planning to do the dirty on him. On the face of it, though, these blokes in glasses are both very much on the same team, and want only the best for one another. As well as the glasses and the nondescript air, both these blokes in glasses have the same selling point Let me explain.

‘“I’ll be PM this time next year,” Starmer tells BBC.’ Such was the headline on the BBC’s website over the Prime Minister’s interview with Laura Kuenssberg, in a place of some prominence. I feel like I’ve read this one before, don’t you? It is, hilariously yet also, oddly, boringly, the headline that now goes on every interview our useless PM gives. Out he sets, determined, as I expect he sees it, to draw a line under the speculation about his future and talk about the things that really matter to hardworking families, salt-of-the-earth toolmakers, and so on – and the most interesting thing he manages to say is that he’s still going to be in his job a year from now. Which hardly draws a line.

It used to be said that you could walk from the west of Ireland to Nantucket on the backs of the cod, so thick was the Atlantic with the fish. But as readers of a certain age will remember, by the last decade of the last century, it was looking doubtful that the cod population would see this century out to the end. By 1992, the cod population was one hundredth of its historic level.   We knew that the way we were fishing was, in that unappealing but apt vogue-word, unsustainable. The fishermen themselves knew that it was unsustainable – that they were destroying the very resource on which their livelihoods and futures depended; that they were, in effect, sawing off the branch they were sitting on. And yet, for years, the overfishing... just sort of happened.

'I celebrate myself, and sing myself,' wrote Walt Whitman in his rhapsodic celebration of freedom, Leaves of Grass. 'And what I assume you shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.// I loafe and invite my soul,/ I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.' Dog walkers have complained of being asked to provide evidence of having poo-bags about their person A century and a half later Roy Marsh, 86, was leaning and loafing at his ease by a boating lake in Skegness when he, too, interacted with a spear of grass. This spear of grass was blown into the poor fellow’s mouth by a gust of wind.