(1) Agreed.

(2) I bloody hate Marmite.

(3) This is true. I don’t even remember Bravo Two Zero being a good book…but it was certainly gripping.

(4) Yes, I do like that kind of bookshop — it’s just (as you say) Waterstone’s is not it, and it’s damnably hard to find non-Waterstone’s bookshops. There are one or two in Canterbury, Actually, I had a pleasant experience in a W’s yesterday. The chap saw that I was buying ‘Twilight’ (for my girlfriend! honestly!) and told me that it would be in my interest, financially, to buy all three on promotion. He even walked to the top floor of the shop to get me one with the correct cover so that the three would make a set. Nice chap.

1) Re: rewound clocks. The bestselling author in the country doesn’t need to be further promoted by being piled to the ceiling in Waterstones. Bookstores used to fulfill a useful function of connecting readers with new writers and new books. In the age of the recommendation engine (Amazon’s in particular), we no longer particularly need that function. But there’s still no call to reward success (rather than merit) with additional promotion. That’s not ‘giving the customer what he wants’ that’s a profit grab.

2) I’ve grown to accept that Martin Amis is the Marmite of contemporary English letters.

3) Andy MacNab has published a lot of books since Bravo Two Zero, none of them, I believe, readable. The non-fiction book demonstrates that he can string a sentence together; but the numerous fiction titles equally prove he can’t craft a story. Then again, Chris Ryan can do neither. Which reminds me that any seven-man SAS patrol that produces two bestselling novelists also doesn’t need our help or promotion.

4) You can’t wander into Amazon on a rainy Sunday and chat with the nice staff members, and caress and flip through new titles, and — with all the skill and stealth of an SAS patrol (or, rather, more stealth and skill than that one) — put your own books at the front of the display table, which the nice staff members now wink and nod at. (I’m not talking about Waterstones, incidentally, but Daunt in Chelsea. You can spot me at the nearby grocery checkout, as I’m the one with the 142 cloth Daunt Books bags spilling out of my other bag.)