Book worm

OSCAR WINNER

NOT many authors walk away from a £500,000 deal, but Gyles Brandreth is one of them. In 2005, just after he'd finished writing a joint biography of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, a publisher took him to lunch and offered him precisely that princely sum to write a biography of Diana, Princess of Wales. "Momentarily tempted – wouldn't you have been? – I declined before coffee was served," he says.

Although he knew and liked Diana, he explains, writing a biography entails spending at least a year immersed in someone else's world. The person in whose life he decided to immerse himself instead is Oscar Wilde, about whom he is writing a ten-novel series of detective stories (see review, Page 16).

MONEY TALKS

IT WON'T be long now before the line-up for the Edinburgh International Book Festival is unveiled, but one small clue about something new this year comes in the list of grants awarded by the Scottish Arts Council. Tantalisingly, it lists £32,528 as being "towards the cost of commissioning work from four leading Scottish writers and presenting it" during the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Even if this translates into stories for four separate events, it seems generous: the same SAC accounts also show that the grant towards the entire programme for Aberdeen's Word Festival, which finished last weekend, was £25,000. Or is the book festival finally to produce its own book?

REVISION NOTES

LAST summer, Le cahier de vacances pour adultes – basically, a guide to help grown-ups keep up to speed with their children's homework – was a surprise best-seller in France, with sales of over 100,000 in just a few months. British publishers seldom miss a trick when it comes to copying good ideas, and in August Square Peg will publish Everything You Learnt at School ... and Promptly Forgot, while Icon will bring out Jonathan Green's Match Wits With the Kids, which is aimed at "anyone feeling threatened by know-it-all children".

Meanwhile, any parent with a teenager sitting exams around now might want to look at the series about "old-school" education that Michael O'Mara is bringing out. Sadly I Used to Know That (Stuff You Forgot from School) and My Grammar and I (or Should that be 'Me'?) both come out too late to help – for this year anyway.