Why is Keira Knightley apparently incapable of closing her mouth properly?

A Guardian columnist perhaps unfairly asks "In every photo her lips are slightly parted. Is this a new fashion trend? Or is something wrong with her? "

John O'Sullivan, London replied "As tempting as it is to sneer at people who have the nerve to be prettier, thinner, wealthier, younger and more successful than me, Keira, despite clearly being a total cow for all of the aforementioned reasons, is not, I suspect, suffering from any chronic sinus difficulty. Instead, she is a victim of photo-posingitus.Photo-posingitus is a terrible affliction suffered by people who have been told once that if they pose in a certain way it will make them look better, and have egos big and yet simultaneously fragile enough to think that looking good in photos is sufficiently important to follow this advice for the rest of time".

The Olympic Victors' Return - some ancient lessons

Mary Beard is a professor in classics at the University of Cambridge. Her Times Literary Supplement blog notes "The ancient Olympic Games were considerably more modest than our own -- and no synchronised diving, thank heavens. But the Greek cities made even more of a fuss than we do about their victorious, medal winning (or rather olive-wreath winning) athletes.

The classic ceremony was to have the victor enter his home town in a four-horse chariot through a hole in the city wall specially demolished for the occasion. Who needs walls, after all, when you’ve got splendid young men like this victor?

The follow-up rewards included a state pension (in the form of free meals for life), front row seats at the theatre, and maybe a poem in celebration of the success. In some cases this was the most lasting honour. In fact, some of the most extraordinary (and difficult) poems to survive from the Greek world are Pindar’s Odes written to celebrate victories not only in the Olympic Games, but also in the rival Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean Games.

Maybe Andrew Motion is at this minute preparing an official ode for our own returning heroes. But whatever his manifold virtues, I doubt that much of Motion’s laureate verse is likely to survive and be studied in 2500 years time".

PS: A subsequent posting she notes "What does OBAMA spell backwards?'

AMABO, of course: 'I shall love', in Latin.

How's that for a slogan to trump McCain?"

A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré: exclusive film clip from UK Telegraph

John le Carré tackles the war on terror, extraordinary rendition and political imperatives in his new novel A Most Wanted Man, published in the UK on 23 September.

"In this exclusive nine-minute mini-documentary, Simon Channing-Williams films John le Carré talking about the book. This is first time that a publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, has worked with a major film producer in this way.Filmed in Hamburg where the novel is set, Hodder’s creative strategy was to capture the sense of surveillance and displacement - themes which run through the novel.A Most Wanted Man by John le Carré":

Shelfari, The Social Network For Book Lovers, Acquired By Amazon

Mashable says Shelfari http://www.shelfari.com/ has been acquired by Amazon; probably not because it has a huge community, but because Amazon needed a book-oriented social network and acquiring Shelfari was the easiest, fastest, or least cash intensive way to do it.

Milton Above All

This year is the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton. Academics have been holding seminars and conferences all over the world to discuss the great poet's work. Christ's College, Cambridge has released its series of Lady Margaret Lectures into podcasts. So far Quentin Skinner, Colin Burrow and Sharon Achinstein have given their thoughts.

Book gossip from the London Evening Standard

"Crime writer Christopher Brookmyre, appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, suggested his twisted sense of humour might come from his parents. After reading his latest novel A Snowball in Hell, his mother texted him: "You are a sick b*******. Who spawned you?" At which point, said Brookmyre, "I knew I had surpassed myself."

A cook for the books Writer and broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli (right) has been putting his mastery in the kitchen to good use for his fellow Booker Prize judges.First he prepared a pear, fennel and blue-cheese starter at the Pimlico home of former MP Michael Portillo, chairman of this year's judging panel, which also includes Alex Clark of Granta magazine, novelist and playwright Louise Doughty and James Heneage, chairman of this year's Cheltenham Literary Festival. Then he took over the stove to cook a main course of chicken with pear and celery. Portillo's butler James poured the wine.

For their next meeting, Kohli invited the judges to his Camberwell home where he cooked lamb chops with lentils. But sadly, Kohli's stints at the stove have been curtailed after he burnt his left hand during a cookery demonstration at the Edinburgh Food Festival.

An insider cries wolf

Red faces at Christie's in St James's where the wife of a former director has launched a novel with explicit sex scenes.

Triptych of a Young Wolf, by Anne Allestree, wife of antiques expert Tom Craig, made a speech extolling the sexual virtues of wolves, saying they copulated by rote with different members of the pack. At one point she started howling."She's crazy about wolves," said novelist Andrew Sinclair, who helped her with research. "It's rather worrying." "I wish I had introduced her to John Aspinall," said Lady Amabel Lindsay, whoselatehusbandPatrickwaschairma n of Christie's."They would have got on like a house on fire."

Allestree caused a stir two years ago when she published Seize the Day, her 600-page account of staying in grand houses. Described as social voyeurism, it listed toffs in the index."She met ambassadors, Eastern potentates and enduring stars - Freya Stark, Harold Acton, Rebecca West," wrote a Spectator reviewer. "English eccentrics wander through her pages - barmy lords, batty old ladies, posh grotesques to set a Marxist drooling..."John Saumarez-Smith, who ran Heywood Hill bookshop in Curzon Street, refused to stock the book because it contained embarrassing references to his elite customers and because the author had gained access to stately homes through her husband's position. Tom Craig was a frequent visitor to Chatsworth, home of the Duke of Devonshire, who owns Heywood Hill.The new book seems likely to cause even more of a stir. Although it doesn't name names, it pulls no punches when it comes to the sexual antics of the aristocracy".

Whitbread award-winning novelist James Hamilton-Paterson was amused when he saw his 2004 book Cooking with Fernet Branca in the cookery department of Foyles. The title of his new book, Rancid Pansies, is an anagram of Princess Diana, since the main character is writing an opera about the late royal. The author is anxious this one might end up in the gardening department. Please transfer it to the fiction section if you see it there".

Should authors receive a royalty on secondhand sales of their books? UK Telegraph blog

"The question was raised a year ago by Helen DeWitt, author of the fantastic novel The Last Samurai; she also set up a PayPal tip-jar so that readers who thought she should receive such royalties could pay them to her directly. Two recent articles brought the subject back to mind for me: they demonstrate both why the issues that concern DeWitt are becoming more urgent, and why her case seems unlikely to be taken up at more than a piecemeal voluntary level.

The first article was a piece of news from The Bookseller: Amazon, subject to regulatory approval, is buying AbeBooks. Abe is the dominant player in secondhand books on the internet; a network of more than 12,000 shops sell through its site. If their offerings were integrated with Amazon's - as those from the rather similar Amazon Marketplace service are at present - then secondhand books would compete with new, royalty-paying ones on an unprecedented scale.

The second article was a Guardian blogpost on the subject of how to pay less for your books. The options given (Oxfam, magazine giveaways, libraries, deep-discount titles at chains) all have the potential to either pare back or eliminate the author's cut. One of the first comments recommended Amazon Marketplace.

It's clear that the internet and developments in the high-street book market have given us more means than ever before of not paying Helen DeWitt. This is not a good thing. But the first of those options from the Guardian article makes it clear one major obstacle to any secondhand book levy.

Europe's largest retailer of secondhand books is not Abe or Amazon but Oxfam; and in any competition for public sympathy between the starving children of Africa and the starving authors of north London, the authors would be marmalised. So the tip-jar - and the change in thinking it is meant to provoke - seems about the best that can be expected for now. It has certainly made me think".

Three Books - Beyond Beijing: China's Past, Present And Future

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, picks on NPR's All Things Considered, "Three Books - Beyond Beijing: China's Past, Present And Future"

"Start with Susan Shirk's China: Fragile Superpower. Shirk, a lifelong China expert, is a terrific guide. The China she describes is strong on the outside, but led by men who are chronically afraid of losing power. Anxious and paranoid, they have watched the collapse of communist and authoritarian regimes around them.

If you want to understand China's economic fault lines, pick up The China Price by Alexandra Harney. Harney shows us the real cost of China's surging economy. Hundreds of thousands of workers are dying of work-related lung disease - an asbestos crisis on steroids.

For my money, though, one of the best ways to understand China's present is by turning to its past. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a novel by Lisa See, takes us back 200 years to the Qing Dynasty, to the world of Lily and her soulmate, Snow Flower".

Wikimedia pegs future on education, not profit

"Analysts have pegged Wikipedia's value between several hundred million dollars and $7 billion, the latter by Silicon Alley Insider, a technology blog known for its list of the World's Most Valuable Digital Startups. But its keepers have thus far refused to sell ad space. They are adamant that the encyclopedia's value is tied up not in potential advertising revenue but in something much loftier - its ability to positively affect the news industry, educational publishing and the nature of open-source knowledge creation and dissemination.

For the immediate future, Wikimedia is focused on three goals: increasing participation; improving quality; and making much of Wikipedia's content available in the form of DVDs, and a new portable data file feature that will allow users to compile articles as a single file, export them as a PDF, and send them to a printer. Wikipedia also plans to offer video-editing capabilities, so that users can combine sound and image".

Choosing Enid Blyton as our favourite author

In a poll to "celebrate" the Costa prize, in which 2000 adults were asked to name their best-loved author, Blyton has pipped everyone to become, apparently, the nation's favourite writer according to the Telegraph again.

"This ought to come as no surprise because she has sold more than 400 million books and there are 3400 translations of her titles still in print, only slightly fewer than Shakespeare. It is true that her work remains most popular in those places - Australia, New Zealand - where the cultural life is still informed by the housewifely rigours of the 1950s, or (since she restricts her vocabulary to primary school age) in countries where English is spoken only very carefully, but it is a shock to find the British are still reading her books.

After all, they are simply terrible. It is not that they are comically jingoistic, luridly snobbish or maniacally racist - hundreds of books are like that - it is just that they are so weirdly bland. In among her 800 odd titles can anyone recall a notable scene, memorable sentence or, other than Noddy, and maybe at a push Big Ears, even a distinctive character? No. It is all five do this and seven do that".

Sir Ian Kershaw in the UK Guardian examines The Twisted Road to World War 2

"There has been endless debate about the crises of 1938 - Germany's move on Austria, the carve-up of Czechoslovakia, and the violence against Jews on Kristallnacht. What were Hitler's aims? Did Neville Chamberlain have any choice at Munich? Seventy years later, scholars have finally agreed on some conclusions. Seventy years on, our present Europe, for all its flaws and faultlines, provides such an attractive contrast that it is hard not to see the European project that arose from the lessons of the second world war and out of the far-sightedness of, especially, postwar German and French statesmen as a huge success story. The main objective of these postwar visionaries was to prevent circumstances ever again arising in which European nations could go to war with each other. The former Yugoslavia gives an example of what, not long ago, was still possible outside the framework of what became the European Union. Though "1938" will not be repeated, the crisis spots have moved elsewhere. The dangers to world peace are different, but still present. Having come this far, logic suggests that we need to look to a future in which, without any loss of national identity, a European voice can speak more strongly and urgently for the interests of a united continent than can the current prevailing and persistent dissonance...."

Odd Book Title

A Register of Royal and Baronial Domestic Minstrels 1272-1327 by Constance Bullock-Davies Boydell, 1986.

Libraries Australia holding details can be found here.

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

"If you are prepared to allow a little craziness to enter your life on a regular basis, you'll never become truly insane. It's the people that sit staring at the television for 17 years that pick up a shotgun and go down the high street"

"Why is it that we always use these really machismo words, like "surfing"? What surfing really means is sitting there, getting hemorrhoids, staring at a screen while clicking on a mouse. It's not surfing at all; it's just being a kind of couch potato"

Terry Pratchett