Bibliofile

Nobel prize-winners have been accused in the past of lobbying and politicking, but this is the first time a laureate has been charged with employing ghostwriters. The Spanish Nobel winner Camilo Jose Cela, who died in January at 85, was accused by a journalist of regularly resorting to ghostwriters to supply him with what he lacked: plots and characters. Cela, claims the journalist, then rewrote the material in his inimitable prose. Sounds like Shakespeare.

Jeffrey Archer didn’t invent the genre: most of Jawaharlal Nehru’s incomparable prose was composed in the tedium of prison life. And nearly every political leader worth his salt, including L.K. Advani, has dipped into the genre since then. But there’s cut-throat rivalry between the London papers for Archer’s day-to-day account of life behind bars serving a sentence for perjury. A Prison Diary—Belmarsh: Hell, now being serialised by Daily Mail and pirated by most other tabloids, has the bestseller writer’s touch: prisoners under suicide watch, life with criminals and murderers and prisoners holding ant races to relieve the boredom, with the losing ants ending up in the next day’s soup. Perhaps Salman Khan would have done better to carry pen and paper with him to jail instead of a tube of mosquito-repellant.