The ruckus that resulted from the Guardian’s phone interview with Gabriel Josipovici last week is summarised nicely by JC on the back page of this week’s TLS: ‘Anyone reading this report would quickly realise that the story was not about literary criticism at all; it was about celebrity, the category into which the named authors are increasingly slotted . . .’
The Guardian got a story out of nothing and nowhere; and the publicity department of the publisher of the book on which the story was tenuously hung is, I assume, pleased with the column inches. The other story is about how, for an ideas book to get mainstream media attention, its ideas have to be ignored in favour of personality guff and the setting up of an artificial tableau of conflict.
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