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On Litopia After Dark this week we are delighted to welcome as our very special guest, Macmillan Children’s publisher turned literary agent Sarah Davies from the The Greenhouse Literary Agency.

On the show this week, Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan – the British husband and wife equivalent of Oprah – are back on UK television screens… did any of you notice?   An essay by Theodore Dalrymple heralds a new social disease – “False Apology Syndrome” and we’re very sorry to have to ask you this… but, could you suffering from it?  A new book is out this week - Patronizing the Arts by Marjorie Garber. In it, she considers the means by which most of Western civilization has paid for its great works of artistic achievement – patronage by the super-rich, and quite often super-nasty.  With a few exceptions, writers are rarely the recipients of munificent patronage - and we want to know why.  Andy Burnham, the British Secretary of State for Culture, this week launched plans to change the face of British libraries which he believes are “out of touch”.  Under his proposals, libraries would install coffee franchises, book shops and film centres – is this a good thing, or just one more step towards dumbing us all down?

Regular and much-loved features naturally include Pitch The Nasty Agent and Toad Suck, Arkansas, Reverse Shuffle Six Card Strip Pokerette.  Cry For Help is a real sob story this week, but the panel are unaffected… tune in to find out who has the hardest heart.

Joining Sarah on the panel this week we are delighted to welcome back our very own Richard Howse, also joining him are stalwart panellists Donna Ballman and Dave Bartram.  In the Ustream Chatroom, (8pm GMT) we had a lovely chat on the sofas and were as quiet as library customers… join us next week for the snacks and video games.

Links mentioned in the show…

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On the BBC Website…

Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan’s new show on digital channel Watch attracted an average audience of 100,000 viewers, according to initial overnight figures….

A-list stars Samuel L Jackson and David Walliams joined the husband and wife team on a stark red and white set for the initial, hour-long show.

Richard and Judy’s New Position was later repeated on Watch +1, bringing the average audience up to 143,000.

A Watch spokeswoman said they were “really pleased” with the figures.

The show will be repeated twice again on Wednesday.

Guests set to appear in the next few weeks include actor Josh Hartnett, Dame Helen Mirren and Lord Attenborough.

Madeley and Finnigan moved to Watch, part of UKTV, after seven years on Channel 4, where their last show was watched by about 1.5 million viewers.

On In Character, Theodore Dalrymple…

There is a fashion these days for apologies: not apologies for the things that one has actually done oneself (that kind of apology is as difficult to make and as unfashionable as ever), but for public apologies by politicians for the crimes and misdemeanours of their ancestors, or at least of their predecessors. I think it is reasonable to call this pattern of political breast-beating the False Apology Syndrome…

Mr. Blair, the then British prime minister, apologized to the Irish for the famine; one of the first public acts of Mr. Rudd, the Australian prime minister, was to apologize to the Aborigines for the dispossession of their continent; Pope John Paul II apologized to the Muslims for the Crusades. There are many other examples, and there are also demands for apologies by aggrieved, or supposedly aggrieved, groups.
What is this all about, and what does it signify? Does it mean that at long last the powerful are making a genuine effort to see things from the point of view of the weak, or is it, on the contrary, a form of moral exhibitionism that subverts genuine moral thought and conduct?

On the Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein…

After reading Marjorie Garber’s Patronizing the Arts, I conclude that the ideal arts patron is a shy, retired Mafia don without the least interest in art: in other words, a rich man who prefers not to discuss the source of his wealth, would never wish to push himself forward for publicity, could not care less about what an artist does with his money, and is content to walk away quietly with his tax write-off in his suitcoat pocket just above his shoulder holster. Professor Garber, chairman of something called the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard, and the author of books on cross-dressing and bisexuality, concludes otherwise…

Professor Garber describes all but the last few pages of her book as a chronicle of “patronage and its discontents.” As her book makes clear, no perfect patronage exists, certainly not in the arts, which offer special problems to any patron and not a few to artists. Patronage in the arts tends to illustrate the cynical proverb that holds no good deed goes unpunished. Although generally sucked up to, by artistic institutions and by artists, patrons, in the restricted sense of men and women who come up with money to help make the creation or performance or display of art possible, have been mocked at least since the days of Samuel Johnson. After his rocky experience with his own patron, Lord Chesterfield, Johnson in his Dictionary famously defined the patron as “commonly a wretch who supports with indolence, and is paid with flattery.”

On The Independent, Arifa Akbar…

People would be able to chat, drink coffee and watch videos in English libraries under a new government proposal, The Independent has learnt. Andy Burnham, the Secretary of State for Culture, will today launch a consultation on changing the face of libraries which he believes are out of touch…

Under the proposals, libraries could install coffee franchises, book shops and film centres. Noise bans will also be reviewed. Mr Burnham will tell the Public Library Authorities conference in Liverpool that libraries must “look beyond the bookcase and not sleepwalk into the era of the e-book”.

“The popular public image of libraries as solemn and sombre places, patrolled by fearsome and formidable staff is decades out of date, but is nonetheless taken for granted by too many people,” he will say, adding that the sector would have to “think radical” to modernise. English libraries attract 288 million visitors a year but book borrowings have fallen by 34 per cent in the past decade and 40 libraries closed across Britain last year. The Society of Chief Librarians has warned libraries that they will die out unless they diversify.

Tags: library, literary agents, patronage, publishers, richard and judy, writers