Book 'em, Danno

Tomorrow's World Book Night - hope you're joining in the celebrations in some way - perhaps by reading a book! I'm away at a conference for the weekend (got to write the paper this morning) so I'll have to collect my box of books on Monday. I applied for 48 copies of Nigel Slater's memoir, Toast, proposing to hand them out to the cooks in The Dark Place's pubs and cafés: Slater is a chef and food writer from this fair city, so it should catch readers' interests.

I'm now a book pusher

Have you heard about World Book Night? It's a festival of reading. People were asked to apply for 48 copies of a book from the list, and explain how they'd distribute them. I applied for Nigel Slater's autobiography of growing up in The Dark Place to become a top chef, Toast, and suggested distributing them around the kitchen staff in the area's pubs, and I've been accepted.

March 5th. Should be good.

What would you have chosen, and to whom would you give it?

All must have prizes

Every year, the university awards honorary degrees to people it thinks have contributed to the community. I was pretty angry when they gave one to the father of India's illegal and immoral nuclear weapons programme, but by and large, they're a good bit of publicity and a fine way to recognise sometimes unheralded work.

The full list for this year is out, and available here. Amongst them, Sathnam Sanghera wrote a fascinating account of his double life as a good Sikh boy and as a journalist playboy - though an honorary doctorate for one book and a lot of articles is a little premature. Nigel Slater fully deserves his, and most of the rest seem like fair choices.

Except, perhaps, for Esther Rantzen. Yes, she's done great things with Childline, but she's now a parliamentary candidate, and it looks like we're endorsing yet another celebrity who thinks fame is a passport to authority. (Then again, our Chancellor is a tax-avoider and leading New Labour shill).

Oddly, no mention on the uni's website of 250 redundancies.