JK Rowling: ‘The worst that can happen is that everyone says, That’s shockingly bad’

Harry Potter sold millions and made her one of the richest women in the world. Now JK Rowling has written her first book for grown-ups. But is the magic still there?

By Decca Aitkenhead

JK Rowling’s new novel arrives with the high drama and state secrecy of a royal birth. Its due date is announced in February, and in April the disclosure of its title, The Casual Vacancy, makes international news. The release of the cover image in July commands headlines again, and Fleet Street commissions a “design guru” to deconstruct its inscrutable aesthetic, in search of clues as to what might lie within. Waterstones predicts the novel will be “the bestselling fiction title this year”. Literary critics begin to publish preliminary reviews, revealing what they think they will think about a book they have not yet even read.

I am required to sign more legal documents than would typically be involved in buying a house before I am allowed to read The Casual Vacancy, under tight security in the London offices of Little, Brown. Even the publishers have been forbidden to read it, and they relinquish the manuscript gingerly, reverently, as though handling a priceless Ming vase. Afterwards, I am instructed never to disclose the address of Rowling’s Edinburgh office where the interview will take place. The mere fact of the interview is deemed so newsworthy that Le Monde dispatches a reporter to investigate how it was secured. Its prospect begins to assume the mystique of an audience with Her Majesty – except, of course, that Rowling is famously much, much richer than the Queen.

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AC Grayling: ‘How can you be a militant atheist? It’s like sleeping furiously’

AC Grayling with his dog Misty. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi

In his new book, The Good Book: A Secular Bible, the philosopher sets out his manifesto for rational thought. He talks about why religion angers him, the power of philosophy – and his mane of hair.

• By Decca Aitkenhead
• In the unholy trinity of professional atheists, AC Grayling has always tended to be regarded as the good cop. Less coldly clinical in tone than Richard Dawkins, less aggressively combative than Christopher Hitchens, Grayling approaches the God debate with a gently teasing charm that could almost – but should never – be mistaken for conciliation. “Yes, I’m the velvet version,” he chuckles.
• So he insists that his new book does not belong in the same canon as Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Hitchens’s God Is Not Great. “No, because it’s not against religion. There’s not one occurrence of the word God, or afterlife, or anything like that. It doesn’t attack religion, it’s a positive book, there’s nothing negative in it. People may think it’s against religion – but it isn’t.” But then he says, with a mischievous twinkle: “Of course, what would really help the book a lot in America is if somebody tries to shoot me.”
• …Read more

Louis Theroux: ‘I’m not that comfortable doing polemic’

 

His ability to make the subjects of his documentaries reveal how strange they are has made his name. But Louis Theroux says he never sets out to turn someone over.

 

What is it about Louis Theroux that makes people want to show him how odd they are? For more than a decade now, ever since Jimmy Savile confided on camera that he used to beat people up and lock them in a basement during his career as a nightclub manager, Theroux’s subjects have been sharing their strangeness with him. But I’ve never been able to work out why. Critics have accused the presenter of tricking interviewees by pretending to be a bumbling fool – a faux naif – yet within minutes of meeting him, I think I see the real reason why his subjects reveal all. I don’t know him at all, but would quite happily tell him anything.      …read more