:00:05. > :00:12.economy has grown slightly in the last three months of the year.
:00:12. > :00:18.Now it's time for Meet the Author. Argus is a writer, broadcaster and
:00:18. > :00:24.a dealer in rare books, his latest book of lost, stolen or shredded,
:00:24. > :00:29.of missing works of art and literature started like a few years
:00:29. > :00:39.ago as a Radio Four series. We invited him to ask why these
:00:39. > :00:45.disappeared works of the creative imagination means so much to us.
:00:45. > :00:51.You start this book with an account of a famous that of the Mona Lisa
:00:51. > :00:58.and the less, in 1911, stolen as a patriotic act. Thousands went to
:00:58. > :01:01.see the gap left behind, why? Accused got larger to see where the
:01:01. > :01:07.moon police are used to be, than when it was sitting there. The
:01:07. > :01:12.question of why that is is fascinating. But police said, it is
:01:12. > :01:18.as if one of the towers of Notre Dame had disappeared. That is to
:01:18. > :01:22.say the Mona Lisa is cemented into the Louvre in some way. It is bin
:01:22. > :01:27.can keep away complex that such a thing could go away Bostock from
:01:27. > :01:32.the painting point of view it is a fabulous career move. In 1911, the
:01:32. > :01:42.theft takes place in August. The Mona Lisa is by no means the most
:01:42. > :01:42.
:01:43. > :01:48.famous painting. In 1913, when she comes back, she is. The key fact
:01:48. > :01:54.about Frank after his he published very little during his lifetime,
:01:54. > :01:58.his great novels were published by his friend from manuscripts that he
:01:58. > :02:02.left at his death. But the author asked for the manuscripts to be
:02:02. > :02:07.destroyed. They should be lost books, and you applaud his friend
:02:07. > :02:12.for not doing that? He has a perfect conflict of interest.
:02:12. > :02:17.Either he honours his friend's wishes and destroys the manuscripts,
:02:17. > :02:23.or he honours the manuscripts and his respects his friend's wishes.
:02:23. > :02:28.We are talking works of the highest literally Fenebahce literally
:02:28. > :02:32.quality. We don't have the castle and we don't have the trial and
:02:32. > :02:40.less Maxwell saves them. Who cares what the author felt. He could have
:02:40. > :02:45.destroyed them himself, but he did not do so. What about the diaries
:02:45. > :02:51.that could have been destroyed? The Secretary did not destroy them, did
:02:51. > :02:57.you think she was right? Larkin kept a series of diaries for 30
:02:57. > :03:03.years and there were probably 30 volumes. They were, by all accounts
:03:03. > :03:07.a repository of fantasy, particularly sexual fantasy and
:03:07. > :03:13.bile. Larkin could be extraordinarily rude about his
:03:13. > :03:19.fellow poets, about writers generally, he was racist,
:03:19. > :03:27.homophobic. He used these diaries as a kind of almost getting pass
:03:27. > :03:33.out of a wound. They wouldn't have shown him in a good light. There
:03:33. > :03:37.was a lot and evidence that he showed why didn't he drew --
:03:37. > :03:41.destroy them himself? Graham Sutherland's portrait of Winston
:03:41. > :03:47.Churchill. Winston Churchill hated it, either he or his wife destroyed
:03:47. > :03:53.it? I sympathise with the Churchills in having destroyed it.
:03:53. > :03:57.It was an image of him that preyed on his mind. Churchill, of all the
:03:57. > :04:02.Englishmen of the 20th century deserved honour and the portrait
:04:02. > :04:05.was designed to honour him, and he felt dishonoured. One is
:04:05. > :04:12.sympathetic to the decision to get rid of it. The difference in that
:04:12. > :04:15.case, it was not his to destroy? wasn't, but it was going to hang in
:04:15. > :04:22.the Houses of Parliament, which was the last thing in the world he
:04:22. > :04:27.wanted. In England, we don't have what the French have, which is a
:04:27. > :04:32.concept of honour. If Napoleon had come back from the Napoleonic wars
:04:32. > :04:39.and they had got somebody to do an image of him and showed him as a
:04:39. > :04:45.bloated, hideous little man full of self worth, heads would have rolled.
:04:45. > :04:51.The problem with that line of thought, art cannot just be a
:04:51. > :04:56.geography, otherwise it would be Stalinism. Yes, I don't mind that
:04:56. > :05:03.that portrait is now gone, it is an emotional thing. It is an opinion,
:05:03. > :05:07.rather than an argument. But I feel it strongly. It is a complex case.
:05:07. > :05:13.You are a rare book dealer by profession, although you were an
:05:13. > :05:22.academic before. You said some were effective shies the object as
:05:22. > :05:26.dealers must now. This is a copy to of your book �14.99. I have not
:05:26. > :05:34.read that because your publisher sent it in the in electronic form.
:05:34. > :05:44.Am I was off for having read the electronic version? I am worse off
:05:44. > :05:44.
:05:44. > :05:48.because I would have got a better royalty! I read about 80% of my
:05:48. > :05:54.books electronically now. It is clear something is happening to the
:05:54. > :05:59.form of the book which is only just beginning. My next book is called,
:05:59. > :06:05.life and death of the book. I am going to argue, ignorantly, I
:06:05. > :06:10.suppose, but in 50 years it will be a very rare sight to see somebody
:06:10. > :06:15.walking around with a bunch of printed pages and a cover on them.
:06:15. > :06:20.I think we are in the last days. For you as a dealer, there is a
:06:20. > :06:27.loss because you sell books, but you also sell manuscripts, letters
:06:27. > :06:32.and all of these things which exist almost exclusively electronically?
:06:32. > :06:38.Writers wrote letters, now they are right e-mails. And someone who
:06:38. > :06:45.deals in literally archives and manuscripts, is, how do you value a
:06:45. > :06:51.letter as opposed to any male? If you buy a hard drive of somebody's
:06:51. > :06:55.computer, and when Salman Rushdie sold his archive to a university,
:06:56. > :07:00.the hard drives of his last four computers were included, will show
:07:00. > :07:06.he played a lot of Super Mario Brothers, because he was very good
:07:06. > :07:12.at that. It also means there are thousands of e-mails, which have a
:07:12. > :07:17.value. On the hard drive they are unique, but they're not unique when