TITLE AUTHOR/PUBLISHER WEEKLY SALES PRICE

1 (2) Net Force Tom Clancy (Headline) 3,863 pounds 6.99
2 (1 ) Point of Origin Patricia D Cornwell (Little, Brown) 3,394 pounds 16.993 (5) Archangel Robert Harris (Hutchinson) 2,776 pounds 16.994 (8) The Tesseract Alex Garland (Viking) 2,343 pounds 9.995 (-) Field of Thirteen Dick Francis (M Joseph) 2,312 pounds 6.996 (7) Tara Road Maeve Binchy (Orion) 2,256 pounds 16.997 (4) Filth Irvine Welsh (Cape) 2,195 pounds 9.998 (9) Rainbow Six Tom Clancy (M Joseph) 2,071 pounds 16.999 (10) Charlotte Gray Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson) 1,815 pounds 16.9910 (4) Ramses 4 Christian Jacq (Simon & Schuster) 1,717 pounds 9.99. John Gray (Thorsons) 3,184 pounds 9.996 (2) Real Food Nigel Slater (Fourth Estate) 2,812 pounds 18.997 (3) Losing My Virginity Richard Branson (Virgin) 2,582 pounds 208 (- ) The Little Book of Stress Rohan Candappa (Ebury) 2,458 pounds 1.999 (6) Addicted Tony Adams & Ian Ridley (CollinsWillow) 2,440 pounds 16.9910 (9) Little Book of Calm at Work Paul Wilson (Penguin) 2,190 pounds 1.99. TITLE AUTHOR/PUBLISHER WEEKLY SALES PRICE

1 (1) Delia’s How to Cook Delia Smith (BBC) 16,049 pounds 16.99
2 (7 ) Little Book of Feng Sui Lillian Too (Element) 5,120 pounds 1.993 (5) Little Book of Calm Paul Wilson (Penguin) 4,937 pounds 1.994 (8) The Life of Birds David Attenborough (BBC) 3,729 pounds 18.995 (4) Men Are From Mars… I always feel that there is a novel to be written about some of his models.`Antony’, Allan Massie’s fourth novel in his Roman Quartet, is published by Sceptre at pounds 6.99. I don’t know why it’s so frightening; it just is.The artworkAnything by Caravaggio, particularly the St Matthew paintings in the church of S Luigi dei Francesci in Rome. One of the most frightening scenes that I remember is the sound of the footsteps of the ghost of the princess as she comes to give the hero the secret of the cards I only saw it once in 1948. The entrance to the underworld is supposed to be beside the lake, and it really does give you the feeling that it might be.The filmThorold Dickinson’s version of the Pushkin story, The Queen of Spades.

The music

Billie Holiday singing “You can’t take that away from me”; partly because of the memories it triggers of when I first heard it at Cambridge, and partly because it sums up what is important to somebody who is trying to write novels.
The playThe Cherry Orchard – Chekov just has this wonderful ability to be able to make things happen under the surface which are different to what is actually happening on the surface.The placeLake Nemi, about 25 miles outside Rome It was the starting point for Fraser’s The Golden Bough I used it in my novel Augustus It’s one of the world’s numinous places; a magical place. One man suggested that the whole programme is in fact being driven by market forces; that the developers would not be building so many houses if people were not snapping them up.Somebody pointed out that developers went down like ninepins during the last big recession, and hinted that the same thing might happen again. Someone else called on the Government to impose a punitive tax on the sale of green-field sites.Last January rural people discerned a ray of hope when John Prescott, the Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions, called for this very measure, and announced that the Government intended to concentrate new house-building on brown-field locations.Yet he did nothing to stop large-scale green-field developments already scheduled near Stevenage and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and little more has been heard of his initiative on urban renewal; but all over the country thousands of people are fervently hoping it is not dead, for they fear that nothing but firm government action can save them.. These pictures were the passion of a handful of English connoisseurs for a century after about 1720. They are cheek by jowl with Mantegna to Rubens, drawings from the Weld-Blundell collection, which was mostly brought together late in the 18th century by William Roscoe, a Liverpool lawyer and banker. Yet that should not have been surprising, for building land is now paved with gold.Earlier this year a single acre in Cheltenham sold for pounds 750,000. The normal rate is pounds 250,000 an acre.One plan – temporarily kicked into touch by furious opposition – was to site 1,400 houses in the lovely Painswick Valley.

Had that gone through, the main beneficiary, an elderly farmer, would have been pounds 40m better off.How can such pressures be resisted? How can we prevent the construction of houses that are not needed? If the figures for Gloucestershire are being exaggerated by 20 per cent through inertia, idleness or greed, how far is the national total of 4.4 million houses over the top? That was what people at our meeting wanted to know.The evening made it clear that every village in our area feels threatened, and I have no doubt that their alarm is shared by thousands of other small communities all over England. On the other, with agriculture in depression, farmers who cannot make ends meet are eager to sell.The council itself, chronically short of funds, owns several farms from which, in theory, it could make millions.Last November, when Stroud District Council put out a call for possible sites in the Berkeley Vale on which to build 1,000 houses, the response was phenomenal: in came offers of 3,800 acres – enough for 40,000 houses at least. One experienced observer reckoned that the final total might go up from 50,000, rather than down – such are the pressures in favour of building.On the one hand, the big developers are clamouring for sites and offering huge prices for land. But will they make any difference in the end? Will anyone in authority pay attention to them? Our scouts came away from the EiP with the strong impression that the answer to both questions is “No”.The inspector in charge was eminently fair and thorough in hearing evidence; but his report will have no executive power.It will contain recommendations only, and it will be the County Council that, in the end, takes the decisions. Far from increasing every year, the strength of the Armed Forces in the county is falling slowly as bases are run down.The structure plan includes provision for 8,000 service homes. Our research has made it clear that these are simply not needed.

Moreover, our latest information on general population trends in the South-west strongly suggests that even if 8,000 were removed from the county total, reducing it to 42,000, this figure would still be too high.The import of these figures is obvious. It is an entirely fallacious statistical projection from trends that are no longer in being. The figure was strongly influenced by the net immigration of people to the county, which, it was claimed, had been running at an average of 2,700 people a year for the past two decades.Recourse to the Office of National Statistics revealed that one third of the 2,700 were Armed Forces personnel; but the checks we made with the commanding officers of local garrisons showed that the alleged net inflow of 900 service personnel per annum does not exist. We are now awaiting the panel’s report.The main point we put to our meeting was that vigorous local action groups, helped by the CPRE, had shot the case for 50,000 houses full of holes: our own research had shown that the total was wildly exaggerated. The meeting, held in the village hall at Slimbridge, highlighted the weakness of the whole planning process, as well as the deep-seated alarm of local people that they are about to be overrun by urban sprawl.The first draft of the structure plan, covering 1991 to 2011, stated that Gloucestershire would have to find room for 53,000 new houses; but the draft attracted such a storm of objections that in November last year it was abandoned.A deposit draft plan, published in April this year, reduced the total to 50,000, but was also attacked from every quarter; and in September an independent panel appointed by the Government held an Examination in Public (EiP) to review all the submissions put forward. In global terms we of the Berkeley Vale count for practically nothing. We are one of 200-odd sub-branches, and our 170-odd members constitute only a fraction of the CPRE’s total strength of 46,000.Nevertheless, we felt we should make presentations to parish councils to show that we had been doing our best to fight the proposals of the Gloucestershire County Structure Plan.

Can anyone save the countryside from the tidal wave of concrete, bricks and mortar likely to roll in, as the Government seems convinced that England needs 4.4m new houses by 2011?

The closer you look into this looming catastrophe, the smaller the chances seem of averting it.
This gloomy assessment derives in part from a meeting recently held by our local sub-branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE). From these cellars, they have easy access to woodland within 20 yards of their exit – this former stately home is surrounded by park land No one knows how long the bats have been here. According to Ruth Warren they were discovered in 1962, when there were perhaps 200 of them. Deterioration of buildings they are using, renovation of old buildings, barn conversions, the blocking up of old mines and caves, disturbance at their roosts, and losses of feeding habitat such as woodland, wetland and hedgerows, are all contributory factors.The bats here are well positioned. But one thing is sure: with the CCW watching over them, their future has never been brighter.. According to the published Action Plan for the conservation of this protected species, there may be 14,000 left in Britain. About 230 summer roosts and 480 winter hibernation roosts are known.But bats – and their essential roosting sites – are highly vulnerable.