The Best-Sellers of James Hilton

Old people, or at least older people, people like me, have a certain sheaf of things we tend to bang on about: the ignorance and ingratitude of the young, the decline in standards, reading, spelling, manners, culture in general, and so on. If we write books we are sometimes faced with the problem of what happens to a piece of writing (a novel perhaps) when it becomes a piece of seeing (a film or a television series). Of course you can always say no, but that doesn’t seem to happen often because of vanity, natural curiosity and (of course) money, that magic dust that can be turned so easily into things we want.

There is a rule we want to enunciate, we writers, that good books make bad films and conversely that bad books … It isn’t true as a rule, but it often is true.

Good books are often long. Proust—a television series in a hundred parts? Yes, there has been something, but in a much shorter compass. I haven’t seen it; the general verdict is not favourable. Ulysses…