Pop impresario Simon Cowell upset authors and readers alike in May, not by announcing that he was intending to write a book for children, but by saying in an interview on US TV: ‘I’ve had to read a lot of these children’s books and they’re quite boring, I think I could do it better.’ Cowell told Terri Seymour for the news show Extra, ‘And now I think I’ll do it,’ adding that the book will be ‘about animals’. Presumably it will be better than such famously boring books as Wind in the Willows and Watership Down.