For many working in publishing today, “Bridget Jones has a lot to answer for”, says Jake Kerridge in The Daily Telegraph. From exchanging flirty emails to attending buzzy launch parties, the film made the business “look like a hoot”. And, once upon a time, it was. Former Pan Macmillan publicist Jacqui Graham says she once asked Hunter S Thompson to take part in the Edinburgh Festival. “I was told he wasn’t going to come unless he could go grouse shooting, play golf at St Andrews and be provided with a certain number of grams of cocaine.” All important decisions were “taken either over a long lunch or when the directors opened their drinks cupboards at half past five”. When Douglas Adams, a “notorious procrastinator”, was late with the next instalment of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the head of Pan books rented a hotel suite and stayed there with Adams until he was finished.

Big-budget book launches were especially extravagant. For the 2008 release of Sebastian Faulks’s James Bond novel Devil May Care, a catsuited model flanked by Royal Marines zoomed up the Thames in a speedboat, before boarding HMS Exeter and presenting Faulks with a Samsonite briefcase containing copies of the book. When Graham was doing a reissue of War and Peace in the 1970s, a relatively junior colleague “decided to go and hire a cannon and push it down Oxford Street as a publicity stunt”. He wasn’t expected to ask for permission or justify the cost. These days, sadly, the British publishing industry is “cautious, penny-pinching” and obsessed with “moral propriety”. No wonder Bridget ditched it for TV.

THE CHÂTEAU This 10-bedroom castle is built on a rocky spur in the south-west region of Auvergne, France. On the ground floor is a granite-paved kitchen, a grand dining room, a substantial living area with doors opening out on to the grounds, and access to the property’s chapel. Staircases in two of the castle’s towers lead to the upper two floors, across which there are 10 bedrooms, a library, further reception rooms, an office and five bathrooms. The property sits in 16 acres of luscious grounds. Clermont-Ferrand airport is a 1hr 15min drive. €2.95m.

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