Love it or loathe it - those seem to be the only possible responses to the cult that has surrounded Princess Diana since her untimely death almost a year ago.
Julie Burchill obviously loves it, her just-published Diana (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) breathlessly announcing that Diana has "conquered the world" and that "the Age of Diana has not ended but has rather just begun".
Of course, one expects vitriol as well as gush from Ms Burchill, and she duly delivers it in her verdict on Diana's main, and successful, rival for Charles's affections. Camilla, she writes, "has spent her entire life on horseback tormenting beautiful creatures, or on her own back tormenting one beautiful creature".
However, if you think that's rough stuff, you haven't read A.N. Wilson's opinion of the Diana cult in the Times Literary Supplement. Reviewing Beatrix Campbell's feminist study, Diana Princess of Wales: How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy (Women's Press), he comments: "She is trying to convince the sorority that the short life of a young woman who did very little except go shopping, fornicate and vomit, is of relevance to the struggle of her lower-class sisters."
Oh, don't sit on the fence, A.N.
Camille Paglia isn't one to mince words, either, though her views on what Tina Brown did to America's most venerable literary institution, the New Yorker (from which Brown departed as editor last week) are startlingly direct, even for her.
Not to mention over-the-top. By my standards (and perhaps yours, too) Ms Brown seems to have done all right in life - she's very rich, very famous and very powerful - but Ms Paglia writes about her in the Observer as if she's on the skids, bemoaning her "downfall" and "self-destruction".
At the start Ms Paglia had entertained high hopes, given that "to many in my radical 1960s generation, the New Yorker was a loathsome symbol of cloistered, bourgeois, liberal gentility. I prophesied that Brown would revolutionise it just as she had Vanity Fair by reviving a 1930s wit and sophistication, which the New Yorker had had under its first editor, Harold Ross."
Alas, this was not to be, and the fact that "the retrograde poetry critic Helen Vendler was not kicked right back to her Harvard lair showed Brown knew little about the American cultural battlefield. It was the first sign of Brown's embarrassing deference to Ivy League credentials" - including her promotion of "a series of vicious feminist and academic insiders" (in preference, one assumes, to vicious feminist outsiders like Ms Paglia).
And the result? "I became so fed up with its smarmy banality that I made repeated furious calls to get them to stop sending the damned thing to my office."
This is the same Camille Paglia who, a few years earlier, had posed for the front cover of Tina Brown's Vanity Fair with, as she says herself, her cleavage exposed and her arms "around the bulging biceps of my two black bodyguards".
Yes, I can see why she's bewailing low standards at the New Yorker. Methinks we're not hearing the full story here.
AS I mentioned a few weeks back, Maeve Binchy features eight times in Eason's list of 100 Bestselling Irish Titles of All Time. Come September, you can safely make that nine, because the month in question marks the publication of Maeve's latest novel, Tara Road, described by her publisher, Orion, as "bursting with charm and irresistibility" and concerning "a summer of unlikely loves and friendships, rivalries, jealousy and the uncovering of secrets as two very different women borrow each other's houses, neighbours and lives".
And the audiotape of the book, read by Kate Binchy, is being released at the same time.
Maeve, though, hasn't yet been turned into a board game, which is what Orion has done with Jostein Gaarder's international bestseller Sophie's World.
This, I'm assured, "balances the inspirational aspects of the novel with the kind of game-play that will delight seasoned board-gamers". The player will "speed through the ages, picking up history and philosophy on the way," and "fun for all the family" is guaranteed.
Ah, the joys of literature.
Jane Thaw of the James Thin bookstore in Edinburgh nominates William Trevor's new novel as her pick of the books to be launched in September. Entitled Death in Summer, it concerns widower Thaddeus and young daughter Georgina who requires a nanny. "But fear not," says Jane, "this is more than a tale of middle-class angst. Trevor excels at portraying the weak and unbalanced in society with just the right amount of sympathy."