The organizers of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest have been kind enough to share a preview of some of this year’s Highly Commended images. The full list of competition winners, and the Grand Title and Young Grand Title Awards, will be announced in October. Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum in London. Captions are provided by the photographers and WPY organizers, and are lightly edited for style.

The woman, who was wearing only jeans and a T-shirt, was stuck for two and a half hours.

In the first week of August, the glitzy megacity of Gurugram, an hour’s drive from New Delhi, was burning.

With its gleaming malls and opulent high-rises, Gurugram had become symbolic of India’s economic rise. But for much of this month, the city has been in a state of siege from Hindu mobs running amok, attacking Muslim homes, commercial establishments, and places of worship. Smoke billowed from buildings set ablaze, riot police trawled the streets, and multinational corporations ordered their employees to stay home. Large numbers of working-class Muslims, the human capital underpinning the city’s prosperity, took flight.

The mayhem in Gurugram was a direct result of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s growing sense of political insecurity. Two recent setbacks had rattled him and the Hindu-supremacist movement he leads. In May, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party suffered a chastening defeat in a high-stakes election in Karnataka, the southern-Indian state that is home to Bangalore and a powerhouse of India’s information-technology sector. With Karnataka, the Hindu right lost its only foothold in southern India, the country’s most prosperous and wealthy region.

[Read: India is not Modi, we once said. I wish I still believed it.]

Then, in mid-July, two weeks before the violence erupted in Gurugram, the Indian opposition announced an electoral alliance to take on Modi in next year’s national elections. The big-tent coalition was a remarkable show of unity, something that had mostly eluded Modi’s rivals since his ascent to power in 2014. A juggernaut comprising 26 parties, the opposition alliance christened itself the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance—INDIA.

These twin events felt like political earthquakes. They cast doubt on what until recently had seemed certain: Modi’s reelection as prime minister for a third consecutive term in 2024. And as Modi and his party have begun to feel politically threatened, they have let loose the foot soldiers of the Hindu right upon India’s minorities.

For a century, since the rise of the Hindu right in the 1920s, religious disturbances in India have followed a dismayingly predictable pattern. Members of Hindu organizations stage threatening parades in Muslim neighborhoods, chanting provocative slogans and blaring music outside mosques in order to arouse a response. Community members retaliate, and confrontation follows, escalating into a riot. Soon after a July 31 Hindu parade in Nuh, the Muslim-majority district adjacent to Gurugram, violence spread across the northern state of Haryana, of which Gurugram is the largest city.

The organizational machinery of the Hindu right has made a science of engineering such conflagrations. It needs only to activate the ecosystem that Paul R. Brass, a doyen of South Asian studies, has termed an “institutionalised system of riot production.” That system reliably generates political rewards: An exhaustive study by Yale, analyzing the effects of such riots over a period of nearly four decades beginning in the 1960s, concluded that the parties of the Hindu right typically “saw a 0.8 percentage point increase in their vote share following a riot in the year prior to an election.”

The benefits of such religious polarization have surely risen under Modi, the most charismatic leader the Hindu-supremacist movement has ever produced. Delivering successive majorities in Parliament in 2014 and 2019, Modi has taken the Hindu right to the kind of unchallenged power it always dreamed of.

Modi first came to international attention following the 2002 religious riots in the western-Indian state of Gujarat, where he was chief minister. Several coaches of a train carrying Hindu pilgrims were burned down under inscrutable circumstances, killing 59 people, and Gujarat witnessed a paroxysm of violence that included acts of brutality shocking even within the history of religious conflict in India. Ultimately, more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed.

The 2002 violence, perpetrated by militant organizations of the Hindu right as the state machinery stood by, has often been described as an anti-Muslim pogrom. Modi was subsequently banned from the United States “for severe violations of religious freedom,” a prohibition that was lifted only after his elevation as India’s prime minister in 2014.

After the riots, Hindu consolidation ensured that Modi retained an iron grip on power within Gujarat. But nationally and abroad, he was tainted—viewed as a dark, unsettling figure who could not be trusted to lead India. In 2004, India’s Supreme Court described Modi as a modern-day Nero who had watched while women and children were butchered.

Modi had visited America frequently during the 1990s, when he was a party ideologue seeking to build support among affluent and influential Indian Americans from Gujarat. Like many conservative Indians, he admired the United States not for its liberal and constitutional values, but for its economic and technological power, and he craved American acceptance. But following his ban from the United States, Modi avoided visiting Western democracies, perhaps fearing that he would share the fate of Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator who was arrested in London in 1998 for his human-rights abuses. Modi made multiple trips to China instead.

When he became prime minister in 2014, he changed tack. He sought to keep his Hindu base energized without attracting the sort of global notoriety that had come his way in 2002. The first test came in 2015, a year after his ascension to power.

A 52-year-old ironsmith named Mohammed Akhlaq was lynched by his Hindu neighbors in a village on the outskirts of Delhi. The cow holds a sacred, hallowed place in the Hindu imagination, and slaughtering cows is illegal in most Indian states. Akhlaq’s neighbors suspected him of storing beef in his fridge. They dragged him out of his house, where a mob, in an act of medieval bloodletting, killed him with sticks and stones.

The gruesome nature of the crime stunned India. Almost immediately, calls arose for Modi to condemn it. No full-throated condemnation ever came. Instead, for more than two weeks, while agitators on the Hindu right orchestrated a campaign of hate, Modi retreated into a mysterious silence that its followers interpreted as assent. Such tactical silence, in some ways even more significant than speech, has since become a hallmark of his politics.

Aakar Patel, a longtime newspaper editor who is now the chair of Amnesty International India, observed that in his years in the newsroom he never encountered a report about cow-based lynchings. “‘Beef lynching’ as category of violence has been introduced to India after 2014,” he wrote in his book Price of the Modi Years. Patel collated a spate of such lynchings that followed Akhlaq’s killing, as incendiary rhetoric around cow slaughter emanated from Modi and the Hindu right. In 2018, one of Modi’s ministers went so far as to celebrate those convicted of having carried out a beef lynching with garlands, a high mark of respect in Hindu society. Such crimes have become so routine in today’s India that they are relegated to the inside pages of newspapers, usually truncated to single-column reports.

[Read: The meaning of India’s ‘beef lynchings’]

In speeches in Western capitals, including in his recent address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, Modi recites florid paeans to democracy and human rights that ring farcical in the ears of critics and dissidents back home. Ahead of India’s hosting of the G20 summit this September, Modi even, bizarrely, claimed that India is the “mother of democracy.”

All the while, spectacular eruptions of violence that draw the world’s attention have been replaced by constant, low-intensity terror that keeps India’s Muslims on edge and the majoritarian pot stirring. Hindu supremacists have declared war on interfaith marriage, terming it a form of “love jihad.” Extrajudicial killings of Muslims by police officials and arbitrary, illegal demolitions of Muslim homes by civic authorities have grown exponentially.

The terror is sustained by a nexus between emboldened vigilantes and a partisan state. Of all the hate crimes committed in India between 2009 and 2018, 90 percent occurred after Modi’s arrival in New Delhi in 2014. Hindu supremacism is bleeding India by a thousand cuts.

From political wilderness to global prominence, Modi has essentially remained an unreconstructed Hindu supremacist. The current, unrelenting hard press on India’s Muslims is nothing but a pursuance of the logic of the 2002 violence by other means: The violence is now geographically dispersed, continuous, and chillingly unpredictable.

On July 31, just as the Gurugram violence began, a railway-security official shot his superior on an express train to Mumbai. The official then walked through seven coaches, found three men who could be identified visually as Muslim, and shot them dead. He made a video of himself with the body of one victim at his feet, hailing Modi and Adityanath, the radical, hate-spewing priest who is the chief minister of India’s most populous province. These leaders were the only choices if you wanted to live in India, the killer declared. The implication was that those who voted for other leaders were effectively traitors.

Connecting the Gurugram violence to the train shooting, the prominent Hindi-language intellectual Apoorvanand remarked that both events “were part of the same soap opera where different characters keep appearing.” Violence was producing its own logic. Between lone wolves and an organized mob, Apoorvanand concluded, nowhere in India were Muslims safe.

In South Asia, the rule of law is weak and state capacity is thin on the ground. Violence can easily spiral out of control. The Indian subcontinent is still haunted by the memory of Partition, the bitter, bloody division of the region into the modern nations of India and Pakistan, which displaced 15 million people and left more than 1 million dead.

Under Modi, the Indian state has ceased to emphasize pluralism and diversity, and fears abound that the nation again stands at the precipice of such a calamity. For the fourth consecutive year, the bipartisan United States Commission on International Religious Freedom has flagged India as a “Country of Particular Concern.” The Early Warning Project, an initiative partly supported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that assesses likelihood of genocide and large-scale atrocities across the world, ranks India eighth among countries at highest risk for mass killing.

The Hindu right sometimes spends years laying the foundations for violence. In old cities, such as Delhi, mosques sprang up organically over centuries. Gurugram, by contrast, was new, and its growing migrant Muslim population had few places of worship when Hindu-supremacist groups began attacking its Friday-prayer sites in 2018. The state had assigned the community fallow lands for these meetings. Although many such informal arrangements exist in India, the Hindu supremacists termed the prayer sites illegal and began imputing shadowy, fantastical motives to Muslim worship.    

Writing for The Caravan earlier this year, I sought to understand how the Hindu-supremacist machinery operated in Gurugram, not only through the organizations of the Hindu right, but in conjunction with an autonomous “alt-right” movement that was emerging in India, and how a genocidal imagination had taken hold in sizable portions of the society and state under Modi. In April last year, I visited the base of operations for the Bajrang Dal, a thuggish armed wing of the Hindu right, comparable to the Proud Boys, which met in the basement of an unoccupied building. A few blocks away was a half-constructed mosque that had become the subject of a simmering dispute in Gurugram.

The state had awarded a land grant for the mosque in 2004, but the mobilization of the Hindu neighborhoods around the site kept it mired in litigation for nearly two decades. The mosque was stillborn when I visited, iron rods jutting out of its half-finished pillars. In May, India’s Supreme Court gave the Muslim community permission to go ahead with construction. That judgment did not go down well in the neighborhood.

When the violence erupted in Gurugram at the beginning of the month, a darkness seized me. This was exactly the sequel I’d been dreading, and the Bajrang Dal was at the forefront of the violence.

In the early hours of August 1, a Hindu mob stormed the mosque. A young cleric named Mohammad Saad, who lived in the compound, was pierced to death with swords. Saad’s colleague, a helper at the mosque, spent two weeks in intensive care, having been smashed in the head with a steel rod and shot in the foot. A few Muslim boys lingering in the compound hid in trunks in a decrepit storeroom that somehow escaped the mob’s attention. Two police vans had been stationed outside the mosque, but the cops stood motionless.

In the most poignant of ironies, an hour before Saad was killed, his brother had called to tell him about the train shooting. Saad had been scheduled to travel home by train the following day. His brother had urged him to cancel the ticket.

Last week, I visited the mosque again. The acrid smell and soot-black walls were familiar from the sites of other riots I had covered. The last time I’d been inside a desecrated mosque was during the Delhi violence of 2020, when 53 people, mostly Muslims, were killed while Modi entertained Trump, on a state visit to India, less than 10 miles away.  

[Mira Kamdar: What happened in Delhi was a pogrom]

Historically, religious violence has been largely confined to impoverished neighborhoods where Hindus and Muslims lived cheek by jowl. The Gurugram mosque, by contrast, was situated in a well-heeled enclave—an island of privilege of a sort no longer insulated from the onward march of Hindu supremacism. Similarly, in the middle of August, a video emerged of a mob in Mumbai beating a Muslim man for going out with a Hindu girl. The assault took place in the city’s posh Bandra neighborhood, home to the Bollywood elite and India’s super-rich—the quarter where Tim Cook had recently inaugurated an Apple Store.

To live in India in the Modi era, now approaching a decade, is to feel in your bones the violence accelerating, its scope ever widening. The Hindu right is never more dangerous than when it feels its hold on political power becoming imperiled. The electoral setback in Karnataka was an early sign of growing psychological fatigue with the talking points of Hindu supremacism and the perpetually high temperature at which this politics of grievance is conducted.

With Gurugram, the Hindu supremacists have brought their polarization playbook to rich and middle-class neighborhoods, where they will likely be seeking to shore up support for the Bharatiya Janata Party ahead of next year’s elections. The tactics remain familiar—mosque disputes, marches through Muslim neighborhoods—but the unpredictability of where the violence will erupt next, the thrill and fear of it, keeps the Hindu right’s base energized. Violence of this kind almost certainly requires assent from the very top, and the opaqueness and secrecy around such decisions is part of Modi’s mystique and power.

By the time I set off from Gurugram for home in New Delhi that day in August, evening had fallen. In less than 10 minutes, I reached the wide-lane, American-style freeway that connects Gurugram to the national capital. Neon lights on the glass towers of corporate headquarters and luxury hotels shimmered in the humid night. How minuscule, I thought, was the distance that remained between India’s modern vision of itself and the mobs of Hindu supremacism.

London’s traffic cameras are under attack. Police say hundreds of license plate-reading cameras have been damaged, disconnected or stolen by opponents of an anti-pollution charge on older vehicles that came into force across the metropolis on Tuesday.

London has expanded its emissions charge zone to cover the entire city, targeting vehicles that do not meet standards with a daily fee.

Drivers must pay a £12.50 charge per day for driving a non-compliant vehicle in the zone

The India Club in London, which was set up in the 1950s, is set to close in September.

With feathers, dancing and steel band music, the London streets came alive with Caribbean culture.

If there’s one thing authors love more than procrastinating, it’s praising one another. During the Renaissance, Thomas More’s Utopia got a proto-blurb from Erasmus (“divine wit”), while Shakespeare’s First Folio got one from Ben Johnson (“The wonder of our stage!”). By the 18th century, the practice of selling a book based on some other author’s endorsement was so well established that Henry Fielding’s spoof novel Shamela even came with fake blurbs, including one from “John Puff Esq.”

Blurbs have always been controversial—too clichéd, too subject to cronyism—but lately, as review space shrinks and the noise level of the marketplace increases, the pursuit of ever more fawning praise from luminaries has become absurd. Even the most minor title now comes garlanded with quotes hailing it as the most important book since the Bible, while authors report getting so many requests that some are opting out of the practice altogether. Publishers have begun to despair of blurbs, too. “You only need to look at the jackets from the 1990s or 2000s to see that even most debut novelists didn’t have them, or had only one or two genuinely high-quality ones,” Mark Richards, the publisher of the independent Swift Press, told me. “But what happened was an arms race. People figured out that they helped, so more effort was put into getting them, until a point was reached where they didn’t necessarily make any positive difference; it’s just that not having them would likely ruin a book’s chances.”

[Read: Seven books critics were wrong about]

Today, pick up any title at Barnes & Noble and you’re likely to find that it’s plastered with approving adjectives from everyone under the sun. When I asked Henry Oliver, who runs The Common Reader, a Substack devoted to literature, for examples of overused words, he sent back a long list: electrifying, essential, profound, masterpiece, vital, important, compelling, revelatory, myth-busting, masterful, elegantly written, brave, lucid and engaging, indispensable, enlightening, courageous, powerful. “We do it like some kind of sympathetic magic,” John Mitchinson, a co-founder of the book-crowdfunding platform Unbound, told me. “Like a rabbit’s foot … We all do it because we are desperate to prove the book has some merit. There is something slightly troubling about it.”

For first-time authors, offering up contacts for blurbs has become a routine part of the pitching process, along with boasting about how many social-media followers they have. Tomiwa Owolade, whose first book, This Is Not America: Why Black Lives Matter in Britain, came out in June, told me that he, his agent, and his editor drew up a list of potential blurb writers, “and my editor messaged everyone on the list. I don’t know how many on the list responded to the email, or received the book but didn’t read it, or read the book and hated it, and I didn’t pester my editor to find out: I only know of the ones who came back with an endorsement.” One of those who responded was the Dutch author Ian Buruma, a former editor of The New York Review of Books. His unexpected endorsement provided a confidence boost to Owolade, and perhaps a sales boost too. “I’m a big fan of his writing, but we’ve never interacted before,” Owolade said. “I thought it was very sweet of him.”

What’s behind the blurb arms race? Two things: the switch across the arts from a traditional critical culture to an internet-centered one driven by influencers and reliant on user reviews, combined with a superstar system where a handful of titles account for the great majority of sales.

Those trends have disrupted the 20th century’s dominant two-step model of book promotion, in which publishers brought out a hardback—conveying seriousness, prestige, and heft—and then a paperback about a year later. This allowed them two chances to “launch” the book, and the cheaper, more portable paperbacks could also benefit from the (hopefully) glowing reviews for the hardback in major newspapers and magazines.

That model is now broken. Mitchinson and Richards tell the same story: The volume of books being published has become enormous at the same time as many legacy publications have stopped publishing stand-alone book sections; the reviews they do publish have lost much of their cultural impact. So instead of harvesting effusive quotes from professional book reviewers, authors solicit them from celebrities and other writers, usually long before publication. A phalanx of powerful, insightful, vivid blurbs now means the difference between success and failure. In Mitchinson’s 12 years of running Unbound, he says, “it’s moved from sending books out for review, to sending them out at the earliest possible moment for endorsement quotes.” Building excitement before publication day leads to higher preorders, and in turn to more promotion on Amazon and in brick-and-mortar bookstores.

And that reveals another dirty secret of the blurb: They’re not addressed to you. “The biggest thing to understand is that blurbs aren’t principally, or even really at all, aimed at the consumer,” Richards told me via email. “They are instead aimed at literary editors and buyers for the bookstores—in a sea of new books, having blurbs from, ideally, lots of famous writers will make it more likely that they will review/stock your book.”

That’s the magic. Stephen King is well known for his generous praise for less commercially successful authors—which is to say basically all of them—and if he says this is an important book, then it is one. His approval is a signal as powerful as a publisher announcing that it has won a “seven-way” auction or paid a “six-figure sum.” Anointed by greatness, maybe such a golden title will be chosen by Reese Witherspoon’s book club. Maybe it will pick up chatter on TikTok or Instagram. Maybe it will become the title that everyone seems to be talking about, like Yellowface or Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Blurbs are therefore an uneasy hybrid of quality-assurance mark and publicity gimmick. This makes the practice of blurbing a fraught one. Are you doing a fellow striver a good turn, or acting as a gatekeeper of excellence, making sure that only the best books succeed?

[Stephen King: My books were used to train AI]

Reading a book takes time, so writers have an incentive to blurb only their friends. Writing a good puff quote takes time too: If you ever see the words inspiring and illuminating, assume the blurber hasn’t even cracked the spine. Most established authors are bombarded with proofs, accompanied by heartstring-tugging notes from editors about the importance of this author’s vision. After writing my own book on feminism, I could have made a fort out of advance copies of other books with women in the title sent to me by hopeful publishers. I can only imagine the number of books Stephen King receives; it must be like a snowdrift on the wrong side of his front door. The distinguished classicist Mary Beard announced a few years ago that she was declining all requests, because she felt like she was becoming a “blurb whore” after being asked at least once a week. “I’m beginning to get a lot more authors who say, I can’t do it,” Mitchinson told me.

Not everyone says that, though. In my reporting for this piece, certain names repeatedly came up as prolific blurbers. “Salman Rushdie, Colm Tóibín, even the reclusive J. M. Coetzee make frequent appearances, so many that you wonder how they find time to read all these books and keep up the day job too,” the critic John Self told me. The British polymath Stephen Fry, meanwhile, “has hilariously blurbed about half of all books published in the U.K.,” said James Marriott of the London Times. His brand is cerebral, patrician, and politically unchallenging. “To me his endorsement means nothing, but I wonder how far casual bookshop visitors get that he puts his name on everything.” (I requested a comment from Fry via his agent but have not yet heard back.)

Unsurprisingly, publishers are grateful to the authors who do participate in the practice. Mark Richards sees them as “good literary citizens.” The novelist Amanda Craig agreed. “My thoughts have done a 180 turn,” she told me. When she published her first book, Foreign Bodies, in 1990, she was offered a cover quote by fellow novelist Deborah Moggach, who was nine years older than her. Craig turned it down because she wanted her work to speak for itself. “I was very purist,” she said. Now, though, the squeeze on reviewing space means that good authors struggle to attract attention, and she has a policy of blurbing “anybody I think is good, including people I thoroughly dislike.”

Craig is also annoyed that the male-dominated golden generation above her, whose members prospered in the 1980s when novels were far more profitable, have largely been reluctant blurbers of their successors. They “got the cream, but it never seemed to have occurred to them … to pass it on,” she told me, adding that she wondered if this had contributed to the decline in male authorship. (The success of men at the very top of publishing—as CEOs of publishing houses, as lead critics on newspapers, and until recently on prize shortlists—obscures the fact that most buyers and readers of books are women, and the industry as a whole is female-dominated.) The generation of women above Craig were supportive because they wanted to see other women succeed, but her male peers today did not benefit from similar solidarity. “When I got Rose Tremain and Penelope Lively, it was like God descending from the clouds,” Craig said. “I do feel for the men of my generation.” The blurb arms race, then, is unfair to many marginalized groups—and men may be one of them.

One obvious thing about blurbs is that they are open to corruption. Ask around and you will quickly discover deep suspicions about, for example, reciprocal blurbing—or what you might call a blurblejerk: “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” as George Orwell once wrote to his friend Cyril Connolly, proposing that they gush about each other’s books in print.

Tactical mutual admiration has always been so common that Spy magazine had a recurring feature called “Log-Rolling In Our Time,” and back in 2001, Slate revealed that Frank McCourt had gone hog wild after the publication of Angela’s Ashes, “doling out 15 blurbs” in five years, including one for the wife of his film producer. (You can see the extent of blurb inflation because, for such a prominent author, three blurbs a year now seems like a low number.)

I learned of Orwell’s logrolling—and the puff quotes by Erasmus and Ben Jonson at the start of this article—from Louise Willder’s fascinating study of book marketing, Blurb Your Enthusiasm. In it, Willder, who writes marketing copy for Penguin Random House, confirms (sadly, without naming names) that some puffers don’t read the books they’re endorsing. “One of the slightly shameful secrets of publishing is that occasionally an author will really want to give an endorsement for a writer they admire, but is too busy to do it—and so they hand the responsibility over to somebody else,” she writes. “I confess that, yes, occasionally I have made up review quotes for a couple of high-profile authors in this manner (although luckily they did find the time to sign off on the finished piece of praise).”

Halfway through our conversation, John Mitchinson revealed the existence of something even more shocking than ghostblurbing. Recently, when he requested a blurb from a public figure via his agent, he said, “they quoted us £1,000.” Wow. I knew the blurbosphere was corrupt, but not that corrupt. Mitchinson declined the offer.

[From the December 1957 issue: Book publishing—the changes I’ve seen]

But then, as we talked more, I realized that a celebrity can earn five or six figures for a corporate speech that takes far less time than reading a book and writing a gushing paragraph about it. And in terms of sales, a puff quote from the right person is probably worth far more than a few thousand dollars. Perhaps I was naive to assume, as James Marriott put it, “that publishers—a prestige, highbrow industry—would never indulge in the dark arts of publicity the way, I don’t know, fast-food manufacturers would.”

A blurb has always been a type of currency, and many of the most successful books are not really books at all, but brand extensions for a diet guru or productivity hacker or business titan. Why assume that those authors care about literature? Some probably regard people who read books before blurbing them as hopeless saps who don’t even take ice baths or keep a bullet journal. The fallen crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried once said that he would never read a book, and that anyone who wrote one had screwed up, because “it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

Hearing these descriptions of blurbing—which can be both a selfless act and a shamelessly corrupt one—reminded me of nothing so much as academic peer review. Getting a paper published in Science or Nature, or another respected journal, is a coup for any scientist. You have been publicly acknowledged as producing something of value, which has been rigorously checked and endorsed by your community. Your university will appreciate the visibility. Your H-index will be bolstered. You might get more research funding or more time off teaching responsibilities. At the same time, for the big journals, the rewards of publishing more and more papers are also obvious: profits (big ones). But the entire system relies on academics giving up their time for free to assess the submitted work. Devolving this quality-control mechanism onto unpaid peer reviewers has obvious flaws, turning what should be an objective process into one that’s open to political bias, petty score-settling, or plain old laziness. The same is true of relying so much on book blurbs. Publishers make money from books; blurbers don’t (well, mostly). In both science and publishing, the merits of the work are supposed to be paramount, but the structure of the industry means that prestige and connections matter too.

Scientists, being scientists, have methodically built an entire movement—called Open Science—to address these potential problems. Authors, being authors, largely complain about them to their friends. They tell stories of being asked for a blurb and then having their tightly constructed praise discarded in favor of a tossed-off sentence by a more fashionable writer. They whisper that some blurbers are only generous with their praise because it makes them feel important. They confer about who’s a soft touch and whose approval really means something. They claim never to be swayed by blurbs themselves, before revealing that praise from a favorite author did, in fact, prompt them to buy a now-beloved title.

“My own personal view is that there should be a moratorium on them—that we as editors should collectively decide not to put any on any of our books for a year, and reclaim our own taste,” Mark Richards of Swift Publishing told me. “Of course, this won’t happen, so like hamsters we’ll be on the quote treadmill until we finally fall off.”

The next generation of carnival performers took to the streets of west London for the children's day parade