"Simon Cowell, I've heard it said, is so vain that if he went to a funeral he'd want to be the corpse. But the net effect of Tom Bower's admirably level-headed biography is that Cowell seems dead already. Suffocated by his vast wealth … Cowell's life has become positively and transcendentally boring, drained completely of colour, bustle and humour." Roger Lewis in the Daily Mail was unexcited by Sweet Revenge: The Intimate Life of Simon Cowell, while the Spectator's Zenga Longmore asked: "Surely, if one wanted to read about Cowell and gaze at pictures of his over-indulged, hairy body, why not just browse the internet? … I would forgive the author if his book were entertaining, but it is not – it renders the reader exhausted yet fretful, a sensation similar to overdosing on double espressos." Lynn Barber in the Sunday Times, too, was left disappointed: "According to the tabloids, Cowell now regrets co-operating on the book but I don't see why. Bower has not produced any really damaging revelations." He fails to answer "the question of whether Cowell's shows are in any way fixed" and the "other great area Bower fails to elucidate is Cowell's love life, or lack of it … Gay is a red herring, but there is still something strange about his attitude to women."
Kathleen Jamie's collection of essays Sightlines received rapturous reviews. Doug Johnstone in the Independent called it "wonderful, sublime … a wondrous thing to encounter … The acuteness of her observations means that she is able to bring places and ideas to life with ease. So we get a vivid trip up an iceberg-strewn fjord off Greenland to witness the northern lights, and then we get the chaotic fuss of visiting a gannetry off the coast of Scotland … While reading this incredible book, I lost count of the number of times I stopped during a passage to think to myself: 'Yes, that's exactly right!'" According to Philip Hoare in the Daily Telegraph, Jamie "has written a book that transcends the definition of nature study"; her "prose is exquisite, yet never indulgent … Sightlines is a work of intense purity and quiet genius, and we're lucky to have it." A cooler Victoria Glendinning in the Spectator noted that sometimes Jamie "slips briefly into 'nature blog' mode. But the spirit of the book is uncompromising and stony. Sightlines cannot teach us instantaneously to see what we are looking at, but it corrects faulty vision and rams home the message that nature, as she says, is 'not all primroses and otters'."
The plot of Pure, Timothy Mo's new novel, was summed up by Tom Deveson in the Sunday Times: "Snooky, a Thai she-male … is caught in a transvestite orgy and forced by secret police to infiltrate a jihadist training camp." Though the novel's "vast amount of detail" is "not always absorbed into the fabric of the novel", Mo "has grappled with contemporary schisms to produce a novel of great charm and interest". "Mo brings all his audacity and exuberance – frivolity, even – to one of the grimmest topics in our cultural lexicon," wrote Boyd Tonkin in the Independent, who thought it a "virtuosic HD performance". Nirpal Dhaliwal in the Evening Standard was of a very different view: "Islamic fundamentalism becomes a mere foil for silliness and lazy humour rather than a subject of genuine scrutiny … trite humour and Mo's refusal to excavate the real issues make this a very boring read … Having chosen such an important topic, Mo has flagrantly chickened out in his effort to explore it."
