Pulitzer prize-winning US historian Jill Lepore’s new book addresses the threat posed to liberal democracy by artificial intelligence. According to Lepore, the extraordinary power of private tech companies led by men whose priorities may not align with the wellbeing of the Earth or its inhabitants is set to destroy civilisation as we know it.

Lepore’s concept of the Artificial State is capacious. It includes both a fantasy desired by a select few and a reality that is already with us. The fantasy is of an atomised society in which an elite can transcend biological and planetary restrictions, “abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state, and even humanity itself for rule by automation, government by machine, and replacement by artificial intelligence”. The reality is that of public discourse having shifted to privately owned platforms on which monetised attention is valued above all else.

That social media feeds are crafted to manipulate users’ behaviour, whether to consume a product or to shift political position, is now well established. X, formerly known as Twitter, is one example. It is riddled with bots controlled by various actors – state, non-state, criminal or corporate – whose activity contributes to an algorithmic flood of rage-bait that polarises citizens.

According to Lepore, the Artificial State is not just the dream, but “the actual plan of a very small number of staggeringly powerful 21st-century merchant princes, Silicon Valley billionaires”. When our priority ought to be climate change, these “princes” – Lepore mentions Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Sam Altman – would rather focus on space travel or ramping up “compute” to beat China in the AI arms race. After scorching the Earth with energy-guzzling datacentres, she notes, their plan is to escape to Mars, hide in a bunker in New Zealand, or have their frozen brains uploaded.

Intriguing, jewel-like stories are Lepore’s hallmark, and The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State sparkles with them. She presents numerous micro-histories that link the past to the present, including the roots of the apparently hyper-modern philosophy of techno-libertarianism in the paranoid science fiction of the cold war. Lepore recounts the origins of the census in ancient Mesopotamia, making the point that counting people gives those in power “the ability to tally, torment, and tax a population”. Her rich survey of science fiction tropes of the 20th century, many of which have infused the hopes and dreams of the Technorati, is revealing. While Lepore interprets much classic sci-fi, such as Isaac Asimov, as cautionary, she observes that “the architects of the Artificial State seem to have read these stories, unironically, as instruction manuals, guides for how to build robots that would one day rule the world”.

By her own admission, Lepore has written “a grumpy book”. Almost every chapter ends with a deeply ominous line. However, she is not a true AI doomer at heart. She clarifies that it is not the technology itself that is the problem, but our lack of a coherent, democratically forged strategy about how to develop and use it. Yet she cites the growing number of industrial robots as if it were self-evident that such technology is always bad. By lumping together a range of different technologies under the umbrella of AI and “robots”, the wrong questions arise. Should a Russian state-operated chatbot fomenting far-right discontent in the UK be in the same categorical boat as machine-learning models used to create potentially life-saving drugs? Should the robot hoover sucking up toast crumbs in my kitchen be ontologically adjacent to a drone dropping bombs on houses full of children, using AI-generated intelligence? To analyse how technologies are reshaping the political order requires conceptual precision.

Lepore’s argument that humanity is in the process of ceding vast power to a tiny group of unelected businessmen – some of whom appear to be cartoon supervillains – is a sound one. She concludes the book with an exhortation to “unplug” and connect with nature and animals but prescribes nothing further. This is no doubt a good idea. But in the face of a technological revolution that threatens to undermine the entire world order, logging off to touch grass can only be the first step.

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Something is happening to literary time. In the last fortnight I’ve read new or forthcoming novels about a mirror universe where history runs backwards (The Understory, Chloe Benjamin), an agency that offers appointments with the past (Time Travel for Beginners, Jaclyn Moriarty), and a young woman who’s genetically untethered from linear life (Audrey Niffenegger’s long-awaited sequel to The Time Traveller’s Wife, out in October). And these are just the latest books to meddle with the fourth dimension. There are dozens: from Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series and Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, to Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time. Time is losing the plot – or perhaps it’s the other way around.

I have an armchair theory about all this counterfactual longing: the lure of the do-over. The present feels like a corrupted timeline. If only we could find the glitch.

But even realist novels are messing with the clock. Irish author Donal Ryan’s Where Are the Kings is a study in grief-time: the ways loss distorts the ordinary passage of hours. Days stretch, collapse, repeat and disappear. Memories gather their own temporal weight. Grief becomes a planet with its own cruel, ruminative gravity.

In his memory, Jack is forever pursuing his suicidal mother to the lake, reliving her last minutes. She is driving her rusty, backfiring Fiat; he is following behind on his pushbike, forcing his body up hill after hill. His muscles are screaming, his lungs are screaming, he is screaming. And he is too late. We will never learn what prompted Jack to follow his mam – only that he knew, in that terrible, lucid way kids know. There is a version of Jack that will always be pedalling; a version of her that might still be saved.

Jack is 12 when we meet him, and in the care of his mother’s people: two stoic grandparents, a trio of blustering uncles and an unhelpfully gorgeous aunt. Jack’s father, Tomáš, has been institutionalised and feels as lost to the boy as his drowned mother. Twice now, Jack has seen a parent break – witnessed something vast and irreversible. He remembers the soundless way his mother cried; how his father clutched at her coffin. His desperate hands.

Jack is poised on the edge of adolescence: smart (“high eye queues”, as his grandad brags), but still at that threshold where perception outpaces understanding. He senses a family injury: “something complicated and invisible, some ancient strife from the time before he existed”. But he can’t quite grasp the shape of the wound, or how it festers in and around him. The grownups are tight-lipped. There’s a great deal they’ve learned to forget. Jack’s mother is already receding into hush and euphemism: “They hardly ever talk about Mam directly. They allude. They are oblique.”

But the family do talk. And their affable chatter is the great pleasure of this novel, particularly Jack’s uncles, Theo and Haulie, a pair of existentially questing mechanics. They ponder the great questions of the universe, retell the great myths: “Liquorice? No, it’s Icarus you thick bastard, the fella whose father made him wings and stuck them on him and he flew too high and bollixed himself up.” And then there’s Jack’s nana and her blasphemous wisdom. On Adam, the world’s first disappointing husband: “he couldn’t keep his house in order, the dopey prick. Set us all on the path to ruin.”

Add in some incestuous lust, a dead deer, contested ashes, feckless priests and a flatulent roommate, and there are the makings here of a family farce: comic or tragic (or both). In another novel, some wild reckoning would be brewing (think of the final wheeling chapters of Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting). But Ryan has never been a grand vaudevillian, or a cathartic trauma plotter. Where Are the Kings is a gentle novel of ungentle things – a reminder that “things don’t stop being beautiful because ugly things happen”. If Ryan’s fiction has a moral heartbeat, this might be it.

There’s a hint or two that Ryan’s eighth novel inhabits the same unhurried world as 2020’s Strange Flowers, his tender-hearted tale of rural life, set in the fictional village of Knockagowny. Like Niall Williams, Ryan seems to be mapping an imagined Ireland, family by family.

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Time moves strangely in this quiet corner of Tipperary, beyond the attenuation of grief: gossip is fleet; politics are sluggish. We gather our bearings from faded band T-shirts, songs on the radio and the late appearance of a brickish mobile phone. It seems to be the late 1990s, but that date feels almost incidental. It could be the 1980s. It could almost be the 1950s. In Theo and Haulie’s garage, time warps even further: “A good while ago could mean a month ago or it could be right back in history,” Ryan writes. “Time stops being linear and it susurrates and syncopates.” Jack imagines the workshop as a kind of wormhole. Might this be his way off the grief-planet: learning to put things back together? It can’t be that simple. And yet it is.

What are we to make of all this slippage and stretching? Ryan gives us a clue in his section headings: Tempus Edax. Tempus Fugit. Tempus Imperator. Time devours. Time flies. Time rules supreme. These phrases belong to the tradition of memento mori: reminders of mortality’s cruel, beautiful, stupid, inescapable truth. Or as Jack puts it: “There’s nothing to be done then, it seems, except live.”

Charles Spencer is to publish a book about his sister Diana in September.

In the book – titled Swan Song: Diana, My Sister – Spencer recounts the story of Diana’s life and the week of her death. It marks “the first time that Earl Spencer has spoken openly and at length about his sister”, according to the book’s publisher, the Penguin imprint Michael Joseph. The book will be released on 22 September in the UK.

“With the 30th anniversary of Diana’s tragic death on the skyline, I’ve been inundated yet again with requests for interviews about my sister,” said Spencer. “This has convinced me to write down my own thoughts and memories, once and for all, rather than having the discomfort of again reading the opinions of others, many of which are based on untruths that have become accepted over time.”

“The aim of this book is to tell the truth about Diana from her brother’s perspective, just as I attempted to do when speaking at her funeral. As with my eulogy, I want to speak on Diana’s behalf and do so in an openly positive way.”

Spencer delivered his sister’s eulogy at Westminster Abbey in September 1997, after her death on 31 August.

Daniel Bunyard, publishing director at Penguin Michael Joseph, said the book contained “many revelations that will draw considerable attention”, but was also “a fitting tribute to the beloved woman who was Princess Diana”.

Spencer said: “I hope this book will be of interest to the many who still cherish the memory of Diana when she was alive.

“I would be delighted if those too young to remember her in her heyday feel, after reading this, that they ‘get’ who she really was: a one-off, dynamic character, full of love, charisma and self-doubt, who gave life a hell of a go, and left the world a far better place, despite exiting the stage while still so young.”

Maggie O’Farrell, Philip Pullman, Katherine Rundell and Elif Shafak are among the authors supporting a campaign by independent booksellers who have urged Andy Burnham to extend business rates relief for pubs, clubs and live music venues to bookshops, warning that rising bills could put some shops at risk of closure.

A total of 234 independent booksellers have signed an open letter organised by the Booksellers Association, calling on the prime minister and the chancellor to give bookshops the same consideration as other businesses that play a significant, positive role in their communities.

The campaign follows the government’s announcement last month of a 20% reduction in business rates for pubs, clubs and live music venues from April 2027.

More than a dozen authors have told the Booksellers Association they support the letter, including children’s laureate Patrice Lawrence, Adam Kay, Lemn Sissay, Anthony Horowitz, Patrick Ness, Donna Ashworth and Rachel Joyce.

Burnham also recently announced plans to tackle the spread of vape shops, betting shops and “rogue operators” on high streets, giving local authorities the power to reject new betting shops and adult gaming centres. He said such businesses had displaced “the shops, services and community spaces that people are crying out for”.

The letter, sent on 13 August, states that bookshops were “deeply disappointed” to learn they would not be included in the additional relief. “The government has accepted that businesses which deliver significant community benefit deserve targeted support. Bookshops clearly meet that test.”

“Business rates relief for bookshops would also provide a meaningful legacy for the National Year of Reading,” it continued. “The government is rightly telling the country that reading matters. But as things stand, its legacy risks being contradictory: promoting reading on the one hand while implementing policies that reduce investment in bookshops and may contribute to their closure on the other.”

“Independent bookshops are the beating hearts of our high streets and communities”, said O’Farrell, author of Hamnet. “They need all the support we can give them.”

Rundell said: “To lose [bookshops] from our high streets would be to chip away at our culture, and at our ability to access fresh thought and new ideas.”

The Treasury has argued that bookshops already receive support through permanently lower business rates multipliers and a £4.3bn package intended to limit increases in bills.

Analysis commissioned from economic consultancy Cebr found that independent bookshops in England that are not eligible for full small business rates relief face an average annual increase of £4,563 by 2029-30, with some bills expected to double when transitional relief ends.

Across the sector, business rates receipts are projected to increase by 45% nominally. For the average independent bookshop, Cebr estimates this would require selling an extra 1,141 books a year to cover the additional cost.

The impact is already being felt, according to separate Booksellers Association research, with 85% of independent booksellers saying they are less likely to invest in stock, staffing, events or their premises as a result of business rates changes.

“In the current encircling corporate darkness, independent booksellers are lighthouses,” Philip Pullman said. “They are almost the last beacons shining to remind us about private reading, personal discovery, and the life-saving joy of encountering minds and hearts that speak to us as one person to another.”

Laura McCormack, the Booksellers Association’s head of policy and public affairs, said restricting high-street businesses deemed as negative was “only half the job”. “You can’t rebuild Britain’s high streets by tackling the wrong businesses while making it harder for the right ones to succeed,” she said.

The main publisher of the bestselling true crime writer Christopher Berry-Dee has dropped the author following a Guardian investigation into allegations of violence and sexual abuse against him, which he denies. Waterstones has also removed his books from sale.

“We are shocked and appalled by the very serious allegations relating to Christopher Berry-Dee, and our thoughts are with those affected,” said the publisher Bonnier Books in a statement to the Guardian.

“Bonnier Books UK will no longer publish Christopher Berry-Dee, we will not work with him on any future projects, and we are terminating all existing agreements”, it continued. “There are practical steps entailed in unwinding longstanding contracts, including those involving third parties, but we are working through them as quickly as we can. We will also be removing our existing stocks from the market.”

An investigation published on Saturday detailed multiple allegations of abuse by Berry-Dee, including domestic violence and sexual assault of a 13-year-old student attending his art school. Berry-Dee refused to be interviewed for the piece, citing health issues, but denied the allegations: “I have not once committed any of the crimes you accuse me of.”

Berry-Dee, 78, is the UK’s top-selling author of true crime. His books, including Talking With Serial Killers, draw on interviews with murderers and have sold nearly 1m copies.

Berry-Dee has admitted lying to his subjects in order to gain access, telling them he intends “to write a book about the miscarriage of justice they are suffering”, he wrote in his 2023 book Talking With Psychopaths and Savages.

Waterstones told the Guardian that Bonnier contacted the bookseller to say that it would no longer publish Berry-Dee’s books. “Following this advice, we have removed the titles from sale in our shops and online,” said a representative.

Orion, an imprint of Hachette, published Inside the Darkest Minds by Berry-Dee last month, but did not respond when asked whether they will continue to publish it.

If you’re one of those people who thinks about the Roman empire several times a week, Robert Harris has you covered. He follows his trilogy of novels about the life of Cicero and his one-off about the unpleasantness in Pompeii with a narrative that takes us from civil war through the assassination of Julius Caesar, with all the bickering and bloodshed that follows, on to the decisive battle of Actium and Octavius’s apotheosis as Caesar Augustus. We meet Cicero, Fulvia, Lepidus, two Caesars and a burly Antony (“Imagine, if you will, a statue of Hercules with a club in one hand, a wineskin in the other”).

Here’s the clever bit: he narrates it all from the point of view of Octavius’s right-hand man, Agrippa, a much less well-remembered figure. Harris tells us he “left behind no speeches, few letters and only a couple of sentences of direct quotation”. Yet Agrippa was “effective co-ruler of the Roman world for many years” and “the greatest general of the period”. Octavius couldn’t have risen without him, but he seems to have done his best to write him out of the story afterwards, according him only two passing mentions in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti.

Harris’s Octavius is vain, clever, sickly, ambitious, manipulative and prickly. His childhood friend Agrippa, the only person he sort-of trusts, is established early on as a bit of a meathead. Their first encounter is when Agrippa duffs up a couple of bullies he catches picking on a weaker boy; mostly for the pleasure of duffing a couple of people up. He doesn’t know at the time that the beneficiary of this duffing is Caesar’s nephew. They become friends: “He helped me with my classwork. I showed him how to fight.” They share a teacher: “He instilled in Octavius especially a lifelong love of poetry, although my literary tastes, to his despair, have always tended towards works on engineering and military history.” Even as they rise to power, our man’s eye is on the duffing. Octavius returns to Rome amid great danger to give a rousing speech, and Agrippa reports only: “His voice carried well. I did not pay much attention to what he said. I was too preoccupied scanning his audience for potential assassins.”

Harris’s framing conceit is that the text we are reading is Agrippa’s memoir, written in some haste and high feeling. Agrippa, now an old man of 50, has come home early from an expedition to duff up the barbarians in Illyricum. He has a gammy leg, which is about to kill him. He limps in to find his wife in bed with his son-in-law. Since the son-in-law is also the emperor’s adopted son, he hesitates to get busy with his sword and instead retreats to his chamber. He’s feeling a bit sorry for himself and, uncharacteristically, he turns to words.

It is a sign of Harris’s discipline as a novelist that he has Agrippa tell his tale in almost comically unambitious prose. There’s a lot of pipe-laying in the military history department, of the “then the legions would wheel around the far side of the Black Sea by way of Hyrcania, the Captain Sea and the Caucasus, and march west” type. And he’s a bastard for an aqueduct, is Agrippa. Loves them; maybe even more than having a scrap. He’s never happier than when building infrastructure and explaining the engineering principles and logistics to the reader.

When Agrippa is stirred to reflection, he tends to reach for a well-worn phrase. “The sickly, pungent stink of death lurked round every corner.” “Mercy was now the order of the day.” “War, which I had once so relished, was gouged into the countryside like an open wound.” “Power makes monsters of us all.” “In the words of the old saying – if you strike at the king, you must be sure not to miss.” (That particular old saying, I think, comes from The Wire, but never mind.)

But from all this elegantly drab stuff emerges a more subtle portrait of the man and the age than you might expect. You get a persuasive portrait of a Rome exhausted by civil strife, and of the serpentine manoeuvrings of its rulers. Everyone is betraying everyone else, raising armies, marrying each other’s children, forming and breaking alliances. It’s hectic. And, gosh, all these people redrawing the map of the world and changing the course of history are young. The plot twist – a feature of scholarly speculation since 1937, Harris’s afterword tells us – concerns the real parentage of the apparently low-born Agrippa.

But that, like much else, it suited him to keep quiet about. His most enduring real-world monument is seven terse words in stone above the entrance to the Pantheon: M F AGRIPPA L F COS TERTIUM FECIT. “Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, in his third consulship, did it.”

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A Sydney library has removed a book critical of Israel called How to Sell a Genocide, following a complaint reportedly from a survivor of the Bondi beach terror attack.

Waverley library at Bondi Junction is in the same council area as Bondi beach.

A Waverley council spokesperson said: “The book has been removed from library shelves for review, and council will further consider processes to ensure closer oversight of book selection.”

“Like most public libraries, Waverley council outsources its book curation, ordering and purchasing, meaning book selection is not undertaken by council officers.”

The Jewish news outlet JWire last week reported it had approached the council after a survivor of December’s antisemitic attack at Bondi, during which 15 people were killed, saw How to Sell a Genocide on the “new release / hot item” shelf and wrote on Facebook that the display was distressing for survivors and bereaved families.

Guardian Australia has been unable to locate the Facebook post.

How to Sell a Genocide critiques what it claims is the US media’s “complicity in the destruction of Gaza”.

The decision to remove the book was criticised by its author, Adam Johnson, who said calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide was not “a fringe or radical position”.

“They seem to be objecting largely based on the title using the word ‘genocide’,” Johnson said.

“But ‘genocide’ is not my word, or my finding. The fact of genocide in Gaza is the overwhelming consensus of the human rights world, and it is a wholly mainstream opinion among those tasked with studying and determining such matters.

“That it makes some people upset is unfortunate, but reality is often upsetting. This particular reality is especially upsetting … to the parents of the over 20,000 children killed by Israel in Gaza since October 2023. Do Sydney officials plan on removing pro-Israel books from their libraries because it potentially upsets these community members?”

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies declined to comment.

Bart Shteinman, an executive member of the progressive Jewish Council of Australia, said the decision to remove the book for review was “deeply alarming”.

“Public libraries belong to all of us, and should host a range of views and topics, be they books about queer families or Israel’s widely-condemned war crimes,” he said.

Israel has repeatedly denied that it has committed genocide in Gaza.

The New South Wales government passed legislation earlier this year which amended the state’s Library Act to better protect the institutions from campaigns to ban books.

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Shteinman said “if the council decides to remove this book permanently, both the mayor, Will Nemesh, and the special minister of state, John Graham, must explain how that decision is not in breach of the law”.

The president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, Nasser Mashni, said it was a “library’s duty to provide its community access to a broad range of published works, including those that may challenge or discomfort”.

“Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, maimed and displaced,” he said.

“Gaza’s population is facing engineered famine, and all of its hospitals and universities have been destroyed. The word genocide is not being used to offend anyone. It is being used because it describes the scale and intent of what is happening.”

Mashni said “history has taught us too well what happens when books start getting banned”.

David Shulman, the senior commissioning editor at Pluto Press, which published How to Sell a Genocide, said understanding events in Gaza and related media coverage was “a matter of the greatest public concern”.

“Adam Johnson is one of the sharpest media critics working today, and his analysis is rigorous, meticulous, data-driven and damning,” Shulman said.

“His book should be made as widely available as possible, not least through the public libraries that play such an essential role in a democratic society.”

The Waverley mayor and the special minister of state were contacted for comment.