“I think that if second-hand books transmitted diseases, we would know about it by now No, I cannot see any chance of it happening. In any case, by the time most second-hand books change hands, any germs lurking within must have given up the ghost!”And yet when Zedqvist sat down to write his next novel, this idea kept coming back to haunt him, and he found himself writing a sort of thriller whose plot involved a string of deaths. The police suspected a serial killer, but there seemed to be no common thread. It wasn’t his real name – he had picked it up during a drunken Scrabble evening – but it served him very well, especially as a nom de plume for a column he wrote for that well-known paper, the Sunday Ordure.It was a book advice column. People wrote to him with queries about books they wanted to get, books they couldn’t remember the author of, books which had been handed down to them through generations and which might be worth a fortune. (They never were.) All the problems that Rolf could solve, he dealt with deftly. The tricky ones were returned with a note saying: “Much as Mr Zedqvist would have liked to answer your question, space, alas, does not permit …”One day, Rolf Zedqvist received a query about books which he had never had before, and which took him aback.

“Dear Mr Zedqvist,” the letter said, “Is it possible to catch diseases from books? Not from new books, but I am sure that old books, library books especially, have been through so many hands, that the chances of some germ harbouring itself therein, and infecting you, must be great. I suspect he always knew that they would, but did not expect it to happen over a war to overthrow a tyrant such as Saddam Hussein.John Rentoul is the author of ‘Tony Blair: Prime Minister’, published by Time Warner
More from John Rentoul. Today – a complete science fiction yarn for our hypochondriac times!

Today – a complete science fiction yarn for our hypochondriac times!
Once upon a time, there was a man called Rolf Zedqvist. Even a year before the 1997 election, there was no doubt he understood it, had thought about it and took it seriously. The day he acknowledged it publicly was a small but significant moment in the transition from Bambi to Stalin in the perception of the public.Since the Iraq invasion, those perceptions have hardened against him. Hence the letters accusing him of being willing to sacrifice the lives of British soldiers but not of his own children, or pointing out that hostages are only being taken in Iraq because of anarchy caused by the invasion.I suspect Mr Blair himself was conscious of the special responsibility of power long before the rest of us detected anything particularly warlike in his demeanour.

I simply want you to know that I did not take the decision lightly but because I believed and still believe it to have been absolutely necessary for our future security and that of the wider world.”The problem for the Prime Minister is that these life-and-death decisions flow from a prior decision to invade Iraq that many passionately opposed. I also know that the current public debate must make things worse. It is accepted that, behind the scenes, officials are doing what can be done, and that the most valuable commodity in the machinery of government, prime-ministerial attention, is being deployed to the full.Mr Blair is humanly sensitive to the torment of the Bigley family, but is confident that history will judge that he has acted rightly. That, I think, steels him against the highly personal nature of Kenneth Bigley’s video appeal.At one of his lowest points over Iraq, two days after Dr David Kelly’s body was found, Mr Blair hand-wrote a letter to the parents of Marc Lawrence, who had been killed in a helicopter crash in Iraq, saying: “I know there is little I can say to mitigate your grief or anguish.