More on the Edinburgh Book Festival farrago, from Alex Massie in the Times:
Some 800 authors, including the likes of Sally Rooney, Frankie Boyle, Amy Liptrot, Greta Thunberg, Naomi Klein and many others you have never heard of, have demanded that Baillie Gifford “divest” from its investments in fossil fuels and companies “linked” to Israel. Other luminaries such as Charlotte Church and Nish Kumar have similarly backed “Fossil Free Books”, the cultural vandals masquerading as concerned global citizens.
Yet no matter how much one sympathises with the invidious position in which the book festival found itself, the decision to part ways with Baillie Gifford is both craven and pathetic. It is a shameful capitulation to scolds and nincompoops whose arguments — to accord them a status they scarcely warrant — collapse after just a few seconds of scrutiny.
The hypocrisy of these fools knows no bounds. Waterstones is Britain’s biggest bookshop and it is owned by Elliott Advisors, a hedge fund with extensive oil and gas interests. Yet all these authors objecting to Baillie Gifford seem content to allow Waterstones to sell their books. Nor have I noticed authors revolting against Amazon even though, in the weasel words of “Fossil Free Books” the world’s largest online retailer has “direct or indirect links to Israel’s defence, tech and cybersecurity industries”.
But then so, apparently, do companies such as the chip manufacturer Nvidia and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. By this standard pretty much anyone who uses the internet is “linked” to Israeli “genocide” and anyone with shares in any stock market tracker fund is doubtless doubly implicated.
It is of course, in that over-worked but useful phrase, virtue-signaling. There's a lot of it about.
Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens would have stood up to the protesters trying to silence debate at literary festivals, Simon Schama has said.
The Hay Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival have cut ties with sponsor Baillie Gifford after a campaign led by Fossil Fuel Books, which claimed that the asset manager invests in companies with links to Israel, as well as companies that contribute to the climate crisis.
Invoking his late friends, Schama told a Hay audience: “Book festivals are theatres for listening to each other. I don’t want to see festivals being trapped in some sort of purity test.
“I go back to dear friends. I’m going to the memorial service of my friend Martin Amis. Martin and Christopher Hitchens and Clive James and a lot of my friends who are not with us were absolutely committed never to have the hands of writers tied behind them.
“They were merry pugilists. They absolutely believed that you could disagree spectacularly with each other without requiring the silencing or worse of each other.
“That is the heart and soul of the Hay Festival and the other great festivals that we have in this country, and I don’t want to see them imperilled. All of you, along with me, have to stand up and fight for them.”
Mick Hartley 
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