Jeremy Paxman

British television personality Jeremy Paxman has admitted that his latest bestselling book, The Victorians, was actually, for the most part, written by someone else — someone whose name doesn’t appear on the cover nor the title page. As Benedicte Page reports in The Bookseller, it’s only in the acknowledgements at the end of the book that “the high-profile television news journalist reveals that, after penning the introduction, he ‘simply did not have the time’ to ‘finish the thing,'” and he tossed it off to Irish writer Neil Hegarty. After noting that the book was published last month to coincide with a BBC series, Page observes that reviews of the book praised Paxman’s ability to “turn a phrase,” and the book is “riding high at number eight in this week’s hardback non-fiction list.”