Following up on Monday’s item about Jeffrey Archer: We hear from Grumpy Old Bookman that The Sunday Times of London has been quite brutal to Lord Archer lately. First, they sent Roy Hattersley out to do an interview at Archer’s Mallorca pad, where he came to the conclusion that “in Archer’s mind, the line between fact and fiction is permanently blurred.” Like, for example, the time he claims with a straight face, “I don’t think that there was any suggestion, or ever has been in my life, of financial impropriety.” (Yeah, right.) Then came the book review, which stomps on False Impression mercilessly, attacking it almost line by line: “Remember that when the knife-wielding female psychopath is in bed with the heroine (‘the blade was a centimetre from the clitoris’), she will employ scrupulously formal syntax: ‘Should you be foolish enough to attempt anything, let me assure you that I can kill you.'” And all that savagery doesn’t even broach the debatable taste of grounding a thriller in a protagonist everybody else thinks died in the collapse of the World Trade Center…but if New Yorkers have a problem with that, they can tell Lord Archer himself in a few weeks, when he comes to town to promote the book.