A thoughtful judge of last year's Samuel Johnson award for non-fiction, Marr is now beginning work on his own book. Who, What, When, Where, Why? are the five interrogatives familiar to any rookie journalist and, under that heading, Marr will be "reflecting on the longer-term trends and the bigger picture ... I hope it will stir up a few hornets, if not the whole nest". Publisher Macmillan will be hoping for another journalistic bestseller to add to its roster of books by the likes of John Simpson and John Sargeant.* Good news for budding young poets: the Foyle Foundation is sponsoring the Poetry Society's Young Poet of the Year Award, for 11- to 18-year-olds.

Fifteen winners will receive a week's tutoring by the award's judges, who this year include Matthew Sweeney, at the Arvon Foundation Centre in Yorkshire. It's not the first time that the bookshop has supported poets: in 1949, William Foyle, co-founder of Foyles, established the Foyle Prize for Poetry, worth £250 – a generous purse in those days. Further details at .uk.* Actress Carol Channing is at work on her memoirs and her American editor, Michael Korda, a member of the celebrated celluloid dynasty, has decreed the manuscript needs more sex. The actress argued, editor counter-argued – until Channing decided to cite her contract, which stated that she had total control over the book's content Simon & Schuster will not have more sex from that woman..

Marx, if we did but know it, is the prophet and advocate of globalisation. Capitalism's restless quest for profit is so dynamic that it is compelled, however inequitably, to be a transforming economic force that must flow into every nook and cranny of the globe. Only once all its possibilities have been exhausted – which might take centuries or even millennia – can socialism be expected to follow.Thus speaks Karl Marx – or, at least, the Marx who inhabits Meghnad Desai's new book Desai's central thesis is rich in paradox. The inspirer of communism would have deplored the way his ideas were bent to serve the Russian revolution and Soviet Communism, because that development obstructed what capitalism had to do. The revolution came far too early; it massively predated the development of Russian capitalism, which could not have done its modernising work by 1917. The years between 1917 and 1989 were thus an aberration. But now capitalism is free to universalise modernity and the logic of markets. We are back on the true road to socialism, except none of us may ever see it.

Indeed, if capitalism is as creative as Desai claims that Marx thought, its possibilities may be inexhaustible. In which case, socialism will remain a dream.It's a neat argument, which Desai evidently hopes will infuriate the remnants of the socialist left while paradoxically beginning to restore the reputation of a political economist he much admires – but not in a way that has the slightest progressive implications. If you thought Marx thundered against capitalist exploitation and called for revolution, think again. In Desai's world, he is more a history-obsessed, pro-capitalist intellectual. He hopes for a better communist order in some future never-never land, but in the meantime cheers on capitalism-cum-globalisation as a necessary but benign evil – while characterising attempts at social justice in the here and now as nice but futile.This Marx is for the World Trade Organisation because, as an agency in which any country has only one vote, it has the best chance to promote globalisation. But he is against the IMF and World Bank because these are institutions dominated by the older capitalist states, which might use government power to curtail the full power of markets.