"A terrible wrathful man, with a slow fuse burning in one end of his belly and a stick of dynamite in the other." That was how Roald Dahl described his long-term American publisher Alfred Knopf in the New York Times in 1983 – but it could easily have applied to himself.

George Daniels is one man for whom you definitely don't want to be late – which is why I am knocking on the back door of his grand white house at 2pm on the dot. Perhaps I needn't have worried: the grandfather clock in the hall doesn't seem to be telling the right time and Daniels himself later reveals he often doesn't wear a watch – not quite what I was expecting from a man frequently described as the world's greatest living horologist.

During the winter of 1969, Bruce Chatwin wrote an exceptionally long letter to Tom Maschler, the head of Jonathan Cape. "You asked me to write you a letter about my proposed book on nomads," he wrote. "The question I will try to answer is, 'Why do men wander rather than sit still?'" It was a question that preoccupied the author for his entire life, from his prep-school days in the 1940s to his slow fade out to Aids-related illness on the Côte d'Azur four decades later, and one that peppers his collected letters, Under the Sun, like the catechism of a restless spirit.

Forget Tony Blair and his journey. This week's most important move in Gail Rebuck's publishing empire at Random House arguably came with the report that Robbie Williams will sell his third ghosted autobiography – You Know Me – exclusively through Tesco for six months.

Shock horror: bored doctor's wife becomes a Bunny Girl at the age of 154.