Writers with Entries

Listed below are a tiny proportion of all the entries revised. Run-of-the-mill additions (new editions, new scholarship, sale prices, film versions, etc.) are not listed here.

• Jane Austen: more on her siblings and on the extraordinary Austen spin-off industry.
• Anita Brookner: not only her new novel, Strangers, but journalist Mark Lawson's unusual recantation of his former Brookner-phobia.
• Agatha Christie: recent manuscript discoveries, and results of research into the decline of her literary vocabulary in old age, suggesting conclusions about her health (probable Alzheimer's) and the processes of composition.
• Caryl Churchill: the furore around her controversial new play, Seven Jewish Children.
• Anne Conway: a work by her offered for sale at four thousand eight hundred pounds.
• Carol Ann Duffy: selection as first British woman poet laureate; another furore around her first poem in that position, "Politics".
• U. A. Fanthorpe: at the time of her death she was being backed for the laureateship by Duffy, the successful candidate.
• Marie Madeleine de Lafayette: the extraordinary career of La Princesse de Cléves as a symbol of resistance to French university cuts, precipitated by snide comments on the novel from President Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Eliza Lynn Linton: a letter offered for sale in which she thanks "Mark Rutherford" for his good opinion of her controversial novel Joshua Davidson.
• Sylvia Plath: more on her relationship with Ruth Fainlight; her son's suicide.
• Anne Stevenson: more on her contact with Ted Hughes over her life of Sylvia Plath.
• Sylvia Townsend Warner: now quoted, a late, irresistible passage from Lolly Willowes.