Cover Stories: London bombs; Sebastian Faulks; Peter York

* It looks as if Sebastian Faulks may become the latest novelist to enter the children's arena. The author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray is about to publish his a new novel, Human Traces, a whopping tome set in the 19th and early 20th centuries when doctors were struggling to understand mental illness and formulate ways of treating sufferers. Apparently, Faulks wanted to be engaged on a project when the novel is published at the end of August, and is now some way into "a story about a boy and a dog, to whom some strange things happen".

* It appears that style guru Peter York has been hard at work on a book to be published this autumn by Atlantic. Depending on your point of view, it is either post-modern and ironic - or entirely tasteless, for the book is Dictators' Homes, a tome described by Julie Burchill, as "wildly original" and "savagely entertaining". Which it may well be, so long as you're not a victim of Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin, or Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, or Saddam Hussein or any other of the charming people whose taste in interior design makes Graceland appear a model of style.