The Week in Books

A new literary award styled as a “Booker without the bow ties” will go ahead next year after securing sponsorship.

Best-selling writer Sebastian Faulks is to breathe new life into much-loved characters Jeeves and Wooster after being approached by the estate of PG Wodehouse.

Best-selling writer Sebastian Faulks is to breathe new life into much-loved characters Jeeves and Wooster after being approached by the estate of PG Wodehouse.

A new James Bond novel, written by the award-winning author William Boyd, will be published in September. Bond creator Ian Fleming's estate confirmed the date of 26 September yesterday, but is keeping the title and plot of the spy's latest adventures a secret.

The Prime Minister said there would be events to mark 100 years since the outbreak of war in 2014, Armistice Day in 2018, and the dates of major battles in between.

A teacher at one of the country's most prestigious public schools has been found guilty of sexually abusing five young boys.

I don't know whether we are supposed to find it more remarkable that Roy Hodgson is a devotee of the novels of Martin Amis, or that Amis is a keen follower of football, but even in our flattened-out, pick-and-mix culture, it did seem a little peculiar to hear the man regarded as Britain's greatest novelist discussing Hodgson's predilection for the long-ball game.

History repeats itself as a gripping thriller

William Boyd, the celebrated author and James Bond enthusiast, is to step into Ian Fleming’s shoes and send Britain’s most famous fictional spy out on a new mission.

Where are you now and what can you see?

Virginia Woolf did not much approve of the intrusion of estate agency into fiction. "House property," she sniffily wrote in the talk that became her 1924 essay "Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown", "was the common ground from which the Edwardians found it easy to proceed to intimacy." Her polemic, against Arnold Bennett in particular, and the painstaking social realism of pre-1914 British fiction in general, scorns Bennett for "describing accurately and minutely the sort of house Hilda [his heroine] lived in, and the sort of house she saw from the window." Against this plodding artisan's view, she sets the intangible "character" of Mrs Brown, the elusive human spirit that no amount of sociological annotation can ever pin down. "I believe," Woolf maintained, "that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite". And no amount of estate agent's patter will ever capture what Woolf, in another essay, rather bafflingly called the "luminous halo" or "semi-transparent envelope" of her inner life. That task falls to the modern novelist.

Sunday night blockbusters play second fiddle to BBC's unlikely hit, says Adam Sherwin