The Redgraves have rivals in the latest batch of offspring to follow their parents

Blimey, that was quick. Barely an hour after the announcement, Sir Fred Goodwin's Wikipedia entry was headed "Fred Goodwin". It looked so bare. Without that all-important Sir, Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh were just historical geezers not heroes. The contraction "Fred" in "Sir Fred" sounded cool; Fred Goodwin just sounds like a bloke down the bookie's.

Booker-Prize winning author Salman Rushdie cancelled plans to appear at an Indian literature festival today after protests from Muslim clerics and warnings that he could be targeted for assassination.

Trevor Nunn has realised a forty-year dream by at last directing Tom Stoppard’s first masterpiece Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, as the second production of his captivating season at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Europe's most performed writer can't crack the UK. Brian Logan asks the author if his new play will

The Victorian era is not generally regarded as one that greatly contributed to the progress of British theatre – and now the architecture of the age has scuppered a modern production.

The Week in Arts

Are we going to let this village tyrant enjoy a respite from scrutiny and accountability

Adam Mars-Jones' sharp pen has earnt him some enemies but, as James Kidd discovers, he can be his own harshest critic

To recap, then. Adam Mars-Jones, twice named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists, despite never having produced anything reaching even 200 pages, suddenly published, in 2008, Pilcrow. This was the story of John Cromer, a cheery, inquisitive lad of the 1950s growing up with Still's Disease, an arthritic condition which, mistreated, leaves him physically stilted and bed-bound. It was, at over 500 pages, indisputably a novel; more than that, it was the first part of a trilogy. Not quite a case of three buses coming all at once, but at least we had the schedule.

A hotel complex in Ukraine, belonging to Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev, the owners of The Independent and the London Evening Standard, has been raided by police in an apparent row over the preservation of playwright Anton Chekhov's nearby house.

Ben Stephenson is shaking things up at the corporation

Sir Tom Stoppard is to work with BBC television for the first time in more than 30 years, making a five-hour epic tale of the Great War which he hopes will revive the reputation of one of Britain's finest novelists of the early 20th century, Ford Madox Ford.

Few today can survive in a rarefied world untouched by popular culture, but there's room for refinement and judgement, whatever the red tops say