Jean Hartley was the publisher, with her husband George, of Philip Larkin's first mature volume of poems, The Less Deceived (1955). But her autobiography, Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press and Me (1989), earns her a place in literary history in her own right, with its elegant account of her wartime childhood and subsequent escape from a "cosy", inward-looking working-class culture through the new educational opportunities of the 1950s and 1960s.

Thousands of students are going to find themselves taking what I call an "accidental gap year"; namely they were set to go to university but there was no place for them this year.

With an international film festival and all-night art event on the agenda, this alluring Canadian city has stellar appeal, says <b>Cathy Winston</b>

A crisis in accommodation has prompted one university to urge students to defer entry for a year and another to put them up at a Pontin's holiday camp.

An exhibition of the work of Jane Cruickshank opens at a gallery in Stow on the Wold, Gloucestershire over the weekend.

It started with the SATs tests for 11-year-olds. Now GCSE candidates in maths and English are being put forward for exams to bolster their schools' league table positions.

A further dramatic slump in the number of pupils taking modern-languages GCSEs is alarming exam boards and teachers' leaders.

Kevin Martin holds his results envelope up high. "It's good, man," he says. Three Bs and three Cs along with a merit and a distinction in two BTEC courses; Kevin, a pupil at Tottenham's Woodside High School, has the grades to go to college like so many of his classmates, who are now destined for one of north London's sixth-form colleges to study for their A-levels.

This choice of her occasional essays displays the best of Smith as critic, memoirist and all-round wrangler with arts and ideas. She emerges as thoughtful but never pompous, agile but never glib, witty but never cruel, with heart and head sweetly aligned.

Teenagers won widespread praise for their GCSE results today as union leaders raised concerns that the Government has betrayed young people by stripping away their future chances.