One door opens to Charles Dickens fans as another shuts for makeover
Gad's Hill Place in Kent will welcome literary pilgrims while Doughty Street in London closes for rest of bicentenaryThe last home of Charles Dickens, Gad's Hill Place in Kent, a private property that his passionate fans besieged in his lifetime and ev...
Jane Austen portrait on show at Bodleian Library for World Book Day
World Book Day will see Bodleian Library in Oxford display 'new' Jane Austen portrait and sampler – for one day onlyA newly discovered portrait claimed to be of Jane Austen, and a sampler worked in slightly wonky stitches by the author as a girl, wil...
John Burnside wins TS Eliot prize
Scottish poet's Black Cat Bone beats strong shortlist in contest mired in protest over City fundingThe Scottish poet John Burnside has won the most controversial TS Eliot poetry prize in years, for a collection described as "haunting", after two of the...
Ted Hughes to take place in Poets’ Corner
Memorial to the former poet laureate, who died in 1998, to be unveiled in Westminster Abbey's South TranseptA slab inscribed with poignant lines from a poem by Ted Hughes, uniting in one stone his love of poetry, fishing, and his adopted county, Devon,...
Ted Hughes to take place in Poets’ Corner
Memorial to the former poet laureate, who died in 1998, to be unveiled in Westminster Abbey's South TranseptA slab inscribed with poignant lines from a poem by Ted Hughes, uniting in one stone his love of poetry, fishing, and his adopted county, Devon,...
Arthur C Clarke predicted Russians would put first man on moon
In a rediscovered 1963 episode of The Sky at Night, Clarke says Russia will win the space race with the US close behindSir Arthur C Clarke predicted in a lost BBC interview that the Russians would win the space race by landing the first man on the moon...
What the Dickens? Exhibition reveals novelist’s spooky plagiarism scare
Author's bicentennial exhibition at British Library has material showing Victorian rival's claim to have written same ghost storyThe spirits which terrorise and ultimately reform Scrooge in A Christmas Carol may have been due to a nightmare brought on,...
Mousetrap goes for world dominance with 60 productions around globe
Agatha Christie's thriller which first went on show in 1952 will also celebrate its 60th year with a 60-theatre tour in the UKWhen The Mousetrap opened in the West End, London was still in the grip of pea-souper fogs, Winston Churchill was prime minist...
Painting by mythical artist Nat Tate sells for very real £7,250 at Sotheby’s
Author and screenwriter William Boyd brought tormented, gifted artist to life in 1998, fooling manyThe anonymous bidder who paid more than £7,000 – far above the top estimate – for a painting by an utterly obscure dead American artist was certainl...
War Horse, the exhibition – a parable of our senseless, violent times
Michael Morpurgo's classic is the basis of a National Army Museum exhibition tracing the history of the real war horsesOf more than 120 books Michael Morpurgo has written, War Horse is not his favourite – though he concedes his epitaph will read: "Mi...
Bodleian Library shows off treasures, from Magna Carta to Shakespeare
Oxford library to ask exhibition visitors which items deserve permanent display - including a First Folio it once threw awayA spectacular exhibition of the greatest treasures of one of the most famous libraries in the world features a monument to past ...
Black Death study lets rats off the hook
Plague of 1348-49 spread so fast in London the carriers had to be humans not black rats, says archaeologistRats weren't the carriers of the plague after all. A study by an archaeologist looking at the ravages of the Black Death in London, in late 1348 ...
