Children’s author who sued John Lewis over Christmas ad loses case

Fay Evans alleged similarity between the 2019 Excitable Edgar TV campaign and her self-published book

Boudicca returns as a 21st-century feminist – 2,000 years after her death

The queen and warrior who led a revolt against the Romans is enjoying a national resurgence as a symbol of rebellion

Children’s books publisher Peter Usborne dies at 85

Publisher pays tribute to ‘genius’ who was an ‘inspirational leader’

London’s County Hall to host immersive Paddington Bear theatre show

The Paddington Bear Experience, a family-friendly show based on Michael Bond’s character, will be at the ex-GLC building on the South Bank

Agatha Christie novels reworked to remove potentially offensive language

Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries have passages edited by sensitivity readers for latest HarperCollins editions

Your garden should be a multilayer food forest, says RHS horticulturist

Tom Massey promotes natural ‘forest gardens’ with biodiverse planting to create wildlife havens

Simon Armitage savours spring ‘ecstasy and melancholy’ on World Poetry Day

Poet laureate celebrates a plum tree in poem commissioned by the National Trust for its blossom campaign

Everyone wanted me to have a literary rival – I got drunk with him instead

I’d been endlessly geed up about the ‘other Belfast novelist’, as if we were obliged to be enemies. I wasn’t having it, says writer Rachel Connolly

Imagine a time when Shakespeare played a very second fiddle to Ben Jonson

Richard Cohen’s Making History returned me to the childhood ecstasy of leafing through my first encyclopaedia

Export ban on Coleridge anti-slavery manuscript as British buyer sought

Handwritten poem in Greek from his undergraduate years has recommended sale price of £20,400

Poetry can move souls and thrum hearts: why wouldn’t we teach our children about it?

A dispiriting new survey has found that nearly a quarter of schools teach poetry only once a year or less. What a shame that is, says children’s laureate, Joseph Coelho

Sensitivity readers: what publishing’s most polarising role is really about

The Roald Dahl alterations thrust sensitivity readers to the foreground, but the profession is nothing new

Martha Mills prize: new award for young writers launched by London Review Bookshop

Prize for writing by 11-14-year-olds inspired by ‘imagination and curiosity’ of Martha, who died in 2021 aged 13

Theresa May to release book on famous political scandals

In The Abuse of Power, former PM will look at how public institutions close ranks ‘to serve themselves’

Surviving copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio to go on show

Events planned in UK and Ireland, including a British Library exhibition, to mark 400 years since complete works first published