Jane Austen’s tea drinking not under ‘interrogation’, says museum

Jane Austen’s House says decision to update displays with information on slavery links have been ‘misrepresented’, including tea detail that was reported as ‘woke madness’

‘A surge of hope’: public helps create poem celebrating coming of spring

Writer Elizabeth-Jane Burnett brings together 400 voices for optimistic riposte to events of past year

Richard Dawkins loses ‘humanist of the year’ title over trans comments

American Humanist Association criticises academic for comments about identity using ‘the guise of scientific discourse’, and withdraws its 1996 honour

David Hare pens furious poem about Boris Johnson’s handling of pandemic

Exasperated satirical poem pours scorn on PM described as ‘dogmeat wrapped in the union flag’

‘Semi-literate’: writers in bitter row over Bob Dylan books

Howard Sounes and Clinton Heylin clash over their respective biographies of singer-songwriter

In the Instagram age, you actually can judge a book by its cover

Social media is now a vital platform to promote new titles. And that means jacket designs that hit you ‘hard and quick’

Poet laureate Simon Armitage publishes elegy for Prince Philip

The Patriarchs – An Elegy deliberately avoids the sycophancy Philip hated, the poet says, and is instead ‘in service of all people like him’

A history of the word ‘divisive’: once admirable, now a criticism

The No 10 race report was recently called ‘divisive’ – but when was the last time we were all of one mind on a topic?

Rathbones Folio prize paid £30,000 to scammers posing as the winner

‘Sophisticated cyber-criminals’ took Valeria Luiselli’s winnings, though a similar fraud attempt on the Baillie Gifford prize was foiled

In the Thick of It by Alan Duncan review – Johnson is a ‘buffoon’, Gove a ‘freak’

The diaries of the former Tory minister dismiss the PM’s Brexit arguments as ‘puerile junk’, but Britain’s stagnant politics is the real target

Leeds Playhouse marks 50 years with dramas rolling back the decades

Alice Nutter, Simon Armitage and Maxine Peake will contribute to season offering a ‘northern perspective’ on how life has changed since the 1970s

Readers on the bookshops they miss most: ‘I can’t wait to take my lockdown baby!’

Bookshops hold a special place in the hearts of readers. With retail now open across the UK, we asked you to tell us about the bookshops you are longing to browse

Children’s laureates campaign for £100m a year to fix primary school libraries

Current laureate Cressida Cowell leads demands to ringfence funds to renew ‘deteriorating’ facilities that fail to appeal to students

Country diary: fine gulls on a warm tide-flow

Aberteifi, Ceredigion: Settled into the grass of Rosehill Marsh with telescope and tripod, I’ve been particularly focused on Larus fuscus

Women’s prize condemns online attack on trans nominee Torrey Peters

Open letter had claimed that the longlisting of the Detransition, Baby author signalled that female writers were unworthy of their own prize