Authors fear the worst if Penguin owner takes over Simon & Schuster

Analysis: if Bertelsmann, owner of Penguin Random House, buys US publisher, writers expect smaller deals and less choice for readers

UK watchdog investigates Penguin owner’s Simon & Schuster takeover

CMA says it is considering whether Penguin Random House’s $2bn deal would lessen competition

See that cute animal? It’s about to go extinct: Dear Zoo gets an update

Look After Us, a companion book to Dear Zoo, delivers hard lessons about saving wildlife, explains its author, Rod Campbell

How Van Gogh paid for his mentally ill sister’s care decades after his death

The troubled artist’s paintings failed to make him a living but as a new book of letters shows, his legacy enabled his sibling to get the treatment he lacked

Childhood brush with death helped make me a better novelist, says Maggie O’Farrell

Writer says encephalitis left her with a stammer that developed her sense of grammar and broadened her vocabulary

‘A box of light’: AI inspired by British verse attempts to write poetry

After processing more than half a million lines by human poets, experts say it is the best attempt yet to produce computer-generated poetry

‘Self-satisfied pork butcher’: Shakespeare grave effigy believed to be definitive likeness

Exclusive: Bust in Holy Trinity church was modelled by tomb-maker Nicholas Johnson, research finds

‘We are guests on Earth’: Akram Khan to stage The Jungle Book as climate crisis tale

Choreographer’s new version, to be performed at Leicester’s Curve in 2022, reinvents Kipling’s Mowgli as a climate refugee

Runners in England plan 330-mile relay to mark launch of parkrun book

Eileen Jones, author of how parkrun changed our lives, will begin ‘bookrun’ in Lake District on Friday

Shortlist for Carnegie medal offers locked-down children ‘hope and escapism’

Run simultaneously with the Kate Greenaway medal for illustration, judges say this year’s finalists should inspire and empower their young readers

Ralph Fiennes to direct and star in TS Eliot’s Four Quartets

A solo theatre adaptation, co-produced by Theatre Royal Bath and the Royal & Derngate, will tour the UK this summer

Beano hero: Dennis the Menace turns 70

The perennial naughty schoolboy is entering his eighth decade as youthful as ever, with help from YouTube star Joe Sugg and a panel of young readers

‘Imperially nostalgic racists’ target Empireland author with hate mail

Sathnam Sanghera speaks out against ‘vicious’ abuse he is receiving over his bestselling book: ‘Empire has been weaponised by the right wing, ever since Black Lives Matter’

Artists may have felt useless in lockdown, but we need them more than ever

The pandemic has shown us that a life with just the ‘basics’ of food and healthcare isn’t enough, says author and literary critic Alice O’Keeffe

Failures of State review – never forget the Johnson government’s Covid disasters

A damning assessment, by investigative journalists Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott, of the handling of the pandemic by the British government