Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty and Ali Smith’s The Accidental live to fight another day at the women-only £30 000 Orange prize for fiction, reports John Ezard in London.

If beauty and tranquillity are what you are looking for, look no further than the Free State, with its majestic mountains, fertile valleys, fields of cosmos and sunflowers. In the first in a series on the attractions of the nine provinces, we focus on the magic of the Free State.

A lost notebook covering three months of the novelist Virginia Woolf’s life in her twenties has been found after lying in an academic’s bottom drawer in Birmingham, Britain, for 35 years. John Ezard reports.

In a rare moment for an auction room, one of the sublime works of thehuman species came under the hammer. John Ezard reports from London.

Within two days of the film’s release, fans had detected at least 32 mistakes in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, writes John Ezard.

An undiscovered poem of high quality by the English poet Philip Larkin was published for the first time this week, writes John Ezard.