A panel chaired by the Poet Laureate has chosen the second poet — unless you count Harold Pinter — to win the David Cohen Prize for Literature. Derek Mahon took the £40,000 award for a lifetime’s achievement as, in Andrew Motion’s words, “one of the most original and subtle poets writing in the English language”.

The Second World War spymistress Vera Atkins is the subject of rival biographies: an authorised one by Sarah Helm, and now a very-much-unauthorised one by William Stevenson. The Atkins family objects to Stevenson’s aggrandising of her wartime exploits. He has said that there were muddles with his publisher, Arcade, in New York. The company says that the family wants to undermine its book to promote the Helm version.

If Premiership footballers do not read much for their own pleasure, at least they read to their children, according to a list of their favourite books. Half of the 20 footballers — one from each Premiership club — chose children’s titles. Ben Thatcher, the Charlton Athletic hard man, picked The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr.

When Dave Eggers’s literary magazine McSweeney’s started, it invited readers to send in $100 in return for lifetime subscriptions. McSweeney’s is now finding its side of the bargain less attractive so it has invited subscribers to “move on” the arrangement. Paying for copies is “totally” a matter of choice; but the magazine is trying various sweeteners to encourage the switch.

Meg Gardiner, whose thrillers are published by Hodder in Britain, could not get a deal in her native US — until Stephen King wrote a column raving about her. That shot her to No 1 on the used book site Abebooks. Now Dutton has bought her five published novels and two new ones.

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