KEY POINTS:
A literary round-up from newspapers and websites around the world.
BRITAIN
"I couldn't care less . . . I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one," Doris Lessing famously said when she received the Nobel Prize for Literature last year (You Tube famous, in fact). Well, she's at it again in the Daily Telegraph, in a big interview where she asks: "Who are these people? They're a bunch of bloody Swedes." And there's plenty more where that came from.
At the other end of the literary (and temper) spectrum, you'll find an interview with Marian Keyes.
And there's a look at how suspicions within her own marriage fuelled Daphne du Maurier's plot for Rebecca.
Fans of the television A Touch of Frost starring David Jason will be interested in the DI's last book appearance, after his creator, RD Wingfield, died last year.
The big essay in the Financial Times gathers together a bunch of books about baby boomers (how's that for alliteration?).
The short Q&A is with Mohsin Hamid.
Doris Lessing, George Steiner . . . all the big guns are out this week, the latter in the Guardian.
Edna O'Brien remembers the commotion caused by the publication of The Country Girls.
Meanwhile, Beryl Bainbridge reviews Melvyn Bragg's Remember Me.
And, to complete the triumvirate for women of a certain age, the writer's room this week belongs to Margaret Forster.
Michel Faber reviews Zachary Lazar's Sway.
In the Observer, David Lodge talks about depression, deafness and his new novel.
And then there's a first-person account of deafness by Lodge in the Sunday Times.
As an employee of the Listener in the current blogosphere, er, climate, one hesitates to even mention it, but there's also an interview with Nigel Lawson. And, back in the Observer, this review of his book by a Lawson sceptic - please accept both, without bias/balance/whichever you consider worse, but in the interests of inquiry. Nothing more, nothing less.
The Sunday Times also interviews Nicholson Baker about Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilisation, in which he argues that the Allies should have left Adolf Hitler alone.
There is a video interview with crime maven Patricia Cornwell.
Among the reviews, there is Growing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600-1914 by Anthony Fletcher, Rajiv Chandrasekaran (author of Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone) on Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq by Patrick Cockburn and Ken: The Ups and Downs of Ken Livingstone by Andrew Hosken.
In the Daily Mail, veteran music writer Ray Connolly (the Melody Maker - remember that?) reviews Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller.
Aficionados of poignantly naff British comedians will enjoy Must the Show Go On? by Less Dennis (sorry, slip of the keyboard, that should have been Les). The review is by Roger Lewis, biographer of Anthony Burgess and Charles Hawtrey, whichever of those impresses you more.
From Les Dennis to Thomas Middleton (in the Times Literary Supplement) - some people go an entire lifetime without being able to write that sentence.
A nice long James Wood review in the London Review of Books: it's of Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones.
There is also Hilary Mantel on yet another Boleyn girl in Jane Boleyn: The Infamous Lady Rochford by Julia Fox. A far cry from Philippa Gregory.
The New Statesman looks at the role Muslims played in shaping western civilisation, with a review of God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe (570-1215) by David Levering Lewis.
The Spectator has a review of Owen Dudley Edwards' wonderfully specific British Children's Fiction in the Second World War and Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh.
UNITED STATES
The New York Times goes big on the new Dermot Bolger novel, The Journey Home, about young suburban Dubliners puzzling over what it means to be Irish these days.
There is a review of I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story by Michael Hastings, in which the reporter author's girlfriend follows him to Iraq, with tragic consequences.
The new book from historian Tony Judt is Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.
There is Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey by Colin Grant and find out about Marie Therese, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter by Susan Nagel.
Also reviewed are new collections from Cynthia Ozick and John Ashbery.
Willie Nelson: An Epic Life by Joe Nick Patoski receives an epic review in the Los Angeles Times.
Less epic - ironically - is the review of Cecil B DeMille: A Life in Art by Simon Louvish.
Ursual K Le Guin's Lavinia is a spin-off from Virgil's The Aeneid.
The paper has sex on the brain with Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Sex and Science by Mary Roach (author of Stiff - relax, it's subtitled The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers) and a piece entitled Literary fiction gets kinky.
A more high-minded, er, organ, the Washington Post offers a poetry special, including Here, Bullet by Brian Turner. No, not our Brian Turner, but an Iraq War veteran whose poem is being passed around by American soldiers based there.
More poetry in the San Francisco Chronicle, which looks at the Bay Area's burgeoning poet laureates - with 13 counties appointing one at last count. Californians, eh.
The title Black Glasses Like Clark Kent attracts attention, but the subtitle A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan hints at the dark story of occupation contained within Terese Svoboda's book.
In the New Yorker, Bullfighting, a new story from Roddy Doyle.
AUSTRALIA
The Sydney Morning Herald reviews God of Speed, Luke Davies' new novel about Howard Hughes, and Slate editor Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy: The Unmaking of a Presidency.
In the Age, there is Julian Barnes' death-fixated Nothing to be Frightened Of.
And the Courier Mail features a new book about Banjo Paterson and the origins of Waltzing Matilda.
All together now, Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda, you'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me . . .
There'll be plenty of renditions of that - or the Eric Bogle song And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda that it inspired - tomorrow.
