The publisher of the wildly popular and very profitable "Harry Potter" books says it intends to fight a lawsuit alleging that author J.K. Rowling stole the idea for the series about the boy wizard. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC is being taken to court in London by the estate of ...

There was a moment earlier this year when it looked like all was lost for Bloomsbury USA—when practically every major editor and executive associated with the company had quit or been fired amid budget cuts, and none who remained could claim ownership of the house they were now charged with running. All year, the principals fell like drops from ...

This year I enjoyed Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf (Icon Books, £8.99), a brilliant book about how human beings learned to read and write. There's a superb explanation of the conditions that cause dyslexia -- which, Wolf points out, wouldn't have conferred an evolutionary disadvantage until very recently, and might even have been beneficial to some ...

By far the best book I have read this year is Ferdinand Mount's Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes (Bloomsbury, £20). It is the humane, sincere and often very funny autobiography of a man who was, for a time, head of Margaret Thatcher's Policy Unit. There are sympathetic and revealing portraits of Keith Joseph and Selwyn ...