Publication of rightwing controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos’s memoir Dangerous has been delayed until June, so that he can include details of the controversy surrounding his book deal and the recent student protests that resulted in cancelled speaking events.

In a statement, Yiannopoulos said he had asked his publisher to postpone the launch, originally scheduled for March, to enable him to write about “the craziness and rioting” at three sites in the US: the Berkeley and Davis campuses at the University of California, and the Seattle campus at the University of Washington.

“It would be absurd for me to publish a book without some discussion of the insanity of the last few weeks,” said the far-right provocateur, who is technology editor of Breitbart News. Breitbart’s former executive chair, Steve Bannon, is now President Trump’s chief strategist.

Yiannopoulos’s speaking tour at university campuses has been dogged by protests and violent clashes between his supporters, police and protesters.

The book was due to be published on 14 March by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster (S&S) that specialises in rightwing writing. It is now set to appear on 13 June.

Dangerous has proved a major headache for the publishing house after it paid Yiannopoulos a reported $250,000 (£203,000) advance. Though the writer had claimed the deal was cooked up over lunch with the publisher, it has since emerged that it had been shopped around other New York publishing houses, who had not found it commercial enough to warrant a substantial offer. A vociferous backlash followed his signing, with authors, critics and booksellers voicing concern about his involvement in far-right politics and alleged trolling of opponents through social media. The British-born writer was permanently banned from Twitter in 2016, after claims he had incited followers to send abusive messages to the Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones. He has also likened feminism to cancer and attacked transgender people as “retarded”.

Dismissing him as “a clickbait grifter who has made a name for himself spewing hate speech”, Adam Morgan, editor of the Chicago Review of Books, said his publication would not review any books published by S&S in protest at the deal.

Last month, in what was widely seen as a damage-limitation exercise, S&S president and CEO Carolyn Reidy wrote to authors to reassure them that Yiannopoulos’s book would not contain hate speech. Instead, it would be “a substantive examination” of the issues surrounding political correctness and free speech, she wrote. Despite this, essayist and feminist author Roxane Gay announced that she would withdraw her forthcoming book from S&S because of the Yiannopoulos deal.

It is not the first book mooted by the journalist, who remains an influential figure in the so-called “alt-right” movement. In 2014, Yiannopoulos claimed he was writing a book about Gamergate, and in 2015, a book called The Sociopaths of Silicon Valley. Neither book appeared.

He has also found it hard to find a publisher in the UK, after S&S’s British subsidiary walked away from a deal. Insiders in the big four publishing houses said he was not well known in the UK and doubted the book could work without a significant promotional platform.

Philip Pullman has ended years of speculation by announcing that The Book of Dust, an epic fantasy trilogy that will stand alongside his bestselling series, His Dark Materials, will be published in October around the world.

The as-yet-untitled first volume of The Book of Dust, due out on 19 October, will be set in London and Oxford, with the action running parallel to the His Dark Materials trilogy. A global bestseller since the first volume, Northern Lights, was published in 1995, Pullman’s series has sold more than 17.5m copies and been translated into 40 languages.

Pullman’s brave and outspoken heroine, Lyra Belacqua, will return in the first two volumes. Featuring two periods of her life – as a baby and 10 years after His Dark Materials ended – the series will include other characters familiar to existing readers, as well as creations such as alethiometers (a clock-like truth-telling device), daemons (animals that are physical manifestations of the human spirit) and the Magisterium, the church-like totalitarian authority that rules Lyra’s world.

The Oxford-based former teacher said he had returned to the world of Lyra because he wanted to get to the bottom of “Dust”, the mysterious and troubling substance at the centre of the original books. “Little by little, through that story the idea of what Dust was became clearer and clearer, but I always wanted to return to it and discover more,” Pullman said.

In a description that will resonate with the current political climate, he added that “at the centre of The Book of Dust is the struggle between a despotic and totalitarian organisation, which wants to stifle speculation and inquiry, and those who believe thought and speech should be free”.

But David Fickling, whose firm, David Fickling Books, will publish The Book of Dust in the UK jointly with Penguin Random House children’s books, warned readers not to draw too many parallels between the new book and the current political situation in the UK or US. “I think it is a really important book for now, not in an intellectual way, but in a storytelling way,” Fickling said. He said the book would “resonate on a psychological level” and added: “Some of the best people for telling us the truth about our times are our great storytellers and Philip is one of them.”

Exact details of the plot are a closely guarded secret. However, Fickling hinted that readers would not have to wait 17 years – the gap between the last volume of His Dark Materials and the first of The Book of Dust – before the new series would conclude. The BBC reported on Wednesday that Pullman had completed the first and second volumes already, and was working on the third. Asked when the second volume would be published, Fickling replied, laughing: “You need to ask him, but readers should know they have a big treat ahead of them.”

The puzzle of how Lyra came to be living at Jordan College, Oxford, in her alternative universe, initiated the new trilogy. “In thinking about it, I discovered a long story that began when she was a baby and will end when she’s grown up,” Pullman said. Describing it as neither sequel nor prequel, but an “equel”, he added: “It doesn’t stand before or after His Dark Materials, but beside it. It’s a different story, but there are settings that readers of His Dark Materials will recognise and characters they’ve met before.”

Speaking to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, Pullman said the first book of the trilogy opened roughly 10 years before the action of Northern Lights, and the series “continues roughly 10 years after His Dark Materials”.

“So we see Lyra both as a baby and we see her in the second book as an adult; she’s 20 years old,” Pullman added. “There she can fully take agency of the story, so to speak.”

Dust, as described in the original series, has been equated to dark matter. It is expected that Pullman will incorporate the latest findings about the substance, which scientists say exists because of evidence of its gravitational impact on the motion of visible matter.

Though Pullman’s publisher would not confirm how this research would feature in the book, Fickling admitted that it had some influence. “He has a capacious mind and is sent nearly every scientific book before publication,” he said. “If you visit his house, you will see all these books that are way above everyone else, he doesn’t miss much that is going on.”

The quest to understand, use and destroy Dust is central to His Dark Materials. But as well as being analogous to dark matter, Pullman has said that it is a metaphor for the original story, which he based upon Milton’s Paradise Lost. In His Dark Materials, the Magisterium regards it as evidence of original sin, which must be destroyed before children emerge from puberty into adulthood when their daemons, the animal familiars that represent their spirits, take their final form.

“Dust is an analogy of consciousness, and consciousness is this extraordinary property we have as human beings,” Pullman told the Today programme. “The story I’m telling in this book is more about in terms of William Blake’s vision, his idea of a fiercely reductive way of seeing things: it’s right or wrong; it’s black or white.

“He said that was far too limiting and we should bring out truer human vision when we see things, surround them all with a sort of penumbra of imagination and memories and hopes and expectations and fears and all these things.

“It’s an attack on the reductionism, the merciless reductionism, of doctrines with a single answer.”

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2003, Pullman noted that the Harry Potter author, JK Rowling, had taken more flak for the magic in her books than he had for his overt criticism of organised religion. “I’ve been surprised by how little criticism I’ve got,” he told the newspaper. “Harry Potter’s been taking all the flak … Meanwhile, I’ve been flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God.”

Ukrainian publishers have reacted angrily to their government’s ban on importing books from Russia, claiming it will create a black market and damage the domestic industry.

The ban, passed by Ukraine’s parliament, is the latest front in the battle between Kiev and Moscow that has been running since Russia annexed Crimea and pro-Russian forces seized power in parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014. Books from Russia account for up to 60% of all titles sold in Ukraine and are estimated to make up 100,000 sales a year.

Although the ban has been under discussion since September, its sudden implementation caught booksellers and publishers by surprise. Speaking to Eugene Gerden of the Publishing Perspectives website, Alexander Afonin of the Ukrainian Association of Publishers and Booksellers warned the move would lead to a shortage of books and force Russian titles underground. He predicted that the ban would last until 1 April at least.

Afonin added that Ukrainian book importers had begun to terminate or suspend agreements with Russian distributors. He said that no compensation had been offered by the government for the loss of business and there was little hope of the slack being taken up by homegrown titles. At leading publisher Summit Books, Ivan Stepurin said: “Currently, local publishers don’t have sufficient resources to replace banned books from Russia.”

Stepurin blamed the high cost of translation – $3,000 to $5,000 (£2,500 to £4,000) per title. “This is too expensive for Ukrainian publishers, taking into account that most books will sell no more than 2,000 copies,” he told the website. “With translation and rights costs so high, the ban will result in a shortage of books in various sectors of the market – especially in educational literature and world classics, where the local publishers’ impact has always been slight.”

Ivan Bogdan, CEO of the country’s biggest online bookseller Yakaboo.ua, said the trade had called for restrictions to imports rather than an outright ban, and had warned prohibition would hit the country’s beleaguered economy. “Today, we have a total ban, rather than well-designed restrictions. That means that the state budget is suffering losses, because of the lack of tax receipts from book importers,” he said.

Inna Yehorova, first secretary at the Ukrainian embassy in the UK, confirmed to the Guardian that the ban was active and that it was intended as “a mechanism restricting access to the Ukrainian market of foreign anti-Ukrainian printed matter content.” She said that the law did not apply to materials and books imported in individuals’ luggage, if the total amount was not more than 10 copies.

The ban follows an order in December 2016 that restricted access to “anti-Ukrainian content” from Russia. It continues a culture war that has been running between the two nations since 2014, alongside military hostilities in eastern Ukraine. On Friday, it emerged that lawyers for Natalya Sharina, director of the Ukrainian Literature Library in Moscow, had taken her case to the European court of human rights. Sharina, who was arrested in 2015 after books banned by Russia were allegedly found in the library, has been under house arrest for two years. But while her trial began in November, the Russian authorities seem no nearer to proving their case against her for embezzlement and incitement through books banned as “extremist” than they were three months ago. Sharina denies all charges.

The Australian children’s book author Mem Fox has suggested she might never return to the US after she was detained and insulted by border control agents at Los Angeles airport.

Fox, who is famous worldwide for her bestselling books including Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes and Possum Magic, was en route to a conference in Milwaukee earlier this month when she was stopped.

She told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation she was detained for one hour and 40 minutes and questioned by border agents for 15 minutes in front of a room full of people – an experience that left her feeling like she had been physically assaulted.

“I have never in my life been spoken to with such insolence, treated with such disdain, with so many insults and with so much gratuitous impoliteness,” Fox said.

“I felt like I had been physically assaulted which is why, when I got to my hotel room, I completely collapsed and sobbed like a baby, and I’m 70 years old.”

The author attributed the aggressive questioning to border police who had been “turbocharged” by Donald Trump’s proposed travel ban.

Fox said she was questioned over her visa, despite having travelled to America 116 times before without incident. She was eventually granted access to the country.

After lodging a complaint over her treatment with the Australian embassy in Washington and the US embassy in Canberra, Fox received an emailed apology from US officials.

Fox said she was shocked by her treatment and “couldn’t imagine” returning to the US.

Fox has written more than 30 children’s books, including the hits Where is the Green Sheep? and Time for Bed. Possum Magic has sold more than three million copies and is the bestselling picture book in Australian history.

This story was corrected on 27 February to clarify that Mem Fox was not questioned for two hours.

The Twitter war raging between Piers Morgan and JK Rowling appears to have reached its zenith with the Harry Potter author clocking up a notable victory against her social media nemesis.

Morgan appeared to score a spectacular own goal in his Twitter confrontation with Rowling on Tuesday, criticising a flattering description of the author that it transpired he had written.

The two high-profile figures share an enthusiasm for tweeting and have been embroiled in a public sparring match on the platform since Sunday, when Rowling wrote that Morgan “being told to fuck off on live TV [was] exactly as satisfying” as she had imagined. He called her “superior, dismissive and arrogant”; she called him a “celebrity toady”.

On Tuesday, Valentine’s Day, Rowling tweeted a screenshot of a flattering description of her as an “intensely” private, successful author who has encouraged children “to read, feel inspired and be creative”.

“Just been sent this! Could the writer let me know who he is! I’d love to thank him! #Valentines” she tweeted.

The text noted Rowling’s commercial success, personal wealth and “squillions of awards … So Ms Rowling definitely matters.

“She would hate to be called a celebrity and guards her private life intensely so she doesn’t play any part of the celebrity game … But by encouraging children to read, feel inspired and be creative, she has had a greater impact on the world than [many other celebrities].”

Morgan seized on Rowling’s tweet, identifying it as “priceless #humblebrag BS”. A “humblebrag” is defined as “an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement whose actual purpose is to draw attention to something of which one is proud”.

“Nobody plays the celebrity game more abusively or ruthlessly than you, Ms ‘Intensely Private Billionaire’,” Morgan wrote.

Twitter users delighted in noting that Morgan himself was the author of the description, part of his March 2010 list of “the 100 British celebrities who really matter”.

Morgan had placed Rowling at 97.

After a BuzzFeed reporter tweeted that Morgan “didn’t realise” he had written the quote (and that it was the best day of the reporter’s life), Morgan said he was merely questioning his own past judgment of which British celebrities really mattered.

“Relax, quarter-wit, I knew what it was. Just surprised I put her as high as 97th.”

Rowling had not publicly responded but was assumed by the Guardian to be wordlessly punching the air at her computer.

Morgan went on to share, several times, a YouGov survey that said the British public vastly preferred Rowling over him, commenting variously: “Who wants to win the popular vote these days, anyway?” and “Says YouGov, who predicted wins for Remain & Hillary.”

He later retweeted a tweet comparing his row with Rowling to “North Korea playing Iran at football. Devil’s own job knowing who to cheer for.”

Edinburgh international book festival has moved to quash fears for its future, after it emerged that it may be forced to move from it historic home in Charlotte Square. The festival, which attracts 230,000 visitors every August, has been based at the world heritage site since its inception 33 years ago.

A spokeswoman for the festival confirmed that talks about a move into nearby George Street were ongoing, following a request from the Committee of the Charlotte Square Proprietors that it reduce its impact on the gardens. She denied that the request posed a threat to the future of the event, which in the past has attracted some of the biggest literary names in the world, including JK Rowling, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood. “We don’t know what will happen at this stage, but we are a creative bunch of people and are sure we can come up with a solution that can work,” she said.

The 18-day event, held annually in August as part of the wider Edinburgh festival, has a substantial impact on the private gardens in Charlotte Square, a source close to the association said. “We want to find a way of ensuring the festival stays, but the difficulty is that it creates so much disruption in the gardens that we can’t use them for anything else.” He added that although the festival starts work in the gardens in July every year and is out by early September, the gardens do not fully recover until April the following year.

Though the festival does not pay rent for the space, it does pay for its annual restoration, which adds up to a “substantial amount”, the source added.

“We love the book festival. It is a great thing,” a member of the proprietors’ association said. “It is one of the things that we can give to the city, but we just want to be able to do more.”

The square is one of the most important architectural heritage sites in Europe and features some of the most famous addresses in Scotland, including the official residence of Scotland’s first minister and a number of houses owned by the Scottish National Trust. Though private, the proprietors’ association intends to open the gardens up to public events throughout the year as part of a £1m refurbishment, which is believed to involve improved drainage and power facilities, as well as new pathways.

In a statement, book festival director Nick Barley said the event was looking at ways in which it could minimise its environmental impact this year and was in talks with Edinburgh city council and Essential Edinburgh to expand into neighbouring George Street, which, he said, would open it up to new audiences.

“We are currently exploring different physical configurations to find a way that the book festival’s ambitions and use of the gardens are compatible with the needs of the owners of the businesses and private properties in the square, while retaining the elements of this world-class festival that our authors and audiences love,” Barley added.

A spokesman for the proprietors’ association said that while they “strongly support the continued use” of the square, they “also recognise that the heavy physical toll the festival takes on the gardens prevents them from potentially being used for other public events and festivals at other times of the year.”

“There is categorically no threat to the continued presence of the book festival in the gardens. Instead, it is everyone’s ambition to find ways to introduce other events into this historic Edinburgh space,” the spokesman added.

The last time the entire Sistine Chapel was photographed for posterity, digital photography was in its infancy and words such as pixels were bandied about mostly by computer nerds and Nasa scientists.

Now, after decades of technological advances in art photography, digital darkrooms and printing techniques, a five-year project that will aid future restorations has left the Vatican Museums with 270,000 digital frames that show frescoes by Michelangelo and other masters in fresh, stunning detail.

“In the future, this will allow us to know the state of every centimetre of the chapel as it is today, in 2017,” said Antonio Paolucci, former head of the museums and a world-renowned expert on the Sistine.

Michelangelo’s ceiling frescoes include one of the most famous scenes in art – The Creation of Adam.

The Renaissance master finished the ceiling in 1512 and painted the massive Last Judgment panel behind the altar between 1535 and 1541.

The last time all the Sistine frescoes were photographed was between 1980 and 1994, during a restoration project that cleaned them for the first time in centuries.

The new photos were taken for inclusion in a three-volume, 870-page set that is limited to 1,999 copies and marketed to libraries and collectors.

The set, which costs about €12,000 (£10,000), was a joint production of the Vatican Museums and Italy’s Scripta Maneant art publishers.

Post-production computer techniques included “stitching” of frames that photographers took while working out of sight for 65 nights from 7pm to 2am, when the chapel where popes are elected is closed.

The set includes the mosaic floor and 15th-century frescoes by artists who have long languished in Michelangelo’s giant shadow.

More than 220 pages are printed in 1:1 scale, including The Creation of Adam and Jesus’s face from The Last Judgment. Each volume weighs about 9kg (20 pounds) and fold-out pages measure 60cm x 130cm (24in x 51in).

“We used special post-production software to get the depth, intensity, warmth and nuance of colours to an accuracy of 99.9%,” said Giorgio Armaroli, head of Scripta Maneant.

“Future restorers will use these as their standards,” he said, adding that each page was printed six times.

John Hurt, the celebrated British actor who was nominated twice for Academy Awards but never won, has been remembered in the In Memoriam section of the 2017 Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles.

Hurt’s nominations were for best actor for The Elephant Man in 1981, the David Lynch-directed film about a disfigured man in Victorian London, and for best supporting actor in 1979 for his role as a prison junkie in Alan Parker’s Midnight Express.

These were two of the high points of brilliant career over several decades, which took off in the early 1970s with roles in the gruesome true-crime study 10 Rillington Place (alongside Richard Attenborough) and as British eccentric Quentin Crisp in a TV film of The Naked Civil Servant. Hurt also became immortalised as the victim of the notorious “chestburster” scene in the Ridley Scot space horror Alien.

Hurt worked steadily thereafter, with his best known roles including Winston Smith in the 1984 adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stephen Ward in the true-life sex-and-politics yarn Scandal, and obsessed author Gile De’Ath in Love and Death on Long Island. A new generation discovered him via his roles as wandmaker Mr Ollivander in the Harry Potter films, and as the Doctor in the Doctor Who 50th anniversary specials.

Hurt died aged 77 in January 2017.

Bookshops could be wiped off the high street as a result of changes to the business rates system, the industry has warned the Treasury.

In a letter to David Gauke, chief secretary to the Treasury, the Booksellers Association said many bookshops will be crippled by rate increases and described the tax as “archaic”.

It also criticises the lack of tax paid by multinational online retailers such as Amazon and called on the Treasury to give bookshops the special status of “community asset value” – reflecting the benefits they bring to the local area – which would allow them to qualify for a 20% discount on their business rates.

The letter cranks up the pressure on the government to take action on business rates in the budget next month. Business rates payments are changing because of a new revaluation of Britain’s property – the first in seven years – which takes effect from April.

Tim Godfray, chief executive of the Booksellers Association, said: “Our concern is that many booksellers who will have to continue to pay business rates from April this year are going to be absolutely crippled by massive increases, especially those in London.”

Daunt Books, which has seven of its nine shops based in London, will see its business rates bill double from April while the letter also points out that the Waterstones in Bedford pays 16 times more in business rates per square foot than the nearby Amazon distribution centre.

Brett Wolstencroft, manager of the Daunt branch in Marylebone, central London, said: “In the past five years we have faced unprecedented rent increases and now an unprecedented increase in business rates. There needs to be a radical readjustment if you want to try and maintain a varied high street that a community can be built around.”

James Daunt, the founder of Daunt books and now the managing director of Waterstones, said the business rates tax was “completely outdated”. The bill for Waterstones will increase from April by £2m, equivalent to a fifth of last year’s £9.8m profit.

Daunt said nationwide chains such as Waterstones have the financial firepower to weather a rise in business rates while benefitting from reductions at some shops in some parts of the country, such as the north of England.

However, Daunt warned: “If you are a vulnerable independent, and most are, then rates will be the nail in the coffin.

“Bookshops are under an extreme and unique pressure from the internet. Amazon is a ferocious competitor and this hands them another advantage. Their rates will go down, ours will go up. Why impose a tax on consumers’ behaviour on the high street and not online? I don’t understand that. The online guys are aggressive on tax anyway.

“What this will mean is that the high street becomes even less diverse. High streets will be full of estate agents and coffee shops. Rates are making the high street a much less healthy environment to operate.”

The Booksellers Association said bookshops should qualify as community assets because they were social hubs and support literacy.

Godfray says in the letter to the Treasury: “We strongly feel that bookshops bring to their locality very many advantages that should be recognised in the tax system.

“They are educational, calm, safe locations, and very often act as a magnet, bringing increased footfall to their surrounding areas, to the benefit of other retailers.

“In view of the ongoing problems the UK continues to suffer with from literacy, I would suggest that bookshops are fundamental to the government’s programme of encouraging reading and aiding literacy.”

Donald Trump’s linguistic dexterity may be questionable, but the US president’s lexicon has had an impact on the English language, which is reflected in the latest additions to oxforddictionaries.com, the online reference guide to current English. New coinages that reflect the latest wave of online political activism form a significant section of more than 300 new definitions in the database, which is a sister work to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Additions including “clicktivism” (a pejorative word for armchair activists on social media), “haterade” (excessive negativity, criticism, or resentment), “otherize” (view or treat – a person or group of people – as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself) and “herd mentality” (the tendency for people’s behaviour or beliefs to conform to those of the group to which they belong) all emerged during the 2016 battle for the White House, said head of content development Angus Stevenson.

“We are getting a convergence of high-level politics and online language in quite a new way,” Stevenson said. “We had all the words around Brexit in the last update and we are now starting to see all the words around Trump coming into the dictionary.”

Stevenson said that new terms from Trump, his supporters and opponents were emerging more rapidly than in the past. “We have lots to add all the time. We don’t have ‘fake news’ or ‘alternative fact’ this time, because they have just started gaining currency, but I am sure they will be in the next update,” he added.

As well as political terms, public conversations about diet, fitness and gender were a strong influence on the words included in the latest update. “Superfruit”, a nutrient-rich fruit considered to be especially beneficial for health and wellbeing; HIIT, the acronym for high-intensity interval training; and “third gender”, a category of people who do not identify simply as male or female, all made it into the online database.

Social media were the source for many of the new coinages, though most were the kind of compounds that would have language purists clutching their pearls. “Craptacular” (remarkably poor and disappointing), “bronde” (hair dyed both blond and brunette) and “fitspiration” (a person or thing that serves as motivation for someone to sustain or improve health and fitness) all made the cut.

Stevenson said the need for brevity on Twitter was not responsible for rising numbers of compound words, but it had widened the pool of those inventing new terms. “People feel much freer to coin their own words these days,” he said, advising anyone who wished to make a permanent dent in the English language to make sure that their word sounded attractive. Citing the word “vlog”, he said ugly-sounding words tended not to gain very wide currency. He added: “They have to have a euphonious sound.”

His favourite addition? “Aquafaba”: water in which chickpeas or other pulses have been cooked, used as a substitute for egg whites, particularly in vegan cooking. “As language nerds we were quite pleased by that because it is a compound of Latin words and sounds very nice,” he explained.

From the opening shot of SS-GB, it is clear this is a world that is both familiar but also arrestingly alien. There are the rolling hills of the South Downs, the dome of St Paul’s and opulent columns of Buckingham Palace – with a difference: they are all emblazoned with swastikas.

The series is the newest ambitious, big-budget drama from the BBC. Based on the bestselling novel by Len Deighton, SS-GB envisions a world in 1941 in which the Nazis won the Battle of Britain and took full control of the UK. It is, according to the creators, “the ultimate post-truth drama – what could be more fitting for this moment in time?”

The show, which begins on 19 February, is also the BBC’s latest attempt to maintain its hold over crucial Sunday night ratings. It follows on from a successful run of dramas, beginning the year with Sherlock, which at its peak drew in 8.1 million viewers on New Year’s Day, and then the critically lauded thriller Apple Tree Yard, starring Emily Watson, which drew in 7 million for its first episode on 22 January.

For the show’s producers Sally Woodward Gentle and Lee Morris, adapting Deighton’s book has been decades in the making. Woodward Gentle met Deighton, considered alongside John le Carré and Ian Fleming to be among the great British spy thriller authors, 20 years ago and the pair remained friends.

“Len actually suggested it as a good one to adapt, but he wanted it to be done by the right people – other people had tried before and failed,” she said. “It’s too nuanced and complicated to do as a film so it made sense for it to be done as television, but it’s only recently that television has been ambitious enough to take on something like that.”

Like the BBC’s previous global drama success, The Night Manager, it has attracted high-calibre talent. The central character of Det Supt Douglas Archer, who grapples with having the Nazis as his bosses while also being embroiled in the resistance, is played by Sam Riley, who starred in films such as Control and On the Road, while Kate Bosworth plays the American reporter who becomes his love interest.

The script has been written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who co-wrote six James Bond films including Skyfall. Deighton, now 87, read the final script before production began but made no changes.

While it is a drama firmly set in the past, Morris and Woodward Gentle said they could never have anticipated how many of the themes it touches on, and the climate of fear it evokes, would become so relevant to the world today.

“In this post-truth, selfish, populist, moment SS-GB raises important questions,” said Woodward Gentle. “We see people scared and vulnerable, they feel under attack, they are torn because people they loved and they thought they knew, aren’t doing what they consider to be the right thing. People who they thought they could trust have affiliations elsewhere. People are driven by self-interest. So in that sense the show feels topical.”

Morris agreed. “It now feels like we have entered into some kind of dystopian parallel universe,” he said, adding with a laugh: “So who would have developed this show apart from people with great foresight?”

The appetite for drama around the world means the BBC can afford to give creators such as Woodward Gentle and Morris a larger budget, as profits from selling the show through BBC Worldwide have soared. The pair also said that while SS-GB was “very different”, they would happily build on the success of The Night Manager, which recently won three Golden Globes.

For Morris, the draw of SS-GB comes from the watertight plotting of Deighton’s book but also the moral questions the setting of Nazi-occupied Britain inevitably raises in the minds of those watching.

“We all like to think we would resist but history tells us that not everybody does,” he said. “When you look at the central character Archer, and the compromised position that he’s in, you inevitably ask yourself what would you do, what would we all do? Would we all be in the resistance or would we have to be pragmatic? That’s all part of the brilliance.”

While the story is concluded over five episodes, the writers have left it possible for it to continue if there is an appetite for more.

“The series is left quite open-ended enough that we can do a second series if we need to,” said Woodward Gentle. “We’d love to take it on again.”

• This article was amended on 13 February 2017. Apple Tree Yard starred Emily Watson, not Samantha Morton as an earlier version said.

The much-loved broadcaster, critic, memoirist, novelist and poet Clive James was not expected to live for long after his short-poem collection Sentenced to Life was published, to great acclaim, in 2015. But Picador has announced that it will publish its sequel, Injury Time, in May.

James was diagnosed with leukaemia, kidney failure and lung disease in 2010. In 2012, the celebrated wit told a BBC interviewer: “I don’t want to cast a gloom, an air of doom, over the programme, but I’m a man who is approaching his terminus.”

Sentenced to Life’s valedictory poems met immediate acclaim. In his Guardian review, Blake Morrison wrote: “How many last words, deathbed aphorisms and funeral songs can his public take? Quite a few is the answer, when they resonate as these poems do at their best”, and the book went on to be the UK’s bestselling poetry collection of 2015.

But his treatment has been far more successful than expected, as James has chronicled in his Observer column, Reports of my death.

Talking from his Cambridge home about the poems in Injury Time, James said: “I felt like I’d dodged a bullet, and when you’re dodging a bullet the best thing you can do is turn it into a dance. This is a very different book. When I wrote Sentenced to Life, everyone thought I was dying. But the new drugs are working and the danger now is that I’ll bore everyone to death. There’s no more drama. Perhaps I need to stage regular road accidents.”

Injury Time records the poet’s determination to use his remaining time wisely, to capture the treasurable moment, and to live well while the sense of his impending absence grows ever more powerfully acute. The new poems range from childhood memories of his mother to a vision of his granddaughter in graceful acrobatic flight. He also writes of his Australian birthplace, where he hopes to “reach the end”, while reflecting on the consolation and wisdom to be found in art, music and books.

The title’s sporting allusion was chosen because “Injury Time is something you’re rewarded with because of what you’ve been through,” he said.

Asked for some lines that suggest the mood of the new book, James offered three from This Being Done, inspired by seeing children setting off for school in winter:

The morning comes, and through the spread of snow
In candy-coloured coats the children go.
Listen awhile and you can hear them grow.

“I was thinking of life when I wrote it,” said James. “And I used to be a child once.”

The decline in books stocked by public libraries may be far worse than official figures indicate, with industry sources claiming that it may be many millions higher than the 25 million books recorded as missing, meaning that the number of books available to borrowers has plummeted by more than 50% since 1996.

Librarians are calling for a national audit to reveal the true extent of the problem, with the news coming as the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (Cilip) sent an open letter to chancellor Philip Hammond calling on him to increase funding for the sector, to protect it from irreparable decline as part of his strategy for economic growth.

Official figures from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (Cipfa) for library books stood at 52.3 million at the end of 2016, a drop of almost 25 million since 1996. But that number reflects computer records rather than physical stock checks made by librarians. Earlier this week, it emerged that libraries in Suffolk had 10,000 fewer books than listed on its database after an inventory count by librarians. Insiders said similar disparities were likely to be reflected across the 151 library authorities in England and Wales because cutbacks had reduced librarians’ ability to do shelf counts.

Library campaigner and former head of Waterstones Tim Coates said: “It’s not just Suffolk that has this problem. This is a national issue, because librarians are not doing enough stock checks because cuts mean they can’t do their job properly.” He added that throughout the book industry, it was acknowledged that inventory reviews always revealed there to be fewer books in store than databases suggested.

Cilip chief executive officer Nick Poole agreed with Coates, and said that six years of austerity had left librarians unable to keep track of their book collections as well as in the past. “We need a national audit of what’s in our libraries,” he said. “Because we have had to pursue lots of other activities, we have taken our eye off the ball with books and they are absolutely at the core of what we do and why people use libraries.”

Poole blamed the problem on swingeing cuts to budgets as a result of austerity measures imposed on local authorities by central government over the past six years. Cutbacks have resulted £25m being slashed from library budgets in just the past year. Since 2010, 8,000 librarians have been made redundant across England and Wales – a quarter of the workforce – while the number of libraries has fallen by 340 since 2008.

The level of books stocked by individual libraries has also fallen dramatically. In 1996, the average library stocked 23,000 books, Coates said. “Since then we have removed the equivalent of 1,000 public libraries worth of books and the picture may be much worse once audited,” he added.

Stock is lost through damage, loss and theft. In the past, books would be automatically replaced, but there is less money available in budgets to buy replacements. In Birmingham, savings of £113m imposed on the city council led to book budgets being suspended across its 38 libraries in 2015. Some branches appealed to the public to donate books less than a year old in order to maintain their collections.

The head of one library authority told the Guardian they were confident that Suffolk’s missing stock levels were typical, but there was little money to fill holes. “Most stock budgets have gone down on the premise that we can buy more ebooks, but the money is spread thinner because we have to buy electronic copies on top of the paper copy of each title, so we can’t buy the multiple paper copies of books that we used to,” she said.

Book budgets have been first in line for cuts because they were less visible to the public, she added. “People can see when hours are reduced or libraries closed, but stock budgets are not so obvious, so they are easier to cut.” Books not being replaced were most often children’s books, she said, and self-help books, a genre most likely to be stolen from her library.

Council leaders laid the blame for the destruction of book stock firmly with central government. Ian Stephens, chair of the Local Government Association’s culture, tourism and sport board, said local authorities were doing everything they could to support libraries, but were “stuck between a rock and a hard place”. “On the one hand, demand for social care will create a funding gap of £2.6bn by 2020. On the other, councils have experienced a 40% reduction in central government funding over the last parliament alone, and serious funding pressures continue,” he told the Guardian.

In his letter shown to the Guardian, Cilip’s Nick Poole called on the chancellor of the exchequer to ring fence library budgets in order to protect them from cash strapped councils trying to shore up frontline services. It also called for investment by central government in the sector in recognition of role libraries play in promoting knowledge, information and data, which, he said, were vital for the economic future of the country.

Describing investment in the library and information sector as a “low-cost, high-impact” way to deliver the government’s goals of creating strong growth while maintaining low taxes, Poole wrote: “As a nation, at exactly the moment when we ought to be investing in literacy and skills, we have allowed at least 10% of our public libraries and many of our much-needed school libraries to close while many others have been forced to implement drastic reductions to opening hours and services.”

Hammond had an opportunity to kick-start Britain’s knowledge economy by being the first UK chancellor to truly invest in our world-class library and information sector, Poole added. He warned: “If you don’t take this opportunity, there is a real risk that your government’s aspirations for a global Britain will be built on thin air.”

The Libraries Taskforce, a government-appointed body, outlined a national strategy to tackle problems faced by libraries in December 2016. A spokesperson for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said ebook and e-magazine stock across the country had increased by more than 50% in the last year and added: “The Libraries Taskforce is committed to working with councils to improve procurement processes.”

Nearly 90 cinemas in the US and Canada are planning to show the film adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, starring the late John Hurt, in protest at President Trump’s policies. The coordinated screenings will take place on 4 April, the date that the book’s central character Winston Smith writes on the first page of his illegal diary.

The organisers of the protest have released a statement, saying: “Orwell’s portrait of a government that manufactures their own facts, demands total obedience, and demonizes foreign enemies, has never been timelier.” According to the statement, the cinemas involved – which include the Alamo Drafthouse chain and New York’s IFC Center – “strongly believe in supporting the National Endowment for the Arts and see any attempt to scuttle that program as an attack on free speech and creative expression through entertainment”.

Winston Smith – a rewriter in the Ministry of Truth – remains one of Hurt’s most celebrated roles. He starred opposite Richard Burton and Suzanna Hamilton in the film, which was directed by Michael Radford and released in 1984.

A full list of cinemas participating is available on the United State of Cinema website.

Some first books struggle for attention, but this is unlikely to be the case with Tom Hanks’s debut, Uncommon Type: Some Stories. Due in October, the first collection from the Oscar-winning star of international box-office hits such as Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan and Big will comprise 17 stories.

The theme of the collection will be typewriters, with each tale involving one of these more and more scarce machines. Hanks is known – in addition to his Hollywood celebrity – for his love of typewriters, and all of the tales will in some way involve one of them.

In 2014, Hanks’s passion – “each one stamps into paper a permanent trail of imagination through keys, hammers, cloth and dye – a softer version of chiselling words into stone” – was expressed through the invention of an app, Hanx Writer, that enables the digital generation to produce facsimile typescript. It became bestseller on Apple’s iTunes store.

A book has been in the works since soon after Hanks published a story in the New Yorker – home to many of the world’s most revered authors – in 2014. Alan Bean Plus Four’s account of four friends’ amateur expedition to the moon caught the eye of Alfred A Knopf’s editor-in-chief, Sonny Mehta. “I was struck by both his remarkable voice and command as a writer. I had hoped there might be more stories in the works. Happily, for readers, it turns out there were.”

The publisher said the stories in Uncommon Type will include “a story about an immigrant arriving in New York City after his family and life have been torn apart by his country’s civil war; another about a man who bowls a perfect game (and then another, and another) becoming ESPN’s newest celebrity; another about an eccentric billionaire and his faithful executive assistant on the hunt for something larger in America; and another about the junket life of an actor.”

Hanks began writing the book in 2015. “In the two years of working on the stories,” a statement read, “I made movies in New York, Berlin, Budapest and Atlanta and wrote in all of them. I wrote in hotels during press tours. I wrote on vacation. I wrote on planes, at home, and in the office. When I could actually make a schedule, and keep to it, I wrote in the mornings from 9 to 1.”

The UK edition will be published by William Heinemann simultaneously with Knopf in the US. Foreign-language rights have so far been sold in seven countries, from Brazil to China. The audiobook, naturally, will be read by the author. Hanks is used to the spotlight, but he can surely expect his short fiction to provide more of it.

A dispiriting portrait of the “real” Mr Darcy, showing Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice hero as a pale, slope-shouldered, weedy character, thin of mouth and chin with his hair powdered white, has been created by a panel of experts through studying contemporary fashions and social history.

Their conclusions have been embodied in a portrait by the illustrator Nick Hardcastle, unlikely to set many 21st century hearts aflutter.

When Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy first walks into literature, at an assembly rooms dance in Meryton, Jane Austen provides remarkably few clues about his appearance. He attracts more admiring glances than his friend Mr Bingley, who is described as “good looking and gentlemanlike”. However, with a typically sardonic flourish, Austen writes: “Mr Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year.”

Casting directors have generally interpreted this as tall, dark and ruggedly handsome, personified by Colin Firth in the famous wet shirt 1995 television version. Indeed the screenwriter Andrew Davies recently revealed that Firth was forced to dye his naturally reddish brown hair a darker shade for the role.

The experts, including the academic John Sutherland and the historian and author Amanda Vickery, commissioned by the Drama Channel to come up with the Darcy Austen might have envisaged, conclude that a tanned complexion, broad shoulders and muscular chest would not have been seen as attractive by Austen’s Georgians, signifying a hardworking outdoor labourer, not a gentleman of leisure. They do permit him strong muscular legs, toned by horse riding and fencing, as a desirable attribute.

The ideal for gentlemanly good looks in Austen’s day, they believe, was a smooth youthful complexion, with a small pointy chin and small mouth, under hair worn long but tied back and powdered white, as seen in many aristocratic portraits.

Vickery says of their version of the character: “As Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in the 1790s, our Mr Darcy portrayal reflects the male physique and common features at the time. Men sported powdered hair, had narrow jaws and muscular, defined legs were considered very attractive. A stark contrast to the chiselled, dark, brooding Colin Firth portrayal we associate the character with today.”

Sutherland believes the enigma is part of Darcy’s charm: “There are only scraps of physical description of Fitzwilliam Darcy to be found in Pride and Prejudice; he is our most mysterious and desirable leading man of all time. What’s fantastic about Jane Austen’s writing is that Mr Darcy is both of the era and timeless.”

Various historical figures have been suggested as Austen’s model for Darcy, including an Irish law student Tom Lefroy – later a judge and MP – with whom she is said to have had a brief youthful romantic attachment. Others believe he was based on the first Earl of Morley, John Parker, married to a friend of the author’s. The truth may have been lost in the many letters her sister, Cassandra, burned after her death.

The research on the real Mr Darcy was commissioned by the Drama Channel to launch its Jane Austen season, which starts on Valentine’s Day.

A “rollicking” anti-lawyer revenge fantasy by Walt Whitman, which challenges previously held ideas about the American poet’s transition from prose to poetry, has been found in the archives of a Victorian New York Sunday newspaper. Though published anonymously, the book matches a detailed synopsis in the poet’s notebook for a project academics had thought abandoned.

Entitled The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, the book has just been published free online by the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. Announcing the discovery unearthed in Whitman materials held at the Library of Congress, Ed Folsom, editor of the journal, said the discovery would change everything previously known about the author’s early writing career. “Now we see that the fiction and poetry were mingling in ways we never before knew,” he said.

Zachary Turpin of the University of Houston discovered the novel in Manhattan-based newspaper the Sunday Dispatch. Set in New York, it was serialised in 1852 and written at the same time as the poet began work on his landmark epic poem Leaves of Grass, published three years later.

Described by Turpin as “a fun, rollicking, creative, twisty, bizarre little book”, Jack Engle is a classic rags-to-riches orphan’s story about a corrupt lawyer, Mr Covert, who tries to trick his ward Martha out of her inheritance. Jack, who works for Covert, sets out to save his fellow orphan and in the process discovers his fate is tied up with hers. In true Dickensian style, Whitman appears to settle old scores in the book: the writer’s father was also swindled by a New York lawyer.

Turpin found the 36,000-word novel as he ploughed through the prolific author’s “odds and ends” in the Integrated Catalog of Walt Whitman’s Literary Manuscripts, a comprehensive list of the poet’s surviving papers, jottings, manuscript drafts, scraps and notebooks. Among the scraps, a series of character names appeared: Covert, Jack Engle, Wigglesworth and Smytthe. Painstaking detective work led him to a tiny notice from 1852 in the New York Daily Times (now the New York Times) advertising the serialisation in the Sunday Dispatch of an autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle.

“Something about it just seemed right,” the academic said. “The name Jack Engle. The year. The newspaper (to which we know Whitman had contributed before).” The clincher came when he matched the character names from Whitman’s notebook with those in the published story. “I couldn’t believe that, for a few minutes, I was the only person on Earth who knew about this book.”

The discovery is significant not only for its rarity. The extent of Whitman’s prose fiction was previously unknown. The book reveals he grappled with a desire to find the right form in which to express his ideas. “The Whitman we see in Jack Engle is not yet the confident, committed poet we now take him to have always been,” Turpin explained. “It is during this vital time that he’s experimenting, trying on different genres and modes of writing, looking for one that’s ample and expansive enough to express what [Ralph Waldo] Emerson would call ‘the infinitude of the private man’.”

Folsom agreed the novel revealed Whitman’s struggle with form and that it gives a precise time for his move into poetry. In chapter 19, the plot comes to an abrupt end as Jack wanders through a graveyard and the plots of the buried merge into endless lost life stories. As he contemplates these lost plots, Jack feel the grass covering his own face. Folsom said: “I sense at this moment Whitman is discovering why conventional plots will no longer serve for the kind of writing he feels he has to accomplish, and this novel thus lets us experience the moment in the process of Whitman’s development when he realises fiction simply will not serve the kind of creative work he will devote the rest of his life to.”

A revival in Whitman’s work may be due. Prized for his originality, compassion, idealism and democratic patriotism, the poet saw himself as a prophet for what the US might become. “The Whitman of the early 1850s is absolutely ablaze,” said Turpin, who has form in finding unusual lost works by Whitman. Last year, he discovered a book-length guide to “manly health” by the poet, which tackled everything from virility to foot care and exercise. Hinting that more may be mined from the archives, Turpin added: “This new novel may also indicate that he didn’t give up prose. God knows – he could have, and probably did, write several more novels, if not many more than that. For all we know, they could be hiding in plain sight. Exciting, isn’t it?”

Raymond Briggs, author of Fungus the Bogeyman and The Snowman, has been awarded a lifetime achievement award by children’s books charity BookTrust, despite the famously irascible artist and writer protesting last December that he regarded such honours as a “funny title, because come on, my lifetime hasn’t ended yet”.

Chosen by a panel of six judges that included children’s laureate Chris Riddell and How to Train Your Dragon creator Cressida Cowell, the award was given to Briggs in recognition of his body of work and “outstanding contribution” to children’s literature.

In a statement, Briggs, whose work spans 40 years and includes darkly funny graphic novels aimed at adults as well as children, described the accolade as “lovely”. The author and illustrator, who professes to hate Christmas despite animations of his work The Snowman being a fixture on festive TV schedules, added: “Being awarded the BookTrust lifetime achievement award is an incredible honour and I’m so glad I’ve been able to make such an impression on people.”

His comments were in contrast to those made to the Guardian at the end of 2016. Speaking to Decca Aitkenhead, Briggs said: “If you say you’ve got a lifetime achievement award, it’s like – well come on, get dead, man!”

Describing his work as “captivating and inspiring”, Diana Gerald, BookTrust’s CEO, said: “Raymond continues to have such a widespread impact on both children and adults and the award is so very well deserved.” Fellow judge for the honour and shadow attorney general Shami Chakrabarti said: “[Briggs’s] talent expresses his values and with his choice and treatment of subjects he brings our history and contemporary challenges to life.”

The award was first presented in 2015 with Shirley Hughes, author of Dogger and the Alfie series, named the inaugural recipient. Judith Kerr, whose many books include The Tiger Who Came to Tea, took the 2016 honour.

Though probably most famous for his children’s books The Snowman and Father Christmas, as well as Fungus the Bogeyman, Biggs has never shied away from political statements in his work. His 1982 graphic novel When the Wind Blows tackled nuclear war from the point of view of retired couple Jim and Hilda Bloggs.

Born in 1934 to Ernest, a milkman, and Ethel, a former lady’s maid, Briggs began cartooning at an early age and attended various art schools, before settling on a life as an illustrator and writer. His parents appeared in the moving 1998 graphic novel Ethel and Ernest, which chronicled their lives from their first meeting in 1928 to their deaths in 1971. A film adaptation of Ernest and Ethel was released in 2016 with actors Jim Broadbent and Brenda Blethyn playing Briggs’s parents.

Briggs has received almost all the most prestigious honours in children’s books, including the Kurt Maschler award, the children’s book of the year and the Kate Greenaway award.

But any sign that the Briggs’s acceptance of the BookTrust honour marks a change of mind towards the children’s laureate position seems unlikely, despite having been asked to take the post. “I didn’t see the point of that. It sounded awful,” he told Aitkenhead in December. “You go all over the country. Imagine it! The hotels and bed-and-breakfasts and taxis and trains, and really you just think: for God’s sake, what for? I suppose if you like that kind of public appearance, it’s alright, but I’d hate it.”

Up to four libraries could close in Liverpool, as the city council takes the scalpel to budgets in the latest battle between central and local government over funding cuts. If the closures go ahead it will mean the city has lost more than half its libraries in the last two years.

The future of the as yet unnamed libraries is being considered as part of a plan to plug a £90m hole in the council’s budget over the next three years. It comes on top of cuts of £330m made since 2010, the city’s mayor Joe Anderson said. He has set up a task force to review the library service, with a view to saving £1.6m in the financial year 2018/19.

Though alternative plans for keeping the libraries open will be considered, Anderson was pessimistic about the likelihood that closures could be avoided. “Hopefully we will be able to do things like transfer the running of libraries to community groups,” he said. “But it is likely that around four libraries will close in 2019.”

The cuts have been forced on the council by continued pressure on local authority budgets from central government, the mayor claimed. “These are not things that we want to do but we have no choice, because the government isn’t listening and as the majority of people who responded to our budget consultation said they wouldn’t support a one-off 10% rise in council tax,” he said.

A spokesman for the council added: “By 2020, our budget will be 68% lower than it was a decade earlier. Our priorities are protecting the most vulnerable so we are cutting less from adults and children’s social care than from other areas.”

Support for Anderson’s call for Westminster to support councils came from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). Nick Poole, CILIP chief executive, said: “This is yet another example of the severe financial pressures that local authorities are under. We back Liverpool city council’s call to central government to provide more support so they can run statutory services such as public libraries.”

Poole called on national and local government to support a raft of measures to protect library services across the country, including emergency relief funding, strengthened national support and “realistic long-term planning” when services are transferred to community ownership.

The cuts will come as a blow to the remaining 13 branch libraries and the central library, which have already faced sharp cuts. Three libraries were closed in Liverpool in 2012, with a further four transferred to community organisations, including Walton library, which has become a “centre for learning, recovery, health and wellbeing” run by the Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust. Another library in the district of Kensington has approval to be transferred to a local community association as soon as the legal process has been completed, the spokesman said. The city also operates a home library service.

The spokesman added that handing some library services over to outside organisations had been a “halfway house solution” to avoid closure. Of the remaining 14 libraries, including the Central library, run by the council, he added: “We don’t know how many of these 14 may be closed or asset-transferred in future … but it definitely won’t be Central Library.”

At the end of last year the Libraries Taskforce, which was set up by the government to find a solution to the ailing sector, produced a report outlining a national strategy to turn around services in England and Wales. A £4m innovation fund to help disadvantaged communities was among the schemes outlined in the Libraries Deliver report.

However, campaigners have claimed it is too little too late, with library loans continuing their steep slide downwards, according to Nielsen LibScan. Official figures released by the government at the end of last year revealed library budgets in England and Wales had taken a £25m hit in the year to March 2016. Libraries minister Rob Wilson has vowed to protect them from further cuts, and has this year visited those authorities facing the most swingeing cuts.

Simon & Schuster has cancelled the publication of Milo Yiannopoulos’ book, and his fellow Breitbart employees have reportedly threatened to quit if he is not fired.

A statement from the publisher late on Monday said: “After careful consideration, Simon & Schuster and its Threshold Editions imprint have cancelled publication of Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos.”

Yiannopoulos confirmed the report on Facebook with a post: “They canceled my book.”

He added: “I’ve gone through worse. This will not defeat me.”

The book was reportedly secured for an advance of US$250,000 (£200,000) and was to be published by Simon & Schuster’s conservative imprint, Threshold Editions.

According to Yiannopoulos’ Facebook page, the book – an autobiography titled Dangerous – was due out on 13 June.

It is the third book that Yiannopoulos has announced that has not eventuated, after he flagged forthcoming titles on the Gamergate controversy and Silicon Valley that never appeared.

Threshold Editions has been contacted for comment by the Guardian.

Simon & Schuster’s decision follows outrage over a recording that appeared to show Yiannopoulos endorsing sex between “younger boys” and older men. The remarks were made during an internet livestream and circulated in an edited video on Twitter.

In the clip, Yiannopoulos said the age of consent was “not this black and white thing” and that relationships “between younger boys and older men … can be hugely positive experiences”.

The American Conservative Union subsequently rescinded its invitation to Yiannopoulos to speak at its annual CPac conference over the “offensive video … condoning paedophilia”. Matt Schlapp, the ACU chairman, said Yiannopoulos’ response was “insufficient” and urged him to “immediately further address these disturbing comments”.

The Washingtonian also reported that employees at Breitbart in the US, where he is a senior editor, were threatening to quit if Yiannopoulos were not fired.

In a video that was on his Facebook page for a few hours on Monday, Yiannopoulos said, of reports that he had endorsed child abuse, that “nothing could be further from the truth”.

“I find those crimes to be absolutely disgusting. I find those people to be absolutely disgusting.”

He did not contest the recording but said his comments were “stupidly worded” and that it had been edited to remove context.

“In most cases – you guys know – if I say something outrageous or offensive, in most cases my only regret is that I didn’t piss off more people, but in this case if I could do it again I wouldn’t phrase things the same way. Because it’s led to confusion.”

The video was no longer available on Facebook three hours after it was posted.

Yiannopoulos’ book deal with Simon & Schuster was condemned by many who perceived the publishers to be giving him a mainstream platform for his often offensive and controversial views.

Color of Change, a US organisation for racial justice, had campaigned online against Simon & Schuster since the book was announced.

Rashad Robinson, the executive director, told the Guardian that its decision to publish the book had said “racism sells”, adding: “They were willing to cultivate hatred and racism in order to make money.”

He hoped the decision to pull the book would send a message to other media platforms “that you should be careful who you stand beside”.

Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter in July 2016 for instigating abuse of the Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones.

Moonlight and Arrival emerged triumphant from the Writers Guild of America awards, with the former winning best original screenplay and the latter best adapted screenplay.

Moonlight, the heartrending tale of a gay man’s coming of age in Miami, is directed by Barry Jenkins and won the original screenplay award for Jenkins; however, because of a difference in eligibility rules it has been nominated for a best adapted screenplay Oscar, as it is based on an unpublished text by award-winning playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney.

At the Academy awards Moonlight will be competing against the WGA’s other major film laureate, Arrival, which took best adapted screenplay for Eric Heisserer, whose script was based on Nebula award-winning short story Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang.

A WGA award is considered a reliable predictor for Oscar results – but the fact that Moonlight will shift categories is likely to skew its bellwether potential. The films it defeated here – Hell or High Water, La La Land, Loving and Manchester by the Sea – will still consider themselves in with a decent chance.

The WGA also gives out a number of TV writing awards, with Atlanta winning best comedy series and best new series, and The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story taking best long-form adapted programme.

Oliver Stone, who received the Laurel award for screenwriting achievement, took aim at what he called the “military industrial money media security complex” in an anti-war acceptance speech. “In the 13 wars we’ve started over the last 30 years and the $14 trillion we’ve spent, and the hundreds of thousands of lives that have perished from this earth, remember that it wasn’t one leader, but a system, both Republican and Democrat ... It’s a system that has been perpetuated under the guise that these are just wars justifiable in the name of our flag that flies so proudly.”

Full list of winners

Film

Best original screenplay: Moonlight

Best adapted screenplay: Arrival

Best documentary screenplay: Command and Control

TV, radio, new media and video games

Best comedy/variety sketch series: Saturday Night Live

Best comedy/variety talk series: Last Week Tonight With John Oliver

Best drama series: The Americans

Best children’s episode: Gortimer Gibbon’s Life on Normal Street (Mel v The Night Mare of Normal Street)

Best children’s long form: Once Upon a Sesame Street Christmas

Best daytime drama: General Hospital

Best on-air promotion (television, new media or radio): CBS On-Air Reel

Best TV news script – analysis, feature or commentary: CBS Sunday Morning Almanac

Best TV news script – regularly scheduled, bulletin or breaking report: Muhammad Ali: Remembering a Legend

Best television graphic art and animation: The Real History of Cinco de Mayo

Best comedy/variety special: Triumph’s Election Special

Outstanding achievement in video game writing: Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

Best original short form new media: The Commute (The Party)

Best quiz and audience participation: Hollywood Game Night

Best radio documentary: Chernobyl: 30 Years Later

Best radio news script – regularly scheduled, bulletin or breaking report: World News This Week

Radio news script – analysis, feature or commentary: Morley Safer: A Journalist’s Life

Best animation: BoJack Horseman (Stop the Presses)

Best documentary script – current events: Frontline, The Choice & Inside Assad’s Syria

Best documentary script – other than current events: Jackie Robinson, Part One

Best adapted short form new media: Fear the Walking Dead

Best adapted long form: The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story

Best original long form: Confirmation

Best new series: Atlanta

Best comedy series: Atlanta

Best episodic comedy: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Kimmy Goes on a Play Date)

Best episodic drama: This Is Us (The Trip)

Humanitarian service: Richard Curtis

International screenwriting achievement: Abbas Kiarostami

Morgan Cox award: Dan Wilcox

Paul Selvin award: Susannah Grant

Screenwriting achievement: Oliver Stone

Animation writing award for lifetime achievement: Mike Judge

Television writing achievement: Aaron Sorkin

Announcing the shortlists for its children’s book prizes, Waterstones has attributed high anxiety levels among young people for the notable increase in “optimistic stories that equip children with confidence to master a future that can feel very uncertain”.

A January survey by the Prince’s Trust found that 58% of 16- to 25-year-olds said political events had made them fear for their futures, with 41% more anxious than a year ago, while on Monday, research by children’s charity the NSPCC revealed its Childline support service was contacted every 11 minutes by children suffering from mental health problems last year.

Florentyna Martin, Waterstones’ children’s buyer, said: “Even in those books aimed at the youngest readers, you can see authors are tackling issues in the wider world.” More than ever, authors were meeting demand from readers perplexed by current political and economic uncertainties, particularly those raised by the Brexit vote, migration and political figures like Donald Trump, she said.

The shift in emphasis to optimistic stories was notable in the 18 books shortlisted across three categories – illustrated, younger fiction and older fiction, said Martin. While teenage readers were seeking reassurance, she said, younger children’s parents were “using the books to bring up tough subjects.”

Patrice Lawrence, whose debut novel Orangeboy features in the shortlist for older (young adult) fiction, said that though her primary aim had been to promote hope in her story of a teenager caught in gang violence, she wanted to reflect the real situation faced by many black teenagers in Britain.

Novels tackling difference, she added, were vital in a society in which intolerance and racism were on the increase. “I keep coming back to empathy,” she said. “Books teach us to empathise. They are the only time you get in to someone else’s head and under their skin, which is really important.”

Alongside Orangeboy, two other of the six novels competing in the young adult category tackle contemporary issues: Lisa Heathfield’s story about abuse, Paper Butterflies; and Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star, which has one protagonist on the verge of being deported from the US to Jamaica.

Dr Rory Conn, a psychiatrist at Simmons House, an adolescent inpatient unit in north London, said fiction was a vital aid for the increased numbers of teenagers he sees. “There is something about the vicarious experience of reading about another young person going through difficulties that is very helpful to them.”

Conn said the rise of 24-hour news and social media commentary about Brexit and global politics had compounded the usual stresses faced by teenagers. “I can’t remember a harder time to be young. The future looks bleak to the young people I see. It is right that they should think about what is happening in the world, but there is not much to temper [the negativity], which seems to be constant.”

Nicola Morgan, children’s author and an expert on adolescence, stress and the science of reading, said that adults’ reactions to world events were compounding the anxiety. “Adults are doing their worrying very publicly and I don’t think it helps children when they see their parents in Armageddon mode,” she said. She believed teenagers were turning to fiction because novels were “more nuanced, more thoughtful, more contextual than newspaper or online news reporting”.

Italian author and illustrator Francesca Sanna, whose refugee story The Journey is shortlisted in the illustrated book category, said her book was inspired by working in refugee centres in Italy and Switzerland. “I have been really happy to find that the children I speak to have so many questions about the story and refugees,” she said. “I left the ending open deliberately, because the situation for refugees is constantly changing and there is no certainty for them.”

The category winners will be voted for by booksellers in the chain and will be announced at Waterstones Piccadilly on 30 March. Each will receive £2,000, with the overall children’s book of the year receiving a further prize of £3,000.

The full shortlist:

Illustrated books:
The Bear Who Stared by Duncan Beedie (Templar - Bonnier)
Life is Magic by Meg McLaren (Andersen Press)
Super Stan by Matt Robertson (Orchard Books - Hachette)
The Journey by Francesca Sanna (Flying Eye)
Tiger in a Tutu by Fabi Santiago (Orchard Books - Hachette)
There’s a Tiger in the Garden by Lizzy Stewart (Frances Lincoln)

Younger fiction:
Cogheart by Peter Bunzl (Usborne)
Captain Pug by Laura James (Bloomsbury)
Beetle Boy by MG Leonard (Chicken House)
The Girl of Ink & Stars by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (Chicken House)
Time Travelling with a Hamster by Ross Welford (HarperCollins)
Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk (Corgi – Penguin Random House)

Older fiction:
Hour of the Bees by Lindsay Eager (Walker)
Paper Butterflies by Lisa Heathfield (Egmont)
Orangeboy by Patrice Lawrence (Hodder - Hachette)
The Wildings by Nilanjana Roy (Pushkin)
Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit (Bodley Head)
The Sun is also a Star by Nicola Yoon (Corgi – Penguin Random House)

In the wake of a complicated public split from a famous pop-punk group, many musicians might make their first step into book publishing a tell-all autobiography. Not for former Blink-182 member Tom DeLonge, whose book about UFOs will be out on 7 March.

DeLonge co-wrote the non-fiction book, Sekret Machines: Gods, with the occult expert Peter Levenda. It is based on interviews with intelligence officers, scientists, engineers and military officials. According to a press release, it will be “an eye-opening investigative journey to the heart of the UFO phenomenon”, as well as transcending “the speculation of journalists, historians and others whose conclusions are often either misinformed or only tease around the edges”.

“Sekret Machines: Gods is the opening salvo on the complacency of human institutions where the UFO Phenomenon is concerned,” says Levenda. “It’s designed to shake people up, to make them question their assumptions.”

DeLonge said Levenda’s expertise aided the project: “It was his ability to frame an esoteric thesis that gave me the ammunition to speak clearly on the subject matter, and that got me in the door.”

According to Rolling Stone, DeLonge has been interviewing aerospace industry officials, the US Department of Defense and Nasa. “It’s very hard to think, ‘How did this guy in a band get access like that?’” he said. “It sounds crazy. But it’s because I can speak to a very specific audience. I earned their trust. I knew my material.”

The Blink-182 founding member announced his departure from the group and confirmed details of his publishing project. At the time of the split, the guitarist defended his decision to not record new music with Blink-182, saying that the “Blink stuff went haywire” because a new contract with the band conflicted with his plans to record a soundtrack to accompany fiction he was planning to publish. DeLonge disputed the account of the split given by band’s manager.

Sekret Machines is DeLonge’s first non-fiction book. He has co-authored a number of novels, one of which – Sekret Machines: Chasing Shadows – covered similar alien-based themes as his forthcoming book. DeLonge is also reportedly to direct a sci-fi film titled Strange Things, about a group of San Diego skateboarders who investigate UFO phenomena.

Promising to be the “ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror and lies”, a new novel by Salman Rushdie dramatising the last eight years of US politics has been announced by his publisher for release in September.

According to publisher Jonathan Cape, The Golden House, Rushdie’s 13th novel, follows “a young American filmmaker whose involvement with a secretive, tragedy-haunted family teaches him how to become a man”. Starting with the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2008, the book will include current and recent political and social events, including the rise of the ultra-conservative Tea Party; the Gamergate scandal, which saw the widespread online harassment of female gaming journalists framed as a debate about media ethics; the debate over identity politics; and, perhaps most urgently, “the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting makeup and coloured hair”.

Publishing director at Jonathan Cape, Michal Shavit called it “the ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror and lies” for “a new world order of alternate truths”. She said The Golden House was “a brilliant, heartbreaking, realist novel that is not only uncannily prescient but shows one of the world’s greatest storytellers working at the height of his powers”.

Rushdie is best known for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, which was alleged to have traduced the prophet Muhammad, and resulted in him receiving death threats and being forced into hiding with round-the-clock police protection.

His last novel, 2015’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights – the equivalent of 1,001 nights, a reference to the classic collection of tales – tells the story of a war between the human world and another populated with jinn over generations. That book also starred a certain US president: “an unusually intelligent man, eloquent, thoughtful, subtle, measured in word and deed, a good dancer (though not as good as his wife) … handsome (if a little jug-eared).” It was widely praised as a return to form for Rushdie after his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton, with Ursula Le Guin writing in her review that readers should “admire the courage of this book, revel in its fierce colours, its boisterousness, humour and tremendous pizzazz, and take delight in its generosity of spirit”.

Julia Baird, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Julia Leigh and recently deceased writers Georgia Blain and Cory Taylor are among 12 authors whose books have been longlisted in the 2017 Stella prize, celebrating Australian women writers.

The list was whittled down from more than 180 entries by a panel of judges, including author and academic Brenda Walker, literary critic Delia Falconer, bookseller Diana Johnston, editor Sandra Phillips and writer Benjamin Law.

Also longlisted were Emily Maguire, Madeline Gleeson, Fiona McFarlane, Elspeth Muir, Heather Rose, Catherine de Saint Phalle and Sonya Voumard.

In the judging statement, panel chair Walker said this year’s longlist was notable for its topicality, and its heavy weighting towards nonfiction and investigative research.

“Many of them address urgent national issues with particular relevance to women, at a time when women are fighting to be politically seen and heard, and to secure their positions in the public sphere,” Walker said.

“The writing on this longlist takes a strong stand against issues such as racism, offshore incarceration, violence against women and alcohol abuse.”

Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race chronicles the cumulative effects racism had on the writer’s early life; An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire is a crime novel that deals explicitly with violence against women; Elspeth Muir wrote memoir Wasted after her 21-year-old brother killed himself by jumping into a river while drunk; and Offshore: Behind the Wire on Manus and Nauru by Madeline Gleeson, which won in the nonfiction category of the Victorian Premier’s Literary award in January, is an investigation into Australia’s offshore detention policy.

The Avalanche, written after Julia Leigh decided to stop unsuccessful IVF treatment, is an unflinching and personal look at the psychological costs of the multibillion-dollar industry. The Media and the Massacre is journalist Sonya Voumard’s literary investigation into the Port Arthur massacre and how it was reported. Two of the books on the longlist explore the dying process: Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain and Dying: A Memoir by Cory Taylor. Both authors died from cancer in 2016.

“These are important contributions to the national conversation, and help us to move towards a more inclusive and empathetic Australian society,” said Walker.

Named for Stella Miles Franklin, who wrote My Brilliant Career under a male pseudonym, the longlist was announced at an event in Sydney on Tuesday evening which featured readings from performance artist and poet Candy Royalle, writer and actor Nakkiah Lui, past Stella nominee Fiona Wright, and Charlotte Wood, who won the 2016 Stella prize for her book The Natural Way of Things.

The $50,000 Stella prize will be awarded on 8 March.

2017 Stella longlist

• Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain
  
• Victoria: The Queen by Julia Baird
• The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba Clarke
• Poum and Alexandre by Catherine de Saint Phalle
• Offshore: Behind the Wire on Manus and Nauru by Madeline Gleeson
• Avalanche by Julia Leigh
• An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire
• The High Places by Fiona McFarlane
• Wasted: A Story of Alcohol, Grief and a Death in Brisbane by Elspeth Muir
• The Museum of Modern Love by Heather Rose
• Dying: A Memoir by Cory Taylor
• The Media and the Massacre by Sonya Voumard

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner are among a list of 35 books a group of five vandals have been ordered to read, after they were found guilty of covering a historic African American schoolhouse with racist, antisemitic and obscene graffiti.

A judge sentenced the teenagers to read the books, as well as watching 14 films, visiting two museums and writing a research paper to encourage “a greater appreciation for gender, race, religion, and bigotry” (sic) after they were caught vandalising the Ashburn Colored School in Virginia, broadcaster WUSA reported.

County prosecutor Alex Rueda said she had taken the step because the five were “dumb teenagers”. “None of the boys had any prior record. They had never been in trouble. And it was obvious that this was not racially motivated. It was more of them being stupid and not understanding the seriousness of what they had done,” she told the TV station.

The daughter of a librarian, Rueda said that she hoped the sentence would teach the teenagers involved in the attack, and help the community. The boys had drawn swastikas, dinosaurs and sexually explicit pictures, and wrote “white power” and “brown power” on the school, which opened in 1892, 30 years after the US civil war ended, to provide black children with an education.

The county prosecutor said she thought the teenagers, who claimed they thought the schoolhouse was a shed, had reached a “teachable moment”. All 35 books on the list tackle issues of racism, gender equality, religion or war, with three books by Leon Uris, Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Beautiful Struggle and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale on the list. The films chosen to educate the boys include Oscar winners 12 Years a Slave and Lincoln.

Each month, the teenagers must file either a book report or substitute three of the books for a film review. They also have to write a paper to explain the message that swastikas and white-power symbols send and visit the Holocaust museum and the American history museum to see an exhibition about the internment of Japanese people during the second world war. “Hopefully, what they get out of this year is a greater appreciation for gender, race, religion, bigotry. And then when they go out in to the world, they are teachers,” the judge said.

It is not the first time a judge has used a list of mandatory reading to punish a defendant. Last September, an Italian judge sentenced a 15-year-old girl to read 30 feminist books to “understand the damage that had been done to her as a woman, instilling feminist values”, after she was found to be part of a child prostitution ring. A 35-year-old man who was caught paying the girl for sex was sentenced to two years in prison, but not required to read any of the books. Adriana Cavarero, whose book Notwithstanding Plato was on the list, said it would have been better if the criminal had been ordered to read the literature instead.

The list of books

1. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
2. Native Son by Richard Wright
3. Exodus by Leon Uris
4. Mitla 18 by Leon Uris
5. Trinity by Leon Uris
6. My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
7. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
8. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
9. Night by Elie Wiesel
10. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
11. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
12. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
13. Things Falls Apart by Chinua Achebe
14. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
15. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
16. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
17. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
18. Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
19. Tortilla Curtain by TC Boyle
20. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
21. A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind
22. Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas
23. Black Boy by Richard Wright
24. The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates
25. Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
26. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
27. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
28. The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
29. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
30. The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
31. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
32. Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
33. Too Late the Phalarope by Alan Paton
34. A Dry White Season by Andre Brink
35. Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides