On Monday, we'll know the long-list for the Booker, sponsored for the first time by the Man Group of hedge-fund whizz-kids. Man has flourished mightily as the markets plunge, with more than £15bn of funds from investors who seek a safe haven in the storm. Meanwhile, former Booker backer The Big Food Group (aka Iceland) has declined into a City basket-case, a corporate catastrophe with shares at 20 per cent or so of their former value. Moral: if you want to make a pile, shovel your firm's money into support for good writing, and keep it there.

¿ Here's a long overdue slice of history: the discovery of the humble aspirin. Diarmud Jeffreys, broadcaster and journalist, is writing about "a drug so remarkable that its powers are still not ... understood". He will look not only at how it works, but at characters involved in its development, which was interwoven with the First World War and Nazi Germany. It all began in ancient Egypt, where the secret lay until 1872, when a US adventurer bought a papyrus scroll. Bloomsbury will publish in 2004, too late to stave off headaches caused by the late delivery of the new Harry Potter.

¿ Penguin has just signed a book by Cambridge professor Simon Baron-Cohen, 20 years in the making. The Truth About the Male and Female Brain presents "a new model" of sexual difference. There is, he argues, only one essential difference: men tend to analyse and construct systems, while women tend to empathise. What took him so long?