The remains of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Lockheed P-38 have been found, settling at least the question of what happened on his last flight. He disappeared on July 31, 1944 while doing a recce; in 1998, a bracelet engraved with the names 'Consuelo' and 'Antoine' was found in the Mediterranean. In one of the last letters she wrote to him, his wife, Consuelo, with whom he shared an often fraught relationship, wrote: "And I am happy to think of you, to dream of you. Despite the fear I feel, knowing that you are the oldest pilot in the world, mon cheri--imagine if all men were like you!" The author of The Little Prince was 44 years old when he died.

The world's first really serious sci-fi museum is due to open in Seattle.

"To an extent, as a relatively young, unheard-of writer, you have a slight idiot's freedom... " Patrick Neate filled in for the DJ in Bangalore.

Pullet Surprises: They happened while Kitabkhana was awol, but here's the dope anyway.
Anne Applebaum, who won for Gulag, wrote on prize-eve in The Washington Times (*): "I'm not quite sure how it got to be this way -- writers of heavy books on one side, mass media on the other -- because it wasn't always so. The great American cultural blender once produced whole art forms, such as Broadway musicals and jazz, that might well be described as a blend of the two. But nowadays, that gap is so wide that I'm not even sure the old descriptions of the various forms of "culture" -- highbrow, middlebrow, popular -- even make sense any more. Does Edward P. Jones, the Washingtonian whose eloquent novel, The Known World, won a Pulitzer Prize this week, even inhabit the same universe as MTV? Does anybody who reads one watch the other?"

One From the Trashcan: An unpublished Kipling story that even the author may have thought wasn't up to scratch has been unearthed. It's from the Stalky & Co series; incidentally, still the best primer to schoolboy sadism I've encountered.

The British Book Awards, popularly known as the Nibbies since we're going to pretend that everyone still uses the fountain pen in the age of a) fancy ballpoints b) those box-like thingies called word processors, saw Lynne Truss in the unlikely company of Monica Ali (Newcomer of the Year) and David Beckham.

Wanted: Awards for novels that showcase the "spirit of resistance", the "spirit of now" and (why not?) the "spirit of St Louis". In my humble opinion, the Ondaatje award, for a book that best captures "a spirit of place", deserves company.

If you called BT recently with a customer complaint, you may have had author Siddhartha Deb at the receiving end.