Cover Stories: Mergers; Princess Pushy; Alan Hollinghurst

Only last month, Caroline Michel of HarperCollins announced the culling of Flamingo and the redundancy of Philip Gwyn Jones, its respected publisher. Last week came news that Random House will merge Secker & Warburg, acquired in 1998 from Reed, and Harvill, rescued two years ago when the publisher Christopher MacLehose had reached the end of the financial road. Logistically, the move makes sense. So why not bring the lists together under Dan Franklin, whom MacLehose hired when Harvill was part of William Collins? After all, even the countries from which each list draws much writing (Russia, France and Spain with Harvill; Germany and South Africa with Secker) are complementary. But as has happened so often, the strengths of each may be diluted. Why - when expedience demands that publishers invent a new imprint, as Random House did with sports list Yellow Jersey - cannot two such names with bejewelled pasts co-exist?

* It's more than a decade since the book world heard from Princess Pushy, aka Princess Michael of Kent, who made a white-gloved appearance at the annual Hatchards party before somebody noticed that large parts of her book, Crowned in a Far Country, were somewhat familiar. Let's hope she learned a lesson, for the William Morris agency is trying to sell her account of life at the court of Henri II of France, The Serpent and the Moon. Simon & Schuster will launch it in the US in the autumn.

* Back in 1988, Alan Hollinghurst's debut novel, The Swimming Pool Library, seemed rather shocking. But if its sexual politics helped to extend boundaries, the actual politics of the era did not impinge. In his fourth novel, The Line of Beauty, due in April from Picador, Hollinghurst picks up the story of Nick, the promiscuous aristo. Hollinghurst "felt very politically unhappy in the 1980s", but still "did rather well out of them". A social satire, it seems, is the way to expiate that guilt.