After the departure of John Saddler and the arrival of Gordon Wise Peter

After the departure of John Saddler and the arrival of Gordon Wise, Peter Robinson – part of the team who led the CB management buyout – has now left. But she has always offered advice and support to other women, and makes time for charity work. * As the Competition Commission prepares its inquiry next week into the proposed takeover of Ottakar’s by HMV/Waterstones, Lesley Miles, who joined Waterstone’s as marketing director six years ago, has been made redundant. So perhaps the quest for a successor sponsor to Whitbread should look further afield than the usual suited suspects in the City. To begin with, does anyone have a direct line to Steven Spielberg?.

In a New Year honours list light on bookish folk, it was gratifying to see that beside the widely reported OBE for Jeanette Winterson was another for Dr Margaret Busby, the pioneering founder of Allison & Busby and – among other current projects – a judge for this year’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize The recognition is long overdue. Unlike Dr B, Judy Piatkus will not be going to the Palace, but she has just collected the Women in Publishing Pandora Award in acknowledgment of her work on behalf of women in the industry. Now into her 27th year as an independent publisher, Piatkus long ago made a success of women’s fiction and “mind, body, spirit”. Yet the movie studios that raid the ark of EngLit – to incredibly lucrative effect – currently do next to nothing to replenish this precious treasure-trove. With copyright-protected material, producers will often pay handsomely to authors or their heirs and legatees. Still, these one-off rights deals, however generous, seldom help re-stock the storehouse of literature.

They reward the work, not the wider culture that shaped it.To its credit, the endlessly book-dependent Beeb does try to nourish one branch of writing via BBC Four’s support for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. If you fancy a promising new movie this month, then Brokeback Mountain (from Annie Proulx) opens today; Memoirs of a Geisha and Jarhead (respectively, Arthur Golden and Anthony Swofford) next week; even, remarkably, A Cock and Bull Story (from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy) in a fortnight’s time.No moment in recent cinema revealed the near-abject devotion of screen storytelling to its literary antecedents better than Peter Jackson’s earnest shoehorning of motifs from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into his King Kong. After all, the gigantic ape caper could otherwise only cite a storyline by the downmarket Edgar Wallace as its literary source. Hollywood high-mindedness now decrees that a beyond-lavish $207m.-epic buffs up its pedigree with solemn allusions to an early-modernist masterwork by a writer who fretted constantly about making ends meet.The screen takes; but the screen gives little back. With out-of-copyright texts (such as Bleak House), resounding successes may cost not a single penny.

More than ever before, the big and small screens both depend on books for much of their most popular – and prestigious – raw material. For millions of contented viewers, the autumn and Christmas seasons will have passed in a long, luxurious banquet of quality adaptations, as cinema and television feasted on the creative flesh of Charles Dickens, J K Rowling, Jane Austen, John le Carr?C S Lewis, Ian Rankin and so, indefinitely, on. At present, elite banking and investment firms seem to have decided that the upmarket stardust that (sometimes) showers the literary scene may dazzle wealthy clients. This snobbish alignment rather undermines the work dedicated book-biz people do to promote reading as a classless pursuit. Beneath the thin crust of artistic altruism there lurks the deep, deep pan of corporate strategy. So the hunt continues for fresh sponsorship: a necessary evil of cultural jamborees, although individual patrons always determine whether the accent falls on the necessity – or on the evil. As for the health clubs-to-chain restaurants giant, it seems that a well-managed and universally admired package of book prizes no longer fits the profile of the group that now boasts of its “strategic investment in Pizza Hut”.

Despite his valiant attempt, I didn’t miss it, but it would have been nice to have caught the earlier train and escaped a rather indulgent finale.Touring to 26 February ( www.danielkitson ). The new year arrives with the latest and – sadly – the last crop of category winners for the Whitbread Book of the Year competition And a sumptuous valedictory spread it turns out to be. Ali Smith and Tash Aw (for novels and first novels), Christopher Logue (for poetry), Hilary Spurling (for biography) and Kate Thompson (for children’s books) collectively write a footnote into literary history as the final contenders for the overall Whitbread title, due to be announced on 24 January. The self-confessed dip afterwards would have been more than allowable had Kitson had something resembling a climax and not used the pitiful and hackneyed ploy of a question-and-answer session to drag things out, looking for the big finish.Aware that there was a critic in the audience for his first night, Kitson suggested the reason he wanted to carry on was so that they missed the last train back to London. The evening is very much a story with a beginning, a middle and an unsatisfactory end. While the first act pootled along nicely for 45 minutes, warmly framed by anecdotes involving Kitson’s family, the second half took off with the aforementioned Asbo liturgy.