Sir Frank Kermode dies, and other top stories...

The literary critic Sir Frank Kermode has died at the age of 90. The London Review of Books, which he was central to the founding of in 1979, announced his passing. In 1991, he was the first literary critic to be knighted since William Empsom and was an inestimably important figure in the world of literary criticism. His published works included studies of the Romantic movement, Shakespeare, and Spencer and Donne. His series of lectures The Sense of an Ending examined fiction's relationship to such concepts as apocalyptic chaos and crisis...

The six entries shortlisted to occupy Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth have been revealed. Whichever of the striking sculptural works is chosen, it will be far removed from Antony Gormley's Big Brother-style spectacle of last year. The works include a giant, blue cockerel, an oversized Battenberg cake made from household bricks and a brass sculpture of a boy on a rocking horse. The list is currently made up of Katharina Fritsch, Brian Griffiths, Elmgreen & Dragset, Hew Locke, Mariele Neudecker, and Allora & Calzadilla...

Scotland's national poet, Edwin Morgan, has died at the age of 90. The Glasgow-based poet wrote over 60 books, and was renowned for his work as a translator and for his contribution to the concrete poetry movement during the 1960s. He said of Glasgow, ‘whatever image the city has to the outside world, to me it underlies and pervades my feeling at a deep level of identification and sympathy.' He was appointed the first national poet of Scotland (known as the Scots Makar) in 2004, having served as Scotland's inaugural poet laureate...