"On the surface we all get on brilliantly, but on a personal level we all f***ing loathe each other," was the anonymous quote given to Stefanie Marsh by "the editorial director of one of the country's largest publishing houses" for a story in today's Times of London about the battle lines being drawn across the British literary scene. "In my view what's happening in publishing in the past few days is a catastrophe. Everyone is horribly excited." What's all the fuss? Famed agent Pat Kavanagh, "a commanding and terrifying presence in literary circles," is leaving the firm of Peters Fraser & Dunlop, and if the custody battle over authors like William Trevor, James Fenton and Ruth Rendell wasn't enough to get the blood racing, her departure spurred further resignations throughout the agency—18 agents who comprise 75 percent of the firm's business, according to the Times, along with the entire actors' department.

From there, it turns into the story of Caroline Michel, the former managing director of the UK branch of William Morris, stepping in as CEO of CSS Stellar, which owns Peters Fraser & Dunlop, which everybody seems to interpret as some sign that PFD is poised to become terribly commercial and not very literary, "an environment in which agents would spend more time managing their client's profiles and dealing aggressively with the media than copy editing." (Copy editing? Seriously?) Also, people seem to love to gossip about Michel, knocking her down a peg or two behind her back.