ROBIN DENNISTON, OUP publisher, retires from the Press at the end of this year. He had groomed the appalling Richard Charkin as his successor. So alarmed were the Press's delegates by this - they have difficulty communicating with the Shark as his vocabulary consists of little other than four-letter expletives - that they told Oxford University's vice-chancellor that they'd resign to a man if Charkin succeeded Denniston.

The vice-chancellor's ruse was to appoint the inexperienced professor Sir Roger Elliott as chief executive of OUP, whereupon, as hoped, Charkin resigned. Helen Fraser, the fragrant publisher at Heinemann, who is related to the Shark through marriage, persuaded her boss Paul Hamlyn to give him a job, and this ex-academic publisher is now masterminding Octopus's mass-market paperback list. He has gone on record as saying memorably that there's really little difference between mass-market and academic publishing.

He has advised his new editors to have nothing to do with the literary agents, describing them in his inimitable way as "f***ing parasitical c**ts", and has devastated Secker & Warburg's fastidious art editor by telling him in future to put "tits" on book covers as that way another 1,000 copies of each titIe (or tit-le) will be sold.