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Philip Pullman has won the Carnegie Medal for children's literature with Northern Lights, the first book in his proposed trilogy, His Dark Materials, a reworking of Milton's Paradise Lost. The Carnegie judges are all librarians and they look for plot, characters, dialogue – and the "tingle factor". Plus, A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel; Cynthia Ozick's latest collection of essays, Portrait of the Artist as a Bad Character; and Jenny Diski talks about her new novel, The Dream Mistress.