Philip Pullman, often described as the most dangerous author in Britain, has set the publishing world alight by announcing a surprise addition to his bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy.

Lyra’s Oxford will take readers back to Pullman’s fantasy world, which focuses on two children in a parallel universe populated by shape-shifting creatures and armoured polar bears.

The fourth book stands alone from Pullman’s trilogy and can be read as such or as a companion to the other titles. The trilogy provoked religious outrage when it reversed Milton’s tale of the war in Heaven. In Pullman’s version, God loses as the children from the parallel universe, Lyra and Will, help to lead a rebellion against a senile deity encased in a bejewelled life-support machine.

Pullman’s books — the third of which, The Amber Spyglass, won the Whitbread Prize — have been compared to C. S. Lewis, but not in the Catholic Herald which describes his work as “fit for the bonfire”.

It emerged yesterday that Sam Mendes, who won the Oscar for American Beauty, has expressed an interest in directing a film version by New Line Cinema, the production company behind the films of the Lord of the Rings.

The title of the next book is significant. It’s been many years since Pullman left his job as an English teacher in an Oxford middle school. But it was in the city of dreaming spires that Pullman found his own way to free young minds; he wrote the trilogy for his children in the wooden hut at the bottom of his garden.

In Lyra’s Oxford the reader will share the excitement of discovering a small bundle of material that has somehow slipped between Lyra’s universe and our own. It will be illustrated with specially printed three-colour pull-out maps of Lyra’s Oxford.

David Fickling, the publisher, said: “This is one of the finest pieces of writing that Philip Pullman has produced.” But will the cartographers agree?

EMBARRASSMENT for the team behind Stephen Daldry’s The Hours, which won Nicole Kidman the Oscar for Best Actress for her role as Virginia Woolf.

Paramount Pictures has paid for a half-page apology in Variety, the film-industry Bible, for failing to credit a scene lifted from a 1997 production of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which starred Vanessa Redgrave.

Jeremy Crow, from the Society of Authors, which oversees the Woolf estate, said: “It’s a major omission in film terms. Credits are taken very seriously.” Quite.

Peace offering? Warner Brothers is the latest entertainment giant to react to the sensitivities of the Iraq War. Warner has altered the billboard for What a Girl Wants, its film about a New York teenager, portrayed by Amanda Bynes, who tries to track down her long-lost English Dad, played by Colin Firth. In the original publicity poster, Bynes flashes a peace sign, but in the latest publicity shots she places her hand uncontroversially on her right hip.

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