From The Sunday Times
July 13, 2008

Literary agents fight over Brideshead Revisited

Literary agents have been fighting over Brideshead, and it’s not the only estate being revisited. Dead authors such as Nabokov and Greene are hot property too

Dead writers are hot this summer. No point wasting one’s time with new authors. They’re unpredictable, demanding. They require lunch. No, what any literary agent worth his salt needs in 2008 is a classic author with form: famous, prolific and deceased within the past 70 years.
In recent months, the literary estate - the body of work belonging to a dead author - has suddenly and unexpectedly become big business. Since Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie, an American literary agent, wrested the Evelyn Waugh estate from the London agency PFD in 2007, then nicked Vladmir Nabokov from Smith-Skolnik earlier this summer, British agents have been falling over each other to protect their own estates and sign new ones.
The full story from The Sunday Times online.