After marrying at the age of 22, she spent 18 years as, in her own words, “a typical woman, a typical housewife, a living statistic”, before “waking up” to politics, feminism and writing in her mid-30s.Since taking up novel writing at the relatively late age of 40, she has produced 14 books, including three volumes of poetry.The Stone Diaries was shortlisted for the Booker in 1993 and won the Pulitzer two years later, while Mrs Shields’ 1997 novel, Larry’s Party, won the Orange Prize for Fiction.Mrs Shields’ steeliness invites comparisons with Dennis Potter, the late television playwright who raced to complete his final two works, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, before dying of cancer of the pancreas in 1994. He confirmed that a working group had been set up by the trustees of the 34-year-old prize to discuss extending future shortlists to cover US authors.When the idea was mooted last spring, it provoked an angry reaction from Lisa Jardine, the chairwoman of this year’s judging panel. Professor Jardine declined to comment on the latest proposals. But she said: “As a critic, I believe that there are two voices in fiction, the American and the Anglo-European, and at the moment, with the Iraq situation, it’s particularly important to maintain that.”.

We’ve had Liz Hurley’s safety-pin dress, James Bond’s gadgets, “vomit machines” and even Wonderbra posters. Others in the series, dubbed “Naked Science”, have included a session on the paranormal in which visitors were invited to join in a seance. Future events will include a show about physical abnormality with routines by poets and standup comics from the Comedy Store. Also planned is an exploration of the concept of the Victorian freak show with the help of puppeteers, and Marisa Carnesky – whose stage name is The Jewess Tattooess and who performs wearing little more than her colourful body designs.News of the shows comes six months after the museum provoked a mix of disgust and consternation by venturing into the science of the fart and the burp in its exhibition “Grossology: The (Impolite) Science of the Human Body”.Dr Deborah Scopes, events manager for the Metamorphing Gallery, where the shows are being staged, says they are intended to help curators to “engage in a dialogue” with the public. “We want people to realise that they don’t need a PhD in particle physics to understand our exhibitions,” she said “We want them to be citizen scientists.

I don’t see that what we’re doing is any different in spirit to what we’ve always done – it’s just the format that’s changed.”Asked about next weekend’s event, Dr Scopes added enthusiastically: “With the penile, testicular and breast implants, we are just going to let people touch them and feel them It’s a handling session. “You watch all these programmes on TV about sex and cosmetic surgery. There are breasts everywhere but, women as well as men, we all want to feel them, don’t we?”Not everyone is so minded. Stephen Bayley, the former director of the Design Museum, said he did not want to condemn the show without seeing it first, but he hoped curators had not “suspended their artistic judgement”. Versace’s designs are presented for our uncritical adoration.”Giles Waterfield, a former director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery whose novel, The Hound in the Left-Hand Corner, satirises a gallery exhibition on “The Nowness of Now”, said museums should not be afraid to be populist.

However, he said they must guard against becoming mere “receiving houses” and “advertising tools” for the products of multinational companies.Among the “superficial” exhibitions Mr Waterfield singled out for his criticism were the British Museum’s recent show entitled “Agatha Christie’s Egypt” and a National Portrait Gallery retrospective of the work of the celebrity photographer Mario Testino.Commenting on the Science Museum’s latest show, he added: “A bit of theme park is fine, so long as it’s not all theme park.”Claire Wilcox, the curator of the V&A’s Versace exhibition, said: “Versace is a very interesting designer, who really sexualised male fashion. Rather than getting into all the celebrity associated with Versace, we felt our show was an opportunity to ask the question, ‘how many people have actually looked at the clothes themselves?’”. Three-hour lessons and longer school days are being proposed by ministers under a radical shake-up of teaching to be unveiled this week. They study for up to 35 hours a week at school when approaching exams.A typical day consists of a three-hour maths lesson in the morning, a 20-minute breakfast, then three hours of another subject in the afternoon Pupils start at 8.30am and can continue until 5.40pm. They say they waste less time moving between classrooms.The school’s achievements, which include beating every school in the country this year with its GCSE results, have been noticed in Downing Street. Its headteacher, Sir Kevin Satchwell, was knighted last year.