Dick Francis's wife turned out to have supplied several of his plots, and the sex scenes, and was probably the one who rode the Queen Mum's horses as well ...I love the undercurrent of outrage in these startling finds - that authors turn out to be unlike what we've turned them into. Rupert Brooke was revealed as a sexual bounder and not the sweet romantic soul as advertised (though it didn't come as a big surprise to anyone who'd actually read, say, "Jealousy" or "Libido"). PG Wodehouse got another drubbing in the press for being in the pay of the Nazis and not being Gussie Fink-Nottle.We've had the tribulations of Frank McCourt. We've had the "Philip Larkin Not A Miserable Frustrated Loner Shock" headlines, and now there's a play to go with them. A year ago, it was Laurie Lee's dispatches from the Spanish Civil War, about which a whiff of baloney still hangs despite Valerie Grove's able defence of her subject in her marvellous biography. His real name was Vivian Lloyd, he was born in Hendon, north-west London, became a dishwasher in Claridges hotel and found out about Welsh miners by hearsay, from listening to stories told by the three children of a Charing Cross Road bookseller called Griffiths. The deception (which he maintained right up to his death in 1983) was discovered by a television producer called Arwel Ellis Owen who was making a documentary to mark the 60th anniversary of the book's publication in 1939.No news seems complete these days without some revelation of literary fraudulence, some accusation of inauthenticity.

The man who fixed an image of plucky mining communities, pit explosions and subterranean male voice choirs in readers' heads all over the English-speaking world, turns out to have been a colossal fraud. HOW INTRIGUING to find that Richard Llewellyn, author of that classic of cultural stereotyping How Green Was My Valley, was about as Welsh as Gandhi. "It was a long time coming, but it was worth it," he said. The Davis Cup final of 1991 seemed a formality for the United States. Although played in Lyon, France were massive underdogs against a side which included Agassi and Sampras But, as always, the French had other ideas.. There are probably 10 different things more important than the Davis Cup in America." The losers shoud have read their history.

French tennis underwent a revolution in 1968 in order to win the Davis Cup and the revolutionary leader, Philippe Chatrier, was in Lyons to see the fulfilment of his dream. "I don't think the American team realised how much the Davis Cup meant to the French team and the French nation," he said. "We have the soccer World Cup, the Tour de France and the Davis Cup. "There are times when you have to take risks," he said. Two more aces in a row secured that set and his nerve, previously not his strongest suit, held throughout an increasingly tense fourth set, played against a background of constant cacophonous frenzy. The Americans underestimated both the strength of the opposition and the strength of the opposition's desire, as Forget suggested. The ace was one of 17 he produced but, coming on a second serve, there had never been a braver one. Never more so than at 30-40, 5-3 when serving for the third set. How else to explain the easiest of forehands which he missed when the match was most delicately balanced at the start of the third set. Sampras seemed beaten from that moment. If Sampras succumbed to the moment, then Forget found it an inspiration.

A victory parade along the Champs-Elysées seemed a distinct possibility. The tale of two heroes had begun with Leconte's defeat of Sampras and ended in another reverse for the former US Open champion, who was to discover that the unique pressure and special atmosphere generated by the Davis Cup can distort the messages which the brain tries to send to the racket hand. "We have not achieved one hundreth of what they did," Forget said, though those who would disagree numbered many millions yesterday. A colourful spectacle to look back on instead of those sepia photographs of the deeds of Borotra and Co. The Musketeers were four, but Forget and Leconte were just two.. and not that willing to be compared. Henri Leconte, the hero of the previous two days, expended the energy he had been saving for the encounter with Andre Agassi in running round waving a huge French flag and he shed tears when Noah told spectators of the letter that Leconte's young son, Maxim, had sent. "Papa, win the Cup for me and bring it home," it read. Forget threw his sweatbands and his shirt into the stands and Noah, when he was not being carried on his squad's shoulders, became director turned cameraman, using a video camera to record the occasion for posterity. The absence of any handshake - it was almost 15 minutes before Noah and Gorman exchanged congratulations and commisertaions - reflected no lack of courtesy on either part, merely that France, the team and the nation, were celebrating. And how they celebrated. He threw his racket, then himself, to the floor and lay on his back, to be joined in ecstatic embrace by Noah, who had leapt the net and would have created a new high jump record had there been a bar.

The rest of the French squad followed to form a joyous scrum Sampras, a 7-6, 3-6, 6-3, 6-4 loser, walked quietly and disconsolately off court and through the exit, as did Gorman and the rest of the vanquished American squad. They deserved their moment of triumph. Forget revelled in his. The Legion d'Honneur next, one would suspect. It would not have gained a point in the Euroviosion Song Contest but in this contest, as the American captain Tom Gorman was later to concede, the French won all the crucial points at all the important moments. Yannick Noah, the French captain, also sang, using the word loosely, at the head of a conga line which snaked around the court in one of many laps of honour.