Yesterday's Arts & Books section carried an interview with the Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro, who resigned from the Hobbit project some months ago when it looked as if the money men would never give the films the green light. The article said: "Still, it's not as if del Toro hasn't been keeping busy while finding himself mired in Middle Earth."

In the next couple of years, as the two parts of The Hobbit, now under the direction of Peter Jackson, roll towards your local multiplex, we are going to be spending more and more time in J R R Tolkien's imagined world (some of us with eyes wide with wonder, others no doubt with gritted teeth, but none will escape the Hobbit publicity machine). So let us get one thing clear at this early stage: the place where the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place is not called Middle Earth. It is called Middle-earth, with a hyphen and a lower-case...