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Heist of the century: university corruption and the financial crisis

Why was the response from US academic experts to the global financial crisis so muted? In the second extract from his book Inside Job, Charles Ferguson argues that corruption in universities is deeply entrenched

Many people who saw my documentary Inside Job found that the most disturbing portion of the film was its revelation of widespread conflicts of interest in universities, at thinktanks, and among academic experts. Viewers who watched my interviews with eminent professors were stunned at what came out of their mouths.

Yet we should not be surprised. Over the past couple of decades medical professionals have amply demonstrated the influence money can have in a supposedly objective, scientific field. In general, medical schools and journals have responded well, adopting disclosure requirements. The economics discipline, business schools, law schools and political science schools have reacted very differently.

Over the past 30 years, significant portions of American academia have deteriorated into "pay to play" activities. These days, if you see a famous economics professor testify in Congress, or write an article, there is a good chance he or she is being paid by someone with a big stake in what's being debated. Most of the time, these professors do not disclose these conflicts of interest, and most of the time their universities look the other way.

Half a dozen consulting firms, several speakers' bureaus and various industry lobbying groups maintain large networks of academics for hire for the purpose of advocating industry interests in policy and regulatory debates. The principal industries involved are energy, telecommunications, healthcare, agribusiness – and, most definitely, financial services.

Some examples. Glenn Hubbard became dean of Columbia Business School in 2004, shortly after leaving the George W Bush administration. Much of his academic work has been focused on tax policy. A fair summary is that he has never seen a tax he would like. In November 2004 Hubbard co-authored an astonishing article, jointly with William C Dudley, then chief economist at Goldman Sachs. The article, How Capital Markets Enhance Economic Performance and Facilitate Job Creation, warrants quotation. Remember, this is November 2004, with the bubble well under way: "The capital markets have helped make the housing market less volatile ... 'Credit crunches' of the sort that periodically shut off the supply of funds to home buyers … are a thing of the past."

Hubbard refused to say whether he was paid to write the article. He also refused to provide me with his most recent government financial disclosure form, which we could not obtain otherwise because the White House had destroyed it. Hubbard was paid $100,000 (£63,000) to testify for the criminal defence of two Bear Stearns hedge fund managers prosecuted in connection with the bubble, who were acquitted. Last year, Hubbard became a senior economic adviser to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.

Larry Summers has held almost every important government position in economics. Treasury secretary under President Clinton, in 2009 he became director of the National Economic Council in the Obama administration.

Although sensible about many issues, Summers has made a succession of well-documented mistakes and compromises. And his views on the financial sector would be hard to distinguish from those of, say, [Goldman Sachs chief] Lloyd Blankfein or [JP Morgan boss] Jamie Dimon.

Most of our information about Summers comes from his mandatory government disclosure form. Summers' 2009 disclosure form stated his net worth to be $17m-$39m. His total earnings in the year prior to joining the government were almost $8m. Goldman Sachs paid him $135,000 for one speech.

Summers is a compromised man who owes most of his fortune and much of his political success to the financial services industry, and who was involved in some of the most disastrous economic policy decisions of the past half century. In the Obama administration, Summers opposed strong measures to sanction bankers or curtail their income.

Harvard still does not require Summers to disclose his financial-sector involvements. Both Harvard and Summers declined my requests for information.

The problem of academic corruption is now so deeply entrenched that these disciplines, and leading universities, are severely compromised, and anyone considering bucking the trend would rationally be very scared. Consider this situation: you're a PhD student, or a junior faculty member, considering doing some research on, say, compensation structures on risk-taking in financial services, or the potential impact of public disclosure requirements on the market for credit default swaps. The president of your university is … Larry Summers.

The chairman of your department is …Glenn Hubbard. Or you're at MIT, and you want to examine the decline in corporate tax payments. The president of MIT is Susan Hockfield, on the board of GE, a company that has managed to avoid paying hardly any corporate taxes for several years.

How much do these forces actually affect academic research and policymaking? The available evidence suggests that the effect is large.

Academic commentary on the financial crisis by economists has been remarkably muted. There are, to be sure, some notable exceptions. But for the most part, the silence has been deafening. How can an entire industry come to be structured such that employees are encouraged to loot and destroy their own firms? Why did deregulation and economic theory fail so spectacularly?

The release of the film Inside Job clearly touched a nerve with regard to these questions. I was contacted by a large number of students and faculty, and there has been a great deal of debate. Departments including the Columbia Business School have adopted disclosure requirements for the first time. But most universities still have no such requirements, and few if any have any limitations on the existence of conflicts of interest. The same is true of most academic publications. Newspaper reporters are strictly prohibited from accepting money from any industry or organisation they write about.

Not so in academia.

There has been one significant positive development. Earlier this year, the American Economics Association adopted a disclosure requirement for the seven journals it publishes. But most institutions continue to oppose further disclosure and, when I was making my film, refused even to discuss the subject.

This is an edited extract from Inside Job: the Financiers Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century by Charles Ferguson, published by Oneworld at £12.99. Order a copy for £10.39 with free UK p&p here or call 0330 333 6846. Charles Ferguson will appear at the Edinburgh international book festival on Sunday 12 August.

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 2:00 pm

Cannes 2012: Confession of a Child of the Century – review

Pete Doherty's performance as a philosophising dandy is as catastrophic as the rest of this insufferable film

There is a long and noble British tradition of musicians becoming absolutely godawful actors. Gary Kemp gave it his best shot; Sting outdid himself. Pete Doherty, however, breaks the mould. His performance as a shambling yet sensitive libertine (geddit?) in Sylvie Verheyde's adaptation of the Alfred de Musset novel is catastrophic. Still, that does mean it's tonally of a piece with the rest of the film.

Face as pasty as porridge, feathered Hoxton hairdo intact, Doherty plays an inexplicably minted dandy whose hobbies include super-intense philosophical debate and orgies. After he breaks up with Lily Cole, who has been playing footsie with a male friend (apparently more of a deal-breaker in a debauched society than you might imagine), he has a chance encounter with Charlotte Gainsbourg and a baby goat in a wood. They spend three months as pals, then what seems like forever as on/off lovers. Of the goat, we never learn. But you will find yourself begging for its reappearance.

The shambling amateurism of Doherty's line-reading, his sixth-form fidgets, his uncertain eyes, sadly don't share the apt emotional ineptitude of, say, Ryan O'Neal in Barry Lyndon – a film Confession faintly resembles, in the same way that a crab stick resembles a Dover sole. It also brings to mind Hollyoaks, or, perhaps, an ad campaign for Hollyoaks that channels Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

That the camerawork takes its cues from its leading man's sweaty jittering doesn't help, nor does the muffled, insufferable voiceover. In a few small scenes that feel as if they might be semi-improvised and don't involve a lot of talking, Doherty hints at his charisma. But for the time being, he'd be advised to stick to the strumming.

Rating: 1/5

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 10:24 am

Waterstones deal with Amazon puts Kindle and ebooks instore

Waterstones will sell Kindle e-readers for the first time and offer free Wi-Fi, so customers can buy a book or download it instore

Waterstones has announced a surprise tie-up with Amazon that will enable shoppers to pluck ebooks as well as physical books from its shelves.

The companies did not reveal the terms of the deal, but Waterstones said it was planning a digital revolution in its stores, with Kindle e-readers on sale for the first time and free Wi-Fi, so customers can choose between buying a physical book or downloading it there and then. It is also opening instore cafes as part of an upgrade of the 30-year old chain.

Its managing director James Daunt, who once described the website as a "ruthless, money-making devil", struck a more positive note, calling the new venture an "exciting prospect".

"We needed to solve the digital question," he said. "We think this makes the Kindle experience better as you can now read digitally and enjoy the pleasures of browsing in a physical book shop."

Signalling his commitment to move with the times, Daunt posted a YouTube video explaining the rationale for the deal.

The announcement came as a surprise because Waterstones was thought to have been in talks with US bookseller Barnes & Noble over using its Nook device. Daunt described the "Kindle family" as the "best digital readers" on the market and said the retailer had left it too late, and did not have the resources, to develop its own technology. WH Smith has gone with rival gadget Kobo.

A partnership with Amazon had seemed unlikely as the success of its heavily discounted book offer is judged to have been at the expense of Waterstones which is the last "range" bookseller – the largest of its near-300 stores stocks 200,000 titles – of any scale left on the UK high street. Daunt, the founder of Daunt Books and a former banker, was parachuted in to lead Waterstones last year after it was sold by HMV to Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut for £53m.

Philip Downer, a director at retail consultancy Front of Store, said the deal was a "big surprise" for the book trade: "It's a huge disappointment really. There are alternatives out there. Waterstones falling into the arms of Amazon feels like a victory for Amazon." Downer said an alternative would have been for publishers to remove software locks, called digital rights management, so readers could switch more readily between retailers and e-readers. "That would do a lot to break down the wall of the walled gardens and create a diversity of players to compete," he added.

Daunt denied Waterstones was "forsaking" the physical book: "Digital is very much an adjunct to the reading of physical books," he said. "They in no way replace the pleasure from having a bookshelf at home, and the tactile experience of reading a physical book. This will complement and strengthen the traditional attributes of the bookshops to which the company remains fundamentally committed."

Mamut is ploughing "tens of millions of pounds" into the store refurbishment programme which will see roughly 100 of its stores refitted this year. The new look stores will feature dedicated digital areas, likened to the Apple store, where customers can test out the different Kindle models and receive tutorials from staff. The exact details of the collaboration are still being thrashed out but ideas include "Kindle Bundles" – giving discounts on the ebook version of any hardback that a shopper bought – and an online digital library that would let shoppers browse through any title stocked by Waterstones. The retailer will "get a cut" when a customer buys a Kindle ebook using its Wi-Fi connection.

Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos was full of praise for the book chain. "Waterstones is the premier high street bookseller and is passionate about books and readers – a dedication that we share deeply," he said. "We could never hope for a better partner to bring together digital reading and the physical bookstore."

Amazon is, however, a controversial player in the books industry. Its dominance has seen it taking on the role of retailer, publisher and even librarian, causing both publishers and retailers to complain that its aggressive pricing is undermining the success of the industry as a whole. In its most recent results Bezos boasted that 130,000 titles were now exclusive to the Kindle store and that its "Kindle Owners' Lending Library" was also proving popular.

Last month the Guardian reported that Amazon.co.uk paid no corporation tax on the profits generated by last year's British sales of £3.3bn – and is under investigation by the UK tax authorities.

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 9:44 am

Guardian first book award 2012: hunt for the 10th title

Do you know of a brilliant literary debut? As the deadline looms for entries to this year's first book award, we're launching the search for the 10th title for the longlist

There's just a week left for publishers to enter books for the 2012 Guardian first book award – but with only two entries allowed per publisher, we're aware that there are hard choices to be be made, so we're launching a hunt for an extra title to join the longlist by popular demand.

Last year's hunt led us to Juan Pablo Villalobos's Down the Rabbit Hole – an exquisite little fable about Mexico's narcoculture, which was championed by its translator Rosalind Harvey and was the first title to be published by And Other Stories. It went on to make the shortlist, and was among the favourites titles with last year's Waterstones reading groups.

The great strength of the first book prize is that it offers a chance for books of different genres to compete: we're proud of a list of past winners that ranges from short stories about China and Zimbabwe to a graphic novel and a biography of cancer.

The last two years have seen a flurry of new ventures, and new ways of trying to make publishing pay, from crowd-funding to self-publishing. But with over 100,000 titles published in the UK every year, it's harder than ever for new writers and publishers to break through.

Though any book is eligible that hasn't already been submitted, we're particularly keen to hear about all those new and small publishers who might not have the means, or presumption, to submit books through the official channels.

To nominate a book, we only ask that you submit a user review and post the link to the review in the message field on this blog. If the book doesn't exist on our datebase, you can post a review into the message field.

In this case that old saw "it isn't all about winning" is demonstrably true. Down the Rabbit Hole wasn't the only book that first caught our eye through the 10th title hunt. It was hotly contested by Michael Stewart's King Crow – which went on to win the Not the Booker prize – as well as several other novels that we subsequently picked up for review.

So go on, surprise us. We'll announce the 10th title at the end of July, and it'll go forward to the longlist, to be judged as usual by Waterstones books groups around the country, along with our central panel.

Now it's over to you.

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 9:25 am

Between Shades of Grey by Ruta Sepetys - review

'This book is very well written and Lina's pain and emotions are conveyed brilliantly. It is moving and heart-wrenching'

Between Shades of Grey is about a Lithuanian girl called Lina whose town is taken over by the Soviets. One night she, her mother and her brother Jonas are hauled on to a cattle car and their fight for survival starts. As they travel through Russia they make friends, enemies and they meet people they will never forget.

This book is very well written and Lina's pain and emotions are conveyed brilliantly. It is moving and heart-wrenching. It shakes you from within at the thought of the horrors that these people had to face. This book makes you feel like you were there. It makes you feel the pain, love and despair that these people went through. You are with Lina the whole way watching over her as her life changes dramatically.

It is brilliant and people from the age 13- 19 will love it.

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Posted on 21 May 2012 | 9:00 am

Duncan Jones to direct Ian Fleming biopic

The creator of James Bond lived more than his own fair share of drama, to be explored in a new 'period action movie' by the director of Moon

Some believe he dreamed up James Bond to be the bon vivant, daring and cultivated epitome of masculinity he could never quite live up to. In at least one regard, however, Ian Fleming is about to mimic his most famous creation: the author and former second world war naval commander is to be the subject of his very own movie, from the director of Moon and Source Code, Duncan Jones.

Jones will base his biopic on an adaptation by screenwriter Matthew Brown of Andrew Lycett's biography The Man Behind James Bond. The film reportedly has the support of the Fleming estate and is set to go into production later this year. It is something of a departure for Jones, whose two feature films thus far have had science fiction themes.

The celebrated writer's life may not have been quite as exciting as that of 007, but it had more than its fair share of drama. Born into a wealthy English family with Scottish roots, the young Fleming was removed from Eton College a term early by his mother after falling out with a housemaster who disapproved of his playboy lifestyle. He subsequently flunked out of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst after contracting gonorrhoea. Women, often those married to other men, were a constant presence in Fleming's life, and he did not marry until he was 44, to Anne Charteris, a divorced woman with whom he had been having an affair for more than a decade.

Much of Fleming's background for the Bond novels was drawn from his years in British naval intelligence during the second world war, a career he embarked upon after failed attempts at banking and stockbroking. Prior to that, he had found more success as a journalist for the Reuters agency, once receiving a signed apology from Stalin for being unable to attend an interview following a high-profile court case in Russia. It was the latter career Fleming later credited with gifting him the writerly skills that helped forge the Bond novels.

"Fleming lived through one of the most perilous periods in world history, in a position that allowed him a unique vantage point of all the players, all the stakes," said Jones in a statement. "He witnessed true heroism firsthand. And he saw the evil men could do. Then, when the war ended, he went off to write fiction. The essential question for me is: where did Ian Fleming end and Bond begin?"

Like his creation, Fleming drank and smoked (around 60 cigarettes a day) throughout his life, the effects of which probably contributed to an early death in 1964 at the age of 56, following several heart attacks. He spent his final years at the Goldeneye estate in Jamaica, where he had been living for three months annually for more than a decade to write.

Fleming is said to have masterminded a number of ingenious missions during the war, including a ploy to seize a Nazi Enigma decoding machine, which never came to fruition. The idea was subsequently borrowed for the plot of 1957's From Russia With Love, which focuses on a Smersh bid (Spectre in the 1963 film) to lure 007 into a trap with the promise of a Soviet decoding unit.

The writer was instrumental in the formation of the 30 Assault Unit of intelligence commandos, which he oversaw from the rear during the war. The unit, initially 30-strong but later expanded, was trained in lock-picking, safe-cracking and unarmed combat. Last year's action thriller Age of Heroes used the 30 Assault Unit as its focus and starred James D'Arcy as Fleming.

Intriguingly, Jones's film is described as a "period action movie about the life of Fleming and the origins of Bond", suggesting it may take the writer's wartime experiences as a starting point. It will arrive at a time when interest in 007 and his creator has rarely been more intense, with the Eon-produced Bond movies having just celebrated 50 years of production and the company's latest film, Skyfall, premiering in October.

A separate Fleming biopic, with James McAvoy and Leonardo DiCaprio each at one point reportedly set to play the writer, was announced in 2008 by DiCaprio's Appian Way production company, but remains in development.

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 8:42 am

Afghanistan has poetry in its soul | Reza Mohammadi

A Taliban poetry book may have raised eybrows but Aghans' lives have been threaded together by verse throughout its history

When the Taliban's poetry book was published in the UK this month, many found it very strange indeed, but someone who understands the culture and lifestyle of Afghans knows how important poetry is to Afghans. On a visit to Jalalabad during the orange flower blossom celebration, I have felt the power of poetry within the people. As each word was recited by poets, people would rise up, cheer, and then sit down. This is how Afghans live and breathe poetry and drown in an illusion and dream.

The Taliban are like other Afghans, humbled by poetry, and their connection to poetry is older than their connection to radical Islam, the Kalashnikov and grenades.

The history of poetry in Afghanistan dates back millennia. It flourished during the reign of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, who ruled from 998 to 1030, and was a man of literature and poetry, with more than 700 poets living in his palace. But 100 years before the Sultan of Ghazni, Persian literature was born in the court of the first Persian king, Yaqub, in Nimruz, a western province of Afghanistan. It is said that one day a poem was recited in Arabic to praise him, but as Yaqub didn't understand Arabic he ordered that no poem should be recited in a language he did not know. So the literary men of the court were forced to compose poems in Farsi, the language of the king. And the rest is history.

Poetry is everything to Afghans, we hear and recite poetry from cradle to grave. Regardless of our ethnicity, whether we are Tajik, Hazara, Pashtun, Uzbek, Turkmen, Nuristani, Baluch, or any other of the hundreds of sub-ethnic groups, Afghans are threaded together by poetry.

Babies are rocked to sleep with spontaneous poetry recited in lullabies by their mothers. These mothers learned how to be poets from their mothers; as their mothers had learned from their mothers. This is how our society of poets was born.

When children begin school, the first Persian text introduced to them is Divane Hafiz of Shiraz. Hafiz was a 14th century poet from Shiraz (modern-day Iran). Traditionalists believe Divane Hafiz of Shiraz is the book of knowledge, containing everything from poetry to philosophy. Non-Persian speakers have their own version – among Pashtuns, Rahman Baba, and among Uzbeks, Fuzoli or Navai hold the same stature.

As Afghans get older, Hafiz is replaced with the study of other poets. In the mornings, Saadi, another poet from Shiraz, is studied, and in the afternoons we read Bedil, a Persian speaking poet from Delhi whose work is more complicated and philosophical. Evening and long nights of winter are dedicated to Shahname (Book of the Kings) by Firdausi. Shahname is the greatest Persian work of poetry and is compared to Homer's Odyssey. It is an epic poem written 1,000 years ago with an anti-Arabic ideology, aimed to preserve the Persian language and culture.

Poetry infiltrates all levels of Afghani society. When the mullahs want to make a statement but cannot back it by reason, they back it with a poem and end the discussion. In the recent years, lords and warlords have competed to have the best poets onside, much like the courts of the past kings. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of one of the terrorist groups – one of the most wanted in America – is a professional poet. Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary commander and rival to Hekmatyar was also a poet. Dr Abdullah Abdullah, the leader of the opposition and Gilani, head of a Sufi popular group also share the passion for poetry. This common thread can at times bring all the leaders and commanders together under one roof. 

About 10 years ago, at the end of the civil war but before the American bombs began to drop, some poets and I were invited to Mazar-e-Sharif by a local governor. We went for a week and were forced to stay for two months. All the commanders and the warlords fought to host us and they would invite the whole city in our honour. A scene that to most would only occur in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez is part of our reality in Afghanistan.

• Reza Mohammadi and Nick Laird will be reading Reza's poetry at Asia House Festival of Asian Literature on 21 May at 6.45pm.

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 6:50 am

Barry the Fish with Fingers by Sue Hendra - review

'A cute book with a puppet in middle of book really making the story come alive'

Both my daughters, aged 4 and 1 years old, adored this book it's been read countless times already!

I particulary focus on my youngest daughter when reading it, as I love the counting theme: there are lots of counting to five, and on each page there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 fish/sea creatures, so this gives me an opportunity to count with Summer the number of fish/sea creatures on each page, and this has improved her counting.

The thing Summer likes best of course is the fish puppet in the middle of the book which I put my hand through. It means I can bring the book to life, counting with Summer and tickling her with puppet.

It's so cute and funny. The illistrations are beautiful and bright and even reading with my older daughter it has taught her about sea creatures such as angel fish.

The book is well made, with thick pages to prevent the pages being easily ripped due to the puppet being used regularly. I'm pleased about this because it's a lovely fun book which we'll read again and again.

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 6:00 am

Waterstones kindle a deal for destruction with Amazon

Waterstones promise to make ebooks 'dramatically better' by teaming up with Amazon, but will you be browsing the shelves with your Kindle?

Monday morning and already it's the end of the world. Instead of teaming up with Barnes and Noble to cast out the "ruthless money-making devil" Amazon, a tired-looking James Daunt has pulled up a chair and supped with him, striking a deal to "launch new e-reading services and offer Kindle digital devices through its UK shops". Is that what he meant when he talked about being "different from Amazon … [and] better"?

Daunt said it was a "truly exciting prospect" to welcome a ravening tiger into his living room. Er no. Sorry, what he's really excited about is harnessing "the respective strengths of Waterstones and Amazon to provide a dramatically better digital reading experience for our customers." Meanwhile Jeff Bezos said that Waterstones was his favourite bookseller, and that he was looking forward to getting his teeth into the only remaining rival on the high street – I mean bringing together "digital reading and the physical bookstore".

Writers and agents reacted with incredulity to a deal which seems to do little more for Waterstones than legitimise Amazon's controversial price-check app. Maybe Daunt's called this right, and there's no point in competing with the "best digital readers", but it's hard to see how physical bookshops can make the Kindle "dramatically better".

The thinking seems to be that since we all like browsing in bookshops, and we all like reading on digital devices, combining the "singular pleasures of browsing a curated bookshop" with the "best digital readers" will make for the best of both worlds. But that seems to fundamentally misunderstand the appeal of the digital reading experience. Full disclosure: I don't use a Kindle, but price aside, the attraction of the Kindle experience seems to be that you can have lots of books, straight away – neither of which is usually much of a problem when you're standing in a bookshop. And the risk that Waterstones runs is that by welcoming its greatest rival onto the high street it puts Amazon's device into the hands of its most committed customers.

The terms of the deal won't be announced until the autumn, but the success or failure of this deal will be determined by what people think digital reading is. So, Kindle users, and … er … book readers alike: will you be heading down to your local Waterstones to join James Daunt at the devil's table, or is this turkeys voting for Christmas?

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 5:41 am

The merry month of May

Quiz: With the promise of sun on the way, test your knowledge of literature's hymns to the month's traditional pleasures

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 4:31 am

John Donne, priest and poet, part 1: love, conscience and martyrdom | Roz Kaveney

John Donne thought too much - about love and death and his rejection of the choices of his family to rise up the church's ranks

Like many of us, he thought too much about everything.

It was always the complaint against John Donne's love poetry, during the centuries that his work was neglected – Dr Johnson complained that he "perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy". Yet, for most of us now, he is often one of the most physical and sensual of love poets – he had to wait to find his readership. As a young rake, he mocks the women he seduces for falling for his charm – he is not always likable in the early songs and sonnets, but he tells us things we need to know about lust and its often tawdry fulfilment.

He was a clever man, who fell, in the end, for a clever woman, it seems; one of the few things we know about the very young woman for whom he wrecked his career – they married secretly and against her family's wishes – is that she was lonely and bookish as a child. As an adult, burdened with constant childbirth, Anne Donne seems to have been the audience for some of the greatest poems we have that combine spiritual love and earthly passion – perhaps it's a sentimentality to think this mattered to her. And of course, in the end, their love killed her in childbirth.

John was just as passionate, just as over-thinking, in his relationship with religion. When it was originally suggested to him that he could retrieve his lost career by taking holy orders, it is typical of him that he dithered, felt unworthy, was concerned that he might be entering the priesthood for the wrong careerist reasons. Yet for years, faith had been the scab at which he constantly picked – one of the reasons why Donne feels like one of us, even those of us who have no faith, nor want it, is that these are serious matters for him. The search takes time - "On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must and about must go." (Satire 3)

He was uncertain of his social status, in an age where to be a gentleman was everything. His mother was, as they say, of good family, but the father who died before he knew him was a tradesman. And his mother's Catholic family had a trade too, to which he did not feel even the slightest bit drawn, and that trade was martyrdom. Thomas More, beheaded for refusing to condone Henry VIII's schism, was his great-grand-uncle; an uncle was imprisoned and exiled for being a Jesuit; his brother died in jail of plague for harbouring a priest. For Donne first of all to conform to the state church, and then to become one of its senior clergy, as dean of St. Paul's, was a serious matter, that looked like time-serving to some. The way he examines his conscience for bad faith is very much of his time, and yet also very modern, almost postmodern.

Yet there is no reason whatever to doubt his sincerity. Donne was not uncritical of the Elizabethan establishment – he spoke out against torture in an age where it was taken for granted as both a way of breaking men and punishing them – but he was clear in his rejection of the choices his kinsmen had made, and the church which had expected it of them. Once the Pope had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth, and said that assassination and support of foreign invasion were the right course of action for committed Catholics, Donne felt it his duty as a citizen to take another side. One of the reasons why Elizabeth's successor James wanted Donne to be a clergyman was that the arguments for conformity Donne had made in his pamphlets were so powerful. The balance between freedom of conscience and the duty of a citizen is a serious matter; it is possible to disagree with the line Donne ended up taking and still be impressed by the arguments that got him there.

We think of him partly as the poet of love, and partly as the poet of death and its terrors – the pain of disease or violence, and the fear of hell. Donne had been to war; friends had been far too close for comfort to treason and its hideous punishments; his wife died and he feared it was his fault. Those of us who have seen fewer nightmares, and who share neither his hope of heaven nor his fear of damnation can still share with him his sense of unworthiness, his sense of sin, his hope of reconciliation to the end of life.

Posted on 21 May 2012 | 4:18 am

Ruby Redfort - Look Into My Eyes by Lauren Child - review

'It's not perfect, in fact there are a lot of painstakingly cliché bits but overall it is one fabulous story!'

Wowsers. Yeah, sounds near enough something Ruby Redfort would say…Ruby Redfort…what a character! I tell you, Lauren Child has done it again. As previously mentioned in a review on the site, this book was first talked about in another Lauren Child series, Clarice Bean as her favourite books. And now we know why.

Lauren Child deserves all the awards that have been showered on her, and more!

Ruby Redfort, our young detective is the daughter of a "rich, dumb and beautiful" couple who are some of the sweetest parents in the world but as thick as bricks. Ruby is living a perfectly normal life (well, not counting that she is a child prodigy in codes and pretty smart and savvy otherwise) so it comes as a huge shock when her beloved housekeeper, Mrs Digby goes missing. Her parents assume she is taking a holiday…but Ruby is not so sure. Let me just add, without wanting to give anything away, that Mrs Digby is a pretty hilarious character in herself. Her character is portrayed with such style on Lauren Child's behalf that you can't help laughing at some of her scenes… or feeling pity for the grown men she tells off!

But back to the plot: and Mrs Digby's replacement is a handsome man called Hitch. And Ruby is convinced that this suave, charming Hitch has a secret. And because Ruby is that kind of girl, and she is adventurous, curious…oh, dear…did you spot the cliché? But otherwise this bit is wonderful. Ruby starts investigating, but before she can get far, she becomes an agent herself.

No, please don't stop reading! It's not like it looks (ok, reads)! Really, I trusted Lauren Child to turn this embarrassingly superficial situation into one of her classically good moments and I was right. Even this is one of the best parts of the story, about which I have already given too much away.

Just read it. I'm not going to say anymore but if you do read it then most of you will understand why. It's not perfect, in fact there are a lot of painstakingly cliché bits but overall it is one fabulous story!

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Posted on 21 May 2012 | 3:00 am

Operation Diamond: can you crack the code?

Helen Moss, author of the Adventure Island series of books, is kicking off a competition, Operation Diamond, here on the Guardian children's books site.

She explains how a real life treasure trove inspired the mystery behind the first book in the series, and sets the first question in her blog-and-clue trail

When I started planning the first Adventure Island book I soon had most of the ingredients for the story; two brothers, a girl and her dog, an island, a secret passage and a ruined castle on the cliffs. All I needed now was a baffling mystery to solve.

I knew something had to be stolen from the castle. But I didn't want it to be anything ordinary like a handbag or a mobile phone. It had to be something really exciting, something hugely valuable, something with a dramatic history...

I did lots of research and learned some fascinating facts about robberies. For example, did you know that the most commonly stolen type of food is CHEESE! Well, that didn't help much. I could hardly start off the Adventure Island series with the mysterious disappearance of a box of Dairylea triangles, could I?

I was starting to think I'd never come up with the perfect robbery when I heard a radio programme about the Staffordshire Hoard and I knew that was what I'd been looking for!

If you've studied the Anglo Saxons at school, you'll have heard of the Staffordshire Hoard. In 2009, a man called Terry Herbert was searching some fields with his metal detector. He probably expected to find a few old coins or a broken buckle. Imagine his surprise when he came across a hoard of over 3,500 Saxon artifacts, almost all gold and silver decorative pieces from weapons – beautifully carved, many inlaid with jewels. There were five kilos of gold alone (that's over 285 Dairylea triangles!)

That metal detector must have been beeping like crazy!

Why did the Saxons bury all those valuable objects together in that field? Were they the spoils of war or offerings to the gods? There are lots of theories but the real reason remains a mystery.

The Staffordshire hoard gave me the idea for the Carrickstowe hoard – the priceless Saxon treasure that is stolen in The Mystery of the Whistling Caves (If you look at the map of Castle Key, you'll see that Carrickstowe is the name of the nearest town on the mainland).

I scaled my hoard down from 3,5000 objects to just three - the King's Sword, The Chieftan's Shield and The Ceremonial Helmet. I used my imagination and the real Saxon objects I've seen in museums and in pictures to come up with the descriptions. (Do you recognise the helmet that Emily is holding in the picture? It's based on the one that was found at another famous Saxon site, the Sutton Hoo ship burial).

So, the metal detector found even more than five kilos of Saxon gold that day in a muddy field – it found a story for me, and the very first investigation for Scott, Jack, Emily and Drift!

Do you know of any exciting finds that have been made in the area where you live? Or have you been lucky enough to find some treasure yourself? Perhaps it could inspire a story for you, too?

Operation Diamond

There's a mystery to crack and the prize is to be in with a chance of starring in Helen Moss's next Adventure Series book. The first clue is below and all the details you need to enter to competition on the Adventure Island Books website.

Question 1: Who found the real Staffordshire Hoard in a field in 2009?

The Saxons (F)
Terry Herbert (Y)

For the next installment of Helen Moss's blog, and your next clue, visit:
www.ReadingZone.com on Tuesday 22 May

Posted on 20 May 2012 | 6:05 pm

Heavy hitter from left field

British readers worried that US bestselling novel The Art of Fielding is purely about baseball can allay their fears. The sport is in the book to focus on the hero's very public crisis, says the author

The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach's debut novel of love, doubt and college baseball, sailed into the UK earlier this year on a wave of hype. The book tracks the arc of poetic shortstop Henry Skrimshander's career at Westish, a fictional liberal arts university on the shores of Lake Michigan: his dizzying ascent to tie the National Collegiate Athletic Association NCAA record for consecutive errorless games; the moment he misfires a throw and finds he can fail; the subsequent awakening of self-awareness that sends him on a screeching slide from grace. Published last autumn in the US, it met with ecstatic reviews, pantheonic comparisons with everyone from Jonathan Franzen to Don DeLillo, and in December it waltzed away with the top slot in the New York Times's 10 best books of 2011. The British literary world was on tenterhooks, and it is at last available in paperback in the UK.

So far, so familiar. Every year or so the transatlantic publicity machine cranks into overdrive, and everyone in the UK is briefly convulsed by rumours of the next big thing from across the water, before the dust settles and we all go back to what we were doing. The difference this time is that The Art of Fielding is every bit as good as billed. A big, beautiful blowout of a book, sure and generous, it reads like a throwback to the mid-20th century, when American literature was in its pomp. Henry's story is a work of rich psychological realism in the grand tradition, gaining pitch and heft from a meaty supporting cast, a resonant campus setting and a thicket of literary references. If we're not quite looking at Philip Roth's replacement – the novel, in the final analysis, is too affable and lacks the nerve of the truly great book to haul its readers over the coals – this is nevertheless an exceptional debut. And its author – in his mid-30s, with most of his writing life in front of him – may well yet step up to the plate.

Surprising, then, how self-effacing Harbach turns out to be in the flesh. Neat and diffident in a button-down shirt and navy blazer, visually he is hard to get a fix on, and for the first 20 minutes or so of our interview, the same proves true in conversation. When I put questions that I imagine he will have heard countless times, he blinks politely and bats them away with a faintly puzzled air. Did the book have a complicated genesis, I ask (it did; his friend Keith Gessen has published an ebook detailing the problems of its publication). Oh no, he insists; in a way the genesis was very simple: aged 24, he had the idea and started writing. What about its status as a Great American Novel? Surely, given the book's obsession with the American canon (Whitman, Emerson and particularly Melville, whom Harbach casts explicitly as its presiding genius), he must have given the question some thought? But he shrugs, smiles, shakes his head. "It's a common phrase, but it's never quite clear what people mean by it. 'What's the Great American novel?' It's like asking: 'What's the meaning of life?' And who cares what the meaning of life is, right?" This, from the man whose novel offers a definition of the human condition ("basically, that we're alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not").

In the end, it's not until we move on to his parallel career as co-editor of the successful internet magazine n+1 that Harbach loosens up. If the novel itself shows no mark of the rookie, this moment in the interview, rather endearingly, does: he is transparently more comfortable talking about a joint endeavour (Harbach founded the magazine in 2004 with four others, including Gessen), and visibly relaxes, speech settling into the easy, yarn-spinning rhythm that makes his written sentences so lovely. The name, he explains, was his: "It started as a sort of joke. Right from when we graduated, Keith and I had always had an imaginary magazine; even though we weren't doing anything about starting it, we'd have these really intense discussions about it. And one day Keith called me up, very distressed. He was like: 'Now McSweeney's is getting going, and there are all these magazines out there – we've missed our moment!' And I was just, like, 'n+1', meaning, however many magazines there are, we find them all unsatisfying in some way. There's always going to be room for the one that does what we want."

Someone setting out to write a debut novel might similarly have glanced at the outfield of US literature, crowded as it is with baseball books, and decided there wasn't room for another, but again, not Harbach. Was he unsatisfied by the baseball novels that had come before? Is The Art of Fielding n+1?

"Well, maybe," he grins. "There's certainly a large literature around baseball in the US. American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it. Also, I think writers find it amenable because it's a slow-moving game, pastoral, with a lot of room for contemplation contained inside of it. But at the same time, there aren't many baseball novels I've really loved. The sport just fit the story I wanted to tell. I was interested in watching someone going through a purely psychological crisis in public. Lots of people have those breakdowns, but it's less interesting when you can hide away. For Henry, anyone who wants to can come and watch him fall apart. No one had written fiction about that; it seemed a very good start to something."

And where do you go, after a start like that? "I'm kind of feeling around," he admits. "I'm such a different person now than I was when I began The Art of Fielding. It's quite a feeling to finish something you have been 10 years beholden to, and to have a clean slate." I can't be alone in dying to see what he'll write on it.

Posted on 20 May 2012 | 2:30 pm

Heist of the century: Wall Street's role in the financial crisis

Wall Street bankers could have averted the global financial crisis, so why didn't they? In this exclusive extract from his book Inside Job, Charles Ferguson argues that they should be prosecuted

Bernard L Madoff ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, operating it for 30 years and causing cash losses of $19.5bn. Shortly after the scheme collapsed and Madoff confessed in 2008, evidence began to surface that for years, major banks had suspected he was a fraud. None of them reported their suspicions to the authorities, and several banks decided to make money from him without, of course, risking any of their own funds. Theories about his fraud varied. Some thought he might have access to insider information. But quite a few thought he was running a Ponzi scheme. Goldman Sachs executives paid a visit to Madoff to see ifthey should recommend him to clients. A partner later recalled: "Madoff refused to let them do any due diligence on the funds and when asked about the firm's investment strategy they couldn't understand it. Goldman not only blacklisted Madoff in the asset management division but banned its brokerage from trading with the firm too."

UBS headquarters forbade investing any bank or client money in Madoff accounts, but created or worked with several Madoff feeder funds. A memo to one of these in 2005 contained the following, in large boldface type: "Not to do: ever enter into a direct contact with Bernard Madoff!!!"

JPMorgan Chase had more evidence, because it served as Madoff's primary banker for more than 20 years. The lawsuit filed by the Madoff bankruptcy trustee against JPMorgan Chase makes astonishing reading. More than a dozen senior JPMorgan Chase bankers discussed a long list of suspicions.

The Securities and Exchanges Commission has been deservedly criticised for not following up on years of complaints about Madoff, many of which came from a Boston investigator, Harry Markopolos, whom they treated as a crank. But suppose a senior executive at Goldman Sachs, UBS or JPMorgan Chase had called the SEC and said: "You really need to take a close look at Bernard Madoff. He must be working a scam."

But not a single bank that had suspicions about Madoff made such a call. Instead, they assumed he was probably a crook, but either just left him alone or were happy to make money from him.

It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident.

This behaviour is criminal. We are talking about deliberate concealment of financial transactions that aided terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferation and large-scale tax evasion; assisting in major financial frauds and in concealment of criminal assets; and committing frauds that substantially worsened the worst financial bubbles and crises since the Depression.

And yet none of this conduct has been punished in any significant way.

Total fines on the banks for their role in the Enron fraud, the internet bubble, violation of sanctions against countries including Iran and money-laundering activities appear to be far less than 1% of financial sector profits and bonuses during the same period.

There have been very few prosecutions and no criminal convictions of large US financial institutions or their senior executives. Where individuals not linked to major banks have committed similar offences, they have been treated far more harshly.

The Obama government has rationalised its failure to prosecute anyone (literally, anyone at all) for bubble-related crimes by saying that while much of Wall Street's behaviour was unwise or unethical, it wasn't illegal. With apologies for my vulgarity, this is complete horseshit.

When the government is really serious about something – preventing another 9/11, or pursuing major organised crime figures – it has many tools at its disposal and often uses them. There are wiretaps and electronic eavesdropping. There are undercover agents who pretend to be criminals in order to entrap their targets. There are National Security Letters, an aggressive form of administrative subpoena that allows US authorities to secretly obtain almost any electronic record – complete with a gag order making it illegal for the target of the subpoena to tell anyone about it. There are special prosecutors, task forces and grand juries. When Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974, the FBI assigned hundreds of agents to the case.

In organised crime investigations, the FBI and government prosecutors often start at the bottom in order to get to the top. They use the well-established technique of nailing lower-level people and then offering them a deal if they inform on and/or testify about their superiors – whereupon the FBI nails their superiors, and does the same thing to them, until climbing to the top of the tree. There is also the technique of nailing people for what can be proven against them, even if it's not the main offence. Al Capone was never convicted of bootlegging, large-scale corruption or murder; he was convicted of tax evasion.

A reasonable list of prosecutable crimes committed during the bubble, the crisis, and the aftermath period by financial services firms includes: securities fraud, accounting fraud, honest services violations, bribery, perjury and making false statements to US government investigators, Sarbanes-Oxley violations (false accounting), Rico (Racketeer Influenced and Criminal Organisations Act) offences, federal aid disclosure regulations offences and personal conduct offences (drug use, tax evasion etc).

Let's take the example of securities fraud. Where to begin?

When did Wall Street insiders know there was a really serious sub-prime mortgage bubble, and that they could game it? Many of the clever ones knew by about 2004, when Howie Hubler at Morgan Stanley first started to bet against the worst securities with the approval of his management. But you can only make money betting against a bubble as it unravels. As long as there was room for the bubble to grow, Wall Street's overwhelming incentive was to keep it going. But when they saw that the bubble was ending, their incentives changed. And we therefore know that many on Wall Street realised there was a huge bubble by late 2006, because that's when they started massively betting on its collapse.

Here, I must briefly mention a problem with Michael Lewis's generally superb financial journalism. In his book The Big Short, Lewis leaves the impression that Wall Street was blindly running itself off a cliff, whereas a few wild and crazy, off-the-beaten-track, adorably weird loners figured out how to short the mortgage market and beat the system. With all due respect to Mr Lewis, it didn't happen like that. The Big Short was seriously big business, and much of Wall Street was ruthlessly good at it.

To begin with, a number of big hedge funds figured it out. Unlike investment banks, however, they couldn't make serious money by securitising loans and selling CDOs (collateralised debt obligations), so they had to wait until the bubble was about to burst and make their money from the collapse. And this they did. Major hedge funds including Magnetar, Tricadia, Harbinger Capital, George Soros, and John Paulson made billions of dollars each by betting against mortgage securities as the bubble ended, and all of them worked closely with Wall Street in order to do so.

In fairness to Mr Lewis, it is true that in several major cases – most notably Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Lehman and Bear Stearns – senior management was indeed disconnected and thus clueless, allowed their employees to take advantage too long and therefore destroyed their own firms.

But cluelessness was most definitely not an issue with the senior management of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. As we saw, Morgan Stanley started betting against the bubble as early as 2004. Conversely, JPMorgan Chase mostly just remained prudently above the junk mortgage fray. Goldman Sachs, though, was in a class by itself. It made billions of dollars by betting against the very same stuff that it had been making billions selling only a year or two before.

Almost all the prospectuses and sales material on mortgage-backed bonds sold from 2005 until 2007 were a compound of falsehoods. And as the bubble peaked and started to collapse, executives repeatedly lied about their companies' financial condition. In some cases, they also concealed other material information, such as the extent to which executives were selling or hedging their own stock holdings because they knew their firms were about to collapse.

In some cases, we have evidence of senior executive knowledge of and involvement in misrepresentations. For example, quarterly presentations to investors are nearly always made by the CEO or chief financial officer of the firm; if lies were told in these presentations, or if material facts were omitted, the responsibility lies with senior management. In other cases, such as Bear Stearns, we have evidence from civil lawsuits that senior executives were directly involved in selling securities whose prospectuses allegedly contained lies and omissions.

The Rico Act provides for severe criminal (and civil) penalties for operating a criminal organisation. It specifically enables prosecution of the leaders of a criminal organisation for having ordered or assisted others to commit crimes. It also provides that racketeers must forfeit all ill-gotten gains obtained through a pattern of criminal activity, and allows government prosecutors to obtain pre-trial restraining orders to seize defendants' assets. Finally, it provides for criminal prosecution of corporations that employ Rico offenders.

Rico was explicitly intended to cover organised financial crime as well as violent criminal organisations such as the mafia and drug cartels. A great deal of the behaviour that occurred during the bubble would appear to fall under Rico statutes. Moreover, pre-trial asset seizure is a widely and successfully used technique in combating organised crime, and asset seizures now generate more tha $1bn a year for the US government. However, there has not been a single Rico prosecution related to the financial crisis, nor has a single Rico restraining order been issued to seize the assets of any individual banker or any firm.

It is important to note here that these asset seizures would not merely represent justice for offenders but for victims as well. US law allows seized assets to be used to compensate victims. In this case, the potential economic impact of seizures could be enormous.

Finally, personal conduct subject to criminal prosecution might range from possession and use of drugs, such as marijuana and cocaine, to hiring of prostitutes, employment of prostitutes for business purposes, fraudulent billing of personal or illegal services as business expenses (sexual services, strip club and nightclub patronage), fraudulent use or misappropriation of corporate assets or services for personal use (eg use of corporate jets), personal tax evasion and a variety of other offences.

I should perhaps make clear here that I'm not enthusiastic about prosecuting people for possession or use of marijuana, which I think should be legal. In general, I tend to think that anything done by two healthy consenting adults, including sex for pay, should be legal as well.

But the circumstances here are not ordinary. First, there is once again a vast disparity between the treatment of ordinary people and investment bankers. Every year, about 50,000 people are arrested in New York City for possession of marijuana – most of them ordinary people, not criminals, whose only offence was to accidentally end up within the orbit of a police officer. Not a single one of them is ever named Jimmy Cayne, despite the fact that the marijuana habit of the former CEO of Bear Stearns has been discussed multiple times in the national media (his predecessor in the job, Ace Greenberg, called him a "dope-smoking megalomaniac").

There is also a second, even more serious, point about this. If the supposed reason for failure to prosecute is the difficulty of making cases, then there is an awfully easy way to get a lot of bankers to talk. It is a technique used routinely in organised crime cases. What is this, if not organised?

As time passes, criminal prosecution of bubble-era frauds will become even more difficult, even impossible, because the statute of limitations for many of these crimes is short – three to five years. So an immense opportunity for both justice and public education will soon be lost. In some circumstances, cases can be opened or reopened after the statute of limitations has expired, if new evidence appears; but finding new evidence will grow more difficult with time as well. And there is no sign whatsoever that the Obama administration is interested.

Charles Ferguson will appear at the Edinburgh international book festival on Sunday 12 August.

Posted on 20 May 2012 | 2:00 pm

Pass notes No 3,178: Jack Kerouac

The Beat writer's masterpiece On the Road has been made into a film. But why has it taken 55 years to get it on to the screen?

Age: Died in 1969, aged 47.

Appearance: Dead Beat.

Who was he? A leading novelist and poet of the Beat Generation.

Oh right. That explains "Dead Beat". Yep.

Very funny. Thanks.

And why are we talking about him now? His novel On the Road has finally made it to the big screen.

The one about all the road trips? The semi-autobiographical one in which Kerouac – under the pseudonym Sal Paradise – drives across America and later Mexico with his new friend Dean Moriarty – a pseudonym for fellow Beat figure Neal Cassady – on a hedonistic quest for identity, freedom and some form of lasting happiness.

Didn't he write it all in just three weeks on a single long roll of paper? He did, in 1951, or so the story goes, although he then spent six years rejigging it before it was published in 1957.

That's a long wait. Not compared to the wait for the film, which began with a letter from Kerouac to Marlon Brando in 1957 begging the film star to buy up the rights, and is only just coming to an end this week, with the premiere at Cannes on Wednesday.

What's taken so long? Well, for one thing, Brando didn't reply. For another, the novel's free-wheeling narrative has taken decades to condense into a nice, neat film story. For a third, an unknown called Kristen Stewart was cast as Marylou five years ago, and her career has sort of gone a bit stratospheric in the interim.

Ooh, Kristen Stewart's in it? Yep. As well as Amy Adams, Viggo Mortensen, Elizabeth Moss, Kirsten Dunst and Sam Riley.

Well, why didn't you just say that earlier, instead of going on about this Caramac guy? It's Kerouac.

Whatevs. I'm booking tickets to the UK premiere at Somerset House as we speak. Too late. They went on sale on Friday at 10am and people snapped up every one in just five minutes.

Aww! They "beat" me to it! Hilarious. You could always go read the original. The first nine metres of it are on display in Paris for the next three months.

As a rule I don't read books that are measured in metres. Probably wise.

Do say: "You wait 55 years for a film of On the Road..."

Don't say: "... and then they go and cast the girl from Twilight."

Posted on 20 May 2012 | 2:00 pm

The Pirates Next Door by Jonny Duddle - review

'A brilliant, funny and entertaining book about a pirates life'

If I'm honest I was slightly unsure of this book, as Keeley has never shown an interest in pirates, but when I showed it to her she seemed excited by the front cover.

As soon as we started to read she was captivated: she loved the rhyming theme which runs throughout book.

As the story unfolded she absolutely loved the funny parts; there were plenty and she laughed out loud at the pictures of the pirates, the jokes and just generally the funny storyline.

She asked lots of questions, too, about pirates and what they do, and was very involved in the story all the way through, showing lots of concentration and interest in what would come next, and predicting the outcome of story.

She loved the ending, too, as the last pages unfolded to reveal a large map where Keeley was interested in looking at the buried treasure etc.

The picures throughout are in great detail and lovely, the story is very well written and very funny.

I think it is a brilliant book for boys and girls of pre-school age, whether they are interested in pirates or not. I really enjoyed reading it too, even after reading it hundreds of times as it's her favorite!!

Posted on 20 May 2012 | 6:00 am

'The Booker can drive people mad'

When Alan Hollinghurst's celebrated The Stranger's Child was omitted from the literary prize's shortlist, many questioned the award's credibility. Twelve months on, Britain's great stylist breaks his silence on the issue – and on what turns young people into 'monsters and bores'

Alan Hollinghurst lives in a light and preternaturally quiet flat on Parliament Hill in north London. When his novel The Line of Beauty won the Booker prize in 2004, he spent some of his winnings on revamping it, with the result that it has a new, large sitting room with a lush view out on to a corner of Hampstead Heath. Furniture is sparse (he likes to joke that the money ran out before he could stretch to armchairs), but there are pale carpets and good paintings and – what's this? – a strange plaster relief, in an elaborate gilt frame, of the face of a (presumably long dead) young woman.

I move towards it excitedly, as if I were the first visitor ever to notice it. Beneath her profile is written her name: Daphne. Crikey. Was this a source of inspiration for Daphne Sawle, one of the most important characters in The Stranger's Child, his fifth and most recent novel? He smiles, indulgently. But, no. He bought it at auction just as he was finishing the book, by which time Daphne Sawle was every bit as real to him as this fine-boned, turn-of-the-century creature.

Hollinghurst is all indulgent smiles today, which is just as well because I've got the jitters. The Stranger's Child, a capacious and wonderful book that begins in one suburban garden in 1913 and ends in another in 2008, has many themes. It is about love, and the passing of time; it is, too, about ambition, taste and disappointment. But more than anything, it is about the unknowability of human beings, and the misunderstandings, even the danger, associated with trying to plug the gaps in our perceptions.

Its nastiest and perhaps most memorable character is Paul Bryant, an enterprising hack reviewer and the would-be biographer of Cecil Valance, the Rupert Brooke-ish figure whose short life and long but ever-shifting literary reputation crouches at the heart of The Stranger's Child.

Bryant, like me, makes a living poking around in people's lives – and I have the impression that his creator disapproves. When he goes to stay with Daphne Sawle, for whom, when she was a girl, Cecil Valance wrote a famous poem, she likens him to a "little wire-haired ratter"; she knows, even before he has lobbed his first question, that all he is interested in, basically, is "smut". When Paul asks her if he might tape their conversation, Hollinghurst writes of the recorder's "odd insinuations of flattery and mistrust". He then lists, highly accurately, the various ways interviewees respond to it: some made awkward, as if it were an eavesdropper; others reassured to a degree that results in a kind of verbal incontinence.

I place my own tape recorder down on the small table beside us. I half expect it to explode, like a grenade. So, does he loathe Paul?

"Well, I wanted to depict him changing," he says, carefully. "And one knows how sweet young people can turn into monsters and bores." They curdle. "Yes, exactly. They curdle."

What about biography? Does he disapprove of it? "No, of course not. I love biography. But as with the novel, there's a great range between the great and the crap. A great biography is like a great novel; it has a deep sense of wisdom about life. I'm quite amused, though, and sometimes frustrated, when someone ends up with the wrong biographer.

"I'm potty about Ronald Firbank, and the first person to have access to all his papers was this woman, Miriam Benkovitz. She was in a position to do something wonderful, and she wrote this utterly inane book – and, of course, a minor literary figure is unlikely to have their life written again, so it feels like a waste. The same thing happened with Denton Welch [the writer and painter, who died in 1948]. There was this very slipshod biography by Michael De-la-Noy."

The Stranger's Child came out last year (it is published in paperback this week) to almost universal praise; the only criticism anyone seemed to be able to level at it was that it isn't The Line of Beauty. But then... controversy! The novel was left off the Booker shortlist, and thus became the focus for discontent with the prize and its supposedly lowbrow leanings; soon after, the literary agent Andrew Kidd announced that he hoped to establish a new, more serious fiction award (although, so far, nothing has yet happened on this score).

How did Hollinghurst feel about this? "I didn't say anything [at the time], and it's hard for me to say anything about it now because it sounds like I'm saying: I should have been on the shortlist."

But? "But there were a lot of books that should have been on the shortlist – Teddy [Edward St Aubyn, author of At Last] and Philip Hensher [King of the Badgers] and probably a lot of other books I haven't read, too. One can take a position about the shortlist in almost an objective way. But I also learnt, a long time ago, to be aloof from these things. You realise how arbitrary they are. It's lovely if it works out for you, but it doesn't mean anything, really, except in commercial terms.

"The Booker made me a lot of money. I didn't realise that all over the world, people will read a book just because it won the Booker prize." A delicious pause. "Not something I would do myself... But then one goes into some quite other, private region to produce a book." He gives me a knowing look. "I think the Booker can drive people quite mad. That's why it's good to be detached from it."

Is he in that private region now? I hope so. "I'm in that rather unfocused phase, which is one of discontent with not writing another book. What I'm missing is sitting at my desk and getting into the large alternative space of a book. I've got quite a few bits and pieces, but I haven't quite had the moment of revelation where I see how they fit together. It's always like this: a blur of different things, and then a story emerges."

Does he ever think: I'm not sure I can do this again? "I have an underlying confidence that I won't suffer writer's block or anything. But I never think: oh, this will be a smash hit. I know there are things I can do, but an element of doubt is probably quite important." Is writing painful? For some, it's agony. "Perhaps we tend to overplay the agony side of it. But then, like any pain, when it's over, you can't remember it. So perhaps I'm wrong to say we exaggerate it. What I will say is that there are times when it's just the best thing: the high of things coming to you. You get a peculiar sense of elation, as if nothing else really matters. It's not a sense of smugness. But you're buoyed up. Your mind is wonderfully perceptive. It's a very beautiful feeling."

I can measure out my adulthood not in coffee spoons, but in Alan Hollinghurst novels. Partly, this is because he takes such an age to write a book; the anxious wait means that one's circumstances have inevitably changed by the time he delivers. Partly, it's because I read his first novel, The Swimming Pool Library, which came out in 1988, during my first year at university, that exciting time when I felt life was just beginning to get going. I remember vividly both the deep surprise of it – all that sex! – and my complete inability to put it down, for all that I was supposed to be watching children (I was their nanny).

This is, I think, something the critics rarely point out. They will tell you that his first four novels compose an unofficial history of gay life in Britain (The Swimming Pool Library, which fleshed out – quite literally – the gay world before and after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, was followed by The Folding Star, a study of romantic and sexual obsession; The Spell, a comedy of manners whose twin engines are ecstasy and a certain kind of narcissism; and finally, triumphantly, The Line of Beauty, perhaps the best book ever written about the 80s). They will also, inevitably, claim him as the greatest stylist of our age. But do they ever use the word page-turner? No, they most certainly do not.

He wasn't always going to be a novelist, though. Poetry was his first love. An only child, he grew up in Stroud, Gloucestershire, where his father was a bank manager (he poured this time into The Stranger's Child: Paul Bryant begins his working life in a bank in a small, country town, where he reads Angus Wilson in his lunch hour, and gets turned on by the angle of his stool at the cash desk). At school – his parents sent him to board at Canford in Dorset – Hollinghurst became fascinated by poetical forms.

"We had to do a competition," he says. "The theme was 'the pleasures of life'. I wrote three sonnets." And what were, in his then opinion, the pleasures of life? A low chuckle (Hollinghurst is the drollest, most quietly mischievous man I've ever met – though it's in his eyes and the cast of his mouth and the tone of his voice, rather than in anything he actually says). "I'm not sure I'd actually experienced the pleasures of life, then. So it was a case of.... going for a walk, having a cup of tea, er... a pint of foaming ale!" He laughs. "They were published, with some typos, in the school magazine. Being a poet at school had a certain prestige; it was a source of glamour. And if you could write modernistic poems, which no one could understand, then even more so."

Later on, as a young man, he published a volume of poems, Confidential Chats with Boys (1982) – "intensely rare", he once described it, self-mockingly – but then the muse left him, and he started on The Swimming Pool Library instead. He was 33 when it was published.

Hollinghurst dates his interest in architecture from school, too – and thus, wary though we must be of conflating life and fiction, we can also trace the big houses in his books to this time. "I placed Corley Court [the Valances' home in The Stranger's Child] almost exactly where my prep school had been," he says. "I'd never gone back into that world before [Corley Court later becomes a school], and I realised the memories were so abundant, I could easily have written a 500-page novel only about that – not that I'm going to! My prep school, an early Jacobean house, made a deep impression on me. I could draw an accurate plan of every floor, even now – and all the fireplaces, the plasterwork on the ceilings. I just absorbed it all. You're wonderfully open and suggestible as a boy, though one also goes through agonies. The emotions of adolescence are so extreme."

After a long period at Oxford – he wrote an MLitt thesis on Firbank, Forster and LP Hartley – he came to London, and began working as a reviewer, eventually joining the Times Literary Supplement as an editor. "It was completely unanticipated," he says. "I'd applied for teaching jobs. I had an interview in Edinburgh, and perhaps I'd still be there if I'd got that."

The editor told Hollinghurst, sounding slightly embarrassed, that his salary would be £11,500. "And my father said: that's more than I ever earned, old boy." His parents were reassured by the fact of his working at the TLS – and it pleased him, too, to be able to jump dramatically into a taxi and shout: the Times! (both papers were in the same place ). He went part-time after The Swimming Pool Library came out, and eventually was able to make a living from writing full-time – which is a good thing because he has a problem combining fiction with the rest of life. Hollinghurst is rather sociable. He has been known to go to parties. But once he's deep into a novel, he has to isolate himself. It's for this reason, too, that he has mostly always lived alone.

We talk, before I go, about literary estates. It is a horrible fact that while he was writing The Stranger's Child, in which we see Cecil Valance's reputation wax and wane, different parties claiming him as their own at various times, Hollinghurst's dear friend Mick Imlah, the poet, died of motor neurone disease at the age of 52. Hollinghurst, his literary executor, looked on as people wrote about Imlah, "each of them saying what they thought about him rather as the characters do in the book".

His own literary executor is Andrew Motion (the two of them shared a house in Oxford; Hollinghurst is also Motion's executor). "Oh, yes, I've kept everything," he says. "A couple of American libraries have suggested I might like to deposit things with them. But I don't like the idea of people rummaging about in my drafts. It's embarrassing. Why expose oneself to that? And I don't think you should be too concerned with posterity while you are living your life."

He will admit, though, to enjoying writing his will, when he finally got round to it ("Andrew was much more organised; he wrote his ages before me"). Specifically, he liked the bequest section. So who, I wonder, will get Daphne, with her marble eyes, and her well-bred nose? He laughs, a low rumble of delight. "Yes, that's something I really should think about. I probably need to add a whole new clause for her."

Posted on 19 May 2012 | 6:05 pm

The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer's meditation on the great influences of his life is a book that deserves to be loved

The last acknowledgement at the end of Pico Iyer's 10th book is to the man within his head, "to the author who, almost in spite of himself, taught me and so many others how to move around the world and even how to hazard trust". This "author", as we know from the subtitle and everything that follows, is Graham Greene. What Greene would have made of the acknowledgement is one of the many unresolved thoughts sparked by this personal and passionate book.

We all carry people within us – parents, siblings, friends, an inspired teacher or lover, someone met on a train in India. Their memory lives on in us and their influence is occasionally, and often unexpectedly, felt. But for Iyer, as perhaps with many writers and artists, this influence can be more specific and more pervasive.

In previous books, Iyer has crossed the world considering the effects of travel (The Global Soul and Sun After Dark) or following in Greene's footsteps in search of a plot for a novel (Cuba and the Night). His fascination with travel, with the exotic and the spiritual, has coalesced into an obsession with Greene, or at least with his words and works, in particular (judging by the frequency of their mention here) with The Quiet American, The End of the Affair, The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter. Iyer's background is multinational – he lives between cultures and countries – and has inevitably involved much travel. So to recognise Greene as the person "who taught me how to move around the world" is to acknowledge an influence that goes to the core of his self and his work.

There is, of course, neither a straight nor a single thread to this narrative. How could there be when the author and one of his subjects never met? There was a moment, a couple of years before Greene's death in 1991, when Iyer asked to interview Greene for Time magazine: he received a polite, typed rejection, in a blue envelope. Without that meeting, there is nothing more substantial to this strand of the story than the connections, coincidences, similarities and occasional differences that Iyer observes. In Saigon, for instance, he finds a city, and characters, "not so different from what Greene had seen in 1951" and which he had written about in The Quiet American. In Havana, in 1987, he met a hustler called Carlos with whom he has the sort of relationship that lies at the heart of Greene's books, where "two men come together in the dark and open their hearts". There are many other crossovers, from a shared need to be away (Greene admitted he never felt himself until he crossed the Channel) to the way Greene's style seems to pervade Iyer's writing, and the echo to the title of Greene's first published novel, The Man Within, in this work.

But Iyer, the literary stalker, knows he was let off the hook by being kept at a physical distance from the man. The living Greene would have been polite but distant to the stranger, while "the man within your head whispers his secrets and fears to you". The real Greene can be criticised for treating his wife badly, but the one in his head is always and only a force for good.

Part of the power of this book stems from the honesty with which Iyer describes his relationship with his father. He believed he had an intimacy with Greene, his imagined "adopted father", the Virgil to his Dante. But his real father comes across as a more distant and troubling character, a mystery Iyer accepts he could never solve. Madras-born Raghavan Iyer earned a first in PPE at Oxford before taking his family to California, in the 1960s, where he lionised Gandhi, promoted Madame Blavatsky and the theosophists, and was an inspiring professor at the University of California. The younger Iyer was sent back to England for his education and then headed out into the world. It wasn't until towards the end of his father's life that this unusually composed man revealed himself as he left a voicemail for his son. Interspersed with "racking sobs" was the father's admiration for his son's essay on Greene. Iyer senior was particularly moved by his son's recognition, learned from the novelist, that the real enemy lies within us.

The lack of any direct contact with one of his subjects, and the distance of his relationship with the other, might have led a lesser writer to self-indulgence or an easy sentimentality. Iyer avoids both pitfalls and, 17 years after his father's death, has produced a captivating and intelligent hybrid. "You're not writing a biography?" his puzzled wife asks towards the end of the book, perhaps aware of the fate of Norman Sherry, Greene's much-abused official biographer. "Oh no," Iyer replies. "The opposite." It is, on one level, a meditation as to why one can feel closer to someone one has never met than to one's parents and, on another, an eloquent and intelligent investigation into fathers and sons. It is a book that contains travel anecdotes, personal memoirs, literary criticism and, yes, biography and autobiography. And yet the result is none of the above, being instead one of those hard to categorise books that publishers resist, booksellers puzzle over but readers will surely love.

Posted on 19 May 2012 | 6:04 pm

Can I teach you how to be a writer?

Jeanette Winterson believes that learning how to write, even reasonably well, gives fluency to the rest of life

Hi, I'm currently doing a creative writing essay and I'd like to ask for advice on how you would describe a bomb …

That is my favourite Google search for creative writing. There are hundreds of courses currently on offer in the UK, ranging from tried and tested success stories such as the Arvon Foundation and UEA, through to writers you have never heard of offering "mentoring" services.

Contradictions are everywhere. Print media is shrinking, perhaps disappearing. At the same time, festivals and live events have never been more popular. Every tiny town seems to have a literary festival. Writers are out of the study and on the road – and when they are not entertaining readers they are invited to enlighten would-be writers. The most solitary of pursuits has become communal, organised, live, extrovert and competitive.

Is this because writing has become a commodity – "cult cargo", as Val Mcdermid puts it?

I travel a lot, and in the signing queue these days I get given piles of work – some of it touching, much of it terrifying; touching, in the effort to communicate, terrifying when the writer is lost in language as though it were a maze.

And yet the need to express, even where there is no communication, seems urgent. When I was in Seattle recently, at the Amazon HQ, the people running the new publishing programme there told me they have been overwhelmed with would-be authors. The creative writing moment/movement baffles me and it intrigues me. What does it signify, all this creative longing? And why through language? Specifically fiction, poetry, memoir?

When I left Oxford and wrote Oranges in my spare time, to be a writer was still the most hopeless and reckless of ambitions, as lofty as it was unlikely. Now it is as ubiquitous as coffee shops on street corners. If you keep a notebook or blog or even tweet, you call yourself a writer. Is it about recognition? Contribution? Identity? It can't be about money, because it costs more to go on a good course than most people will ever make back from their writing. It isn't about fame in any obvious X Factor way either. Few writers are well-known. Almost none of them are stopped in the street.

The crazy part of it is that we are breeding professional, competent, homogenised writers who will go on to teach writing that is professional, competent and homogenised. The intriguing part of it is whether this movement towards creativity and self-expression is really the start of a kind of Occupy – that it could be dangerous and confrontational, not homogenised at all.

Is the world of work plus the leisure offerings of mass entertainment now so banal and unsatisfying that creative writing offers a fight-back? If the society we are making – that is, the society unelected big business is making for us – is both soulless and soul destroying, then micro solutions such as creative writing could return some sense of both individuality and community. And if learning to communicate goes beyond talking to yourself in a private language, then it might become an instrument of change.

The arts are responsive to social change. Writing isn't something handed down from a big brain in an ivory tower – that's the academy, not the rough and tumble of creativity. Writing is a conversation, sometimes a fist-fight. It is democratic.

If writing is becoming its own kind of mass movement, using both new technology and global platforms, then writers with well-earned reputations should be involved. If not, this protean possibility too easily becomes an institutionalised hobby.

So when I was asked to follow on from Martin Amis and Colm Tóibín and take up the task of professor of creative writing at Manchester University, I decided to say yes – for two years. My duties will be to run an MA seminar and workshop for 11 weeks of the year, and to organise events with other writers. I also intend to get involved at undergraduate level.

I am bringing with me all my doubts and uncertainties, my blank spots and my questions. I know what I want to say. I am wondering what my students will want to say to me.

Manchester has a strong teaching faculty – MJ Hyland is there, as well as the Irish poet John McAuliffe. The Centre for New Writing is involved in the local community and in the world of international writing. I want to bring over some Chinese writers and this will be supported by the growing Centre for Chinese at Manchester University.

Writing should be personal but not insular. If we are not readers we cannot be writers. Reading widely is necessary. A course that encourages students to read outside their own interests will expand what they have to say. One of the problems with US courses – those ant colonies – is that students read nothing except contemporary American writers. This produces the factory fiction so typical of writing programmes. Worse, it sets up a resistance to anything that is not immediately recognisable. What the Americans do better than us is to pay and persuade the best writers to teach on the best courses.

If the new writing phenomenon is to be positive it needs to be bold. I believe that we are all part of the creative continuum, but I am sure that there are different doses and dilutions of creativity. We are not all the same and we do not have the same aptitudes or talents. I can't make you a writer. What I can do is show you how to strip a piece of text like dismantling an engine – and put it back and see why it roars or purrs. My own method is oily rag and spanners. Words and how they work is what interests me.

I was born in Manchester and I grew up in a working-class tradition of self-help that included Worker's Extension Lectures and the Mechanics Institute – one of many radical and pioneering Manchester initiatives for uneducated workers. I know from my own experience that learning how to read deeply – and that means diverse and sometimes difficult texts – trains your brain and improves your sense of self. Learning how to write, even reasonably well, gives fluency to the rest of life.

Manchester used to be the engine of England. Now that the BBC has moved to Salford, Manchester is at a new and exciting moment in its creative history. This is an opportune time to be a writer here.

Posted on 18 May 2012 | 4:50 pm

Ten questions on Jane Austen

The plot of which Austen novel relies on the weather? Where does Wickham have a tryst with Georgiana Darcy? And which character says 'I hate money'? Accuracy is Austen's genius, and asking specific questions about her work reveals its cleverness

Jane Austen's admirer Virginia Woolf said that "of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness". It is a brilliant insight. The apparent modesty of Austen's dramas is only apparent; the minuteness of design is a bravura achievement. But it cannot be shown by some grand scene or speech. Accuracy is her genius. Noticing minutiae will lead you to the wonderful interconnectedness of her novels, where a small detail of wording or motivation in one place will flare with the recollection of something that happened much earlier. This is one of the reasons they bear such rereading. Every quirk you notice leads you to a design. If you ask very specific questions about what goes on in her novels, you reveal their cleverness. The closer you look, the more you see. Try these 10 questions.

Who marries a man younger than herself?

Age matters very much to characters in Austen's novels: think of Elizabeth Elliot in Persuasion, unmarried at 29 and approaching "the years of danger". The age of a young woman (but also a man) determines her (or his) marriage prospects. In Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas is 27 when she snares Mr Collins, her age spurring her to waste no time when he heaves into view.

"A woman of seven and twenty ... can never hope to feel or inspire affection again," declares Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. She is, however, an absurd 17-year-old: judgments of what is inevitable at any given age are invariably ridiculous failures of imagination. Lady Russell in Persuasion thinks that Charles Musgrove would not have been good enough for Anne Elliot when she was 19, but once she is 22 and still unmarried, he becomes quite a catch, so quickly does a young woman's bloom fade. Yet Lady Russell is usually wrong about things, and at the ripe age of 27 (that number again) Anne gets the man she loves.

Charlotte Lucas feels all that age pressure. In hooking her husband she becomes the only woman in all Austen's fiction to marry a man younger than herself. For Mr Collins is introduced to us as a "tall, heavy-looking young man of five-and-twenty". Many admirers of Pride and Prejudice think of Mr Collins as middle-aged. In the 1940 Hollywood film the role was taken by British character actor Melville Cooper, then aged 44. The trend was set. In Andrew Davies's 1995 BBC adaptation Mr Collins was played by David Bamber, then in his mid-40s. In the 2005 film, the role was taken by a slightly more youthful Tom Hollander, then aged 38. Adaptors miss the point by getting his age wrong. His solemnity and sententiousness are much better, much funnier, coming from someone so "young". Middle-aged is what he would like to sound, rather than what he is. His youth emphasises Charlotte's achievement, with little money and no beauty to assist her.

Who says: 'I hate money'?

It has to be a bad person, for anyone who professes not to care about cash must be lying. It is Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey, a youthful but accomplished hypocrite, who announces her antipathy to lucre. A few chapters later she tells Catherine Moreland, in preparation for dumping James Moreland in favour of Frederick Tilney, "after all that romancers may say, there is no doing without money". In Sense and Sensibility, another mercenary young woman, Lucy Steele, talking of Edward Ferrars, tells Elinor Dashwood: "I have always been used to a very small income, and could struggle with any poverty for him." It is the purest cant. Lucy is ruthless about money, a fact nicely illustrated by her stealing all her sister's petty cash from her before eloping with Robert Ferrars. We should not forget that idealistic Marianne Dashwood shares this supposed scorn of wealth with these two calculating girls. When Elinor and Marianne debate the importance of money in the company of Edward, Marianne reacts indignantly to Elinor's declaration that happiness has much to do with "wealth": "'Elinor, for shame!' said Marianne, 'money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction, as far as mere self is concerned.'"

When Marianne is burbling about the "remarkably pretty" upstairs sitting room at Allenham (just right, she is thinking, for a lucky wife), she regrets its "forlorn" furniture. All it needs is to be "newly fitted up – a couple of hundred pounds, Willoughby says, would make it one of the pleasantest summer-rooms in England". The casual extravagance of this – all the worse as it is the imagining of wealth that will come only when Willoughby's aunt dies – should stop us short. The two lovers have been thinking of spending twice Miss and Mrs Bates's joint annual income in Emma on soft furnishings for one room. Austen's attentive first readers would surely have come close to despising Marianne when they heard her saying this. It is further proof that those who declare themselves above caring about money are those who are most governed by it.

What is Mrs Bennet's Christian name?

We never know. Nor do we know the forenames of other Austen ladies: Mrs Dashwood, Mrs Allen, Mrs Norris, Mrs Grant, Mrs Dixon, Mrs Smith. A few husbands call their wives by their first names. In Sense and Sensibility, John Dashwood calls his ghastly wife "My dear Fanny", though she addresses him as "My dear Mr Dashwood". In Emma, Mr Elton flaunts his use of his wife's Christian name. "Shall we walk, Augusta?" he says to her in front of the group at Box Hill. It is almost ostentatious. "Happy creature! He called her 'Augusta.' How delightful!" says stupid Harriet Smith, after first meeting the vicar's monstrous new wife. Her exclamation indicates that the Eltons are behaving in an unusual, perhaps modish, manner. Mr Elton's flourishing of "Augusta" is made the more repellent by Mrs Elton's mock-coy revelation that he wrote an acrostic on her name while courting her in Bath.

Yet it is not simply "wrong" to use your wife's Christian name. In Persuasion Admiral Croft addresses his wife as "Sophy". This is at one with his breezy good-heartedness, and a sign of the couple's closeness. Such is his uxoriousness that, as he struggles to remember Louisa Musgrove's frothy name, he frankly wishes that all women were called Sophy. Meanwhile his wife addresses him as "my dear admiral". He is one of those men (Mr Palmer, Mr Bennet, Mr Weston, Dr Grant) whose first name remains undeclared.

The mere use of a person's Christian name is electric. In Sense and Sensibility Elinor overhears Willoughby discussing the gift of a horse with her sister and saying, "Marianne, the horse is still yours." It can mean only one thing. "From that moment she doubted not of their being engaged to each other." A woman who lets a man speak her name has given him a special power. But it is even rarer for a woman to call a man by his first name. Mr Knightley asks Emma to call him George, but she won't. "Impossible! – I never can call you any thing but 'Mr Knightley'."

Why is Mr Perry getting a carriage?

The plot of Emma turns on Frank Churchill's "blunder" in mentioning the likelihood of Mr Perry, the local apothecary, "setting up his carriage". Frank knows because of his secret correspondence with Jane Fairfax, and is therefore in difficulties when asked by Mrs Weston how he found out. The news is telling. Mr Perry is evidently making so much money from the hypochondriacs of Highbury that he can accede to his wife's desire for a carriage. The Austens themselves owned a carriage for a year or two in the late 1790s but then had to give it up. It would have taken an income of about £1,000 a year to make a carriage affordable, well beyond most genteel households.

Mr Perry can use his carriage to make his lucrative house calls. The "intelligent, gentlemanlike" practitioner is a kind of therapist, whose business is humouring his clucking patients. He is first seen tactfully failing to contradict Mr Woodhouse's absurd opinion that wedding cake is harmful. He agrees that it "might certainly disagree with many – perhaps with most people, unless taken moderately". Though "all the little Perrys" are soon seen "with a slice of Mrs Weston's wedding-cake in their hands". Their father is a man who makes his handsome living from echoing the prejudices of his clients.

Frank Churchill later tries a joke about Mr Perry's earnings, suggesting that if a ball were to be held at the Crown instead of at Randalls there would be less danger of anyone catching a cold. "Mr Perry might have reason to regret the alteration, but nobody else could." Arch-hypochondriac Mr Woodhouse replies "rather warmly", deeply offended at the suggestion that his apothecary relishes minor ailments: "Mr Perry is extremely concerned when any of us are ill." Yet he is getting a carriage because he has battened on the hypochondriacs of Regency England.

Who is wearing mourning?

Lots of people. Near the end of Emma, Mrs Churchill's death makes it possible for Frank Churchill to marry Jane Fairfax. When Frank meets Emma after the announcement of his engagement, he is smiling and laughing on this "most happy day", but suited, we should realise, all in black. We are not told this: Austen's first readers would have "seen" this garb, and registered the clash of official sorrow and private happiness. The deaths of close kin required a period of full (or "deep") mourning – in which clothes were predominantly black – followed by an equal period of "second" or "slight" mourning. Austen's own letters to her sister are full of chat about adapting clothing to mark the death of this or that relative. On hearing of Mrs Churchill's death, Mr Weston shakes his head solemnly while thinking – Austen cannot resist telling us – "that his mourning should be as handsome as possible". His wife, meanwhile, sits "sighing and moralising over her broad hems". Austen's satire is entirely tolerant.

At the end of Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford and Mrs Grant begin a new life together, clad in full mourning because of the death of Dr Grant. Their mourning is not grief. We take it that, even in their black clothes, they are delighted to be rid of an irksome impediment to their sisterly friendship. Austen likes us to notice how official mourners fail to grieve. In Persuasion, Captain Benwick is "in mourning" for Fanny Harville's loss, which means not just that he is sad, but that he is actually wearing black, as the Harvilles are likely to be. Anne learns the story of their shared tragedy, but then their clothes would already have made her curious. If we do not see these clothes we lose something, for Captain Benwick must either eschew his mourning dress while paying his attentions to Louisa Musgrove, or court her while wearing it. Either possibility gives special force to Captain Harville's later exclamation to Anne: "Poor Fanny! she would not have forgotten him so soon." Mourning dress is, after all, donned in order to stop you escaping from the memory of the dead person.

Where does Wickham have a tryst with Georgiana Darcy?

By the seaside – where else? The near-seduction of Mr Darcy's sister is staged with the help of the perfidious ex-governess Mrs Younge at Ramsgate, on the Kent coast, where, we infer, Georgiana Darcy is at Wickham's mercy. Only her brother's last-minute arrival saves her. It is dangerous by the sea. Austen had something particular against Ramsgate, where her sailor brother Francis was stationed in 1803-4. In a letter to Cassandra in 1813 she refers to a friend who has decided to move to Ramsgate and exclaims: "Bad Taste!" In Mansfield Park, Thomas Bertram boastfully describes his flirtatious behaviour in Ramsgate with the younger Miss Sneyd, whoever she be. On arrival in the town, he and Sneyd find "Mrs and the two Miss Sneyds … out on the pier … with others of their acquaintance." "Mrs Sneyd was surrounded by men," he recalls. Sex is in the air in Ramsgate.

Feckless Tom Bertram is a haunter of seaside resorts. Returning from Antigua, he does not dutifully come home to his mother and siblings, but goes to Weymouth. Later in the novel, Julia Bertram accompanies Mr and Mrs Rushworth to Brighton where she meets up with Mr Yates, with whom she elopes. Brighton is truly dangerous. Lydia Bennet meets Wickham there and elopes with him. In Austen's novels, seaside resorts are places for flirtations and engagements, attachments and elopements, love and sex. And honeymoons. In Sense and Sensibility Lucy Steele marries Robert Ferrars and they go on honeymoon to Dawlish in Devon. Emma (who has never seen the sea) and Mr Knightley, once engaged, plan a "fortnight's absence in a tour to the sea-side" following their marriage. You might say that once Emma has truly discovered love she is bound, at last, for the seaside. It will be by the sea that she and Mr Knightley begin a sexual relationship.

Who marries for sex?

Austen's stories rely on an acknowledgment of men's sexual appetites, which explain why that "truth universally acknowledged" – an affluent bachelor's desire for a wife – is in fact true. There are several men in Austen's fiction who "want" a wife for reasons beyond financial calculation. Mr Collins wants one; Charles Musgrove wanted one. The former hoped to please Lady Catherine de Bourgh, but surely had other reasons. The latter, having been turned down by Anne Elliot, rationally opted for her younger sister. We might surmise that a desire for sexual release motivated both "young" men, and that early 19th-century readers would have understood this. In Emma, Mr Elton, the Highbury vicar, is "a young man living alone without liking it". That last phrase carries a weight of meaning. Only a wilfully innocent reader could think that he yearns for a wife just to choose his fabrics and argue with his cook.

Austen's narratives depend on our imagining male sexual needs. Catching us wondering how Mr Palmer in Sense and Sensibility, an intelligent but ill-natured man, could possibly have married a woman as idiotic as Charlotte Jennings, Austen lets Elinor reflect on the puzzle. "His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman – but she knew that this kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it." It is an extraordinary judgment, for Mr Palmer is paired with a fool for the rest of his days. Elinor has seen this happen often. His error has been his yen for "beauty" – or, we might say, "sex appeal". At this stage of the novel, Charlotte Palmer is heavily pregnant (though he is scarcely able to talk to his wife, he does have sex with her). Perhaps her advanced state of pregnancy means a temporary denial of conjugal solace. More reason for his grumpiness.

Why does Robert Ferrars marry Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility? All the evidence is for a process of sexual intoxication that Lucy, who has "considerable beauty", manages with great skill. He marries her "speedily" because he wants her. She trades on sexual allure (not mere bluff – we are explicitly told of the "great happiness" of their honeymoon). Mr Bennet's choice of Mrs Bennet has also been sensually determined. In the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice, his joke about his wife not accompanying his daughters to meet Mr Bingley lest he "like you the best of the party" has a hint of ruefulness. As a young man he was "captivated by youth and beauty". Having made his mistake, he must live with it. And after all, we can infer that Mr and Mrs Bennet have carried on an active sex life well into middle age as, "for many years after Lydia's birth", Mrs Bennet is sure that they will eventually have a son.

What does Captain Benwick say in Persuasion?

Nothing worth telling us. There is a special group of Austen characters who may talk and talk, but never get a word of their speech quoted. Captain Benwick is a member. On her first evening in Lyme, Anne gets him for company and finds that, though initially "shy", he has plenty to say, notably about his "taste in reading". Soon he is talking about poetry and repeating the chunks of Scott and Byron that he has got by heart. He has found out the lines that seem to dignify his own love-lorn feelings. Keen to avoid the conversation of Captain Wentworth, Anne spends most of the evening with Captain Benwick. He is full of quotations himself, but says precisely nothing that the author thinks worth quoting.

The next day Captain Benwick seeks Anne out and he is soon talking again, disputing over books. Captain Harville is grateful to her for "making that poor fellow talk so much". The sense is delicately given that Anne is becoming the victim of this previously silent man who has so readily discovered the consolation of talk. As the party walks along the Cobb for a last time before leaving, "Anne found Captain Benwick again drawing near her". He is going to talk and recite some more, but Austen does not tax the reader with what he says. Her heroine's response is charitable: "She gladly gave him all her attention as long as attention was possible." Not enough attention for any of his words to lodge.

It feels like Austen's private joke about a man who recites rather than converses. When Charles Musgrove returns from Lyme he tells Anne about Captain Benwick talking. "'Oh! He talks of you,' cried Charles, 'in such terms ... His head is full of some books that he is reading upon your recommendation, and he wants to talk to you about them ... I overheard him telling Henrietta all about it.'" He keeps being talked about as talking, but his own words are kept from us. So, in some odd way, he never fully exists.

Who has the shortest successful courtship?

Among Austen heroines, it is Catherine Moreland. Northanger Abbey being the shortest of Austen's novels, its love story is also the most rapid. The novel is full of haste – from the progress of Catherine and Isabella's friendship, through John Thorpe's boasts about the speed of his travel, to Colonel Tilney's constant impatience and hurry. (Northanger Abbey has more precise times of day than any other Austen novel.) The time between Catherine's arrival in Bath and her departure from Northanger Abbey is only 11 weeks: a brief acquaintance on which to base a married life together. Briefer still, as during those 11 weeks Henry Tilney has spent some time away at his parish, leaving Catherine at Northanger Abbey with his sister. Having elicited such a speedy proposal from Henry Tilney, Austen reassures us by telling us that he and Catherine in fact marry "within a twelvemonth" of their first meeting – not much less than the year allowed Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy between their first encounter and their nuptials.

Other characters are speedier than Catherine and Henry. Mr Elton, wounded after being rejected by Emma, goes to Bath and writes to Mr Cole just four weeks later to announce his engagement to a woman he had never met before. Charlotte Lucas's notorious advice in Pride and Prejudice is to be as speedy as possible. In order to fix Mr Bingley's intentions, she tells Elizabeth, Jane Bennet "should … make the most of every half-hour in which she can command his attention. When she is secure of him, there will be more leisure for falling in love as much as she chooses." A lengthy courtship has no advantages: "It is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life." The shortest courtship imaginable is indeed Mr Collins's of Charlotte, lasting as it does from dinner-time to night-time of a single day, all of it spent in the voluble company of others.

Which novel's plot relies on the weather?

All of them. Austen is a genius with the weather, making it the very principle of chance entering her narratives. Sense and Sensibility is kicked into life by a misjudgment about the weather: Marianne goes walking on the Devon hills with her younger sister Margaret, convincing herself that "the partial sunshine of a showery sky" bodes well. Marianne's "declaration that the day would be lastingly fair" is utter folly, revealed when "a driving rain set full in their face". Fleeing for home, Marianne trips and is rescued by the handsome Willoughby. It might seem a fortunate accident, the beginning of a romance, but Marianne's determination to delude herself about the weather bodes ill.

The weather variously throws lovers together or separates them in each novel, nowhere more decisively than in Emma. Our heroine is contemplating the possible pairing of Mr Knightley and Harriet Smith. The world is narrowing. "A cold stormy rain set in" – unseasonal for July. "The weather affected Mr Woodhouse," requiring Emma ceaselessly to be attentive to him in order to keep him "tolerably comfortable". The evening of rain lengthens out like the long prospect of her future days with only her father for company. But then "the wind changed into a softer quarter; the clouds were carried off; the sun appeared; it was summer again". Mr Knightley arrives and, while Mr Perry consoles Mr Woodhouse for his weather-induced indisposition, he walks with Emma in the garden.

At the critical moment in their conversation, he offers a revelation and Emma declines to know it – she dreads him speaking lovingly of Harriet. They reach the house but she decides to "take another turn". A benign climate blesses their exchange, and he can tell her not that he wishes to marry Harriet, but that he loves her. It is the walk in the sudden fine weather that allows for Mr Knightley's proposal, unpremeditated before he discovers the occasion. The shrewd reader will regard the final betrothal of Emma and Mr Knightley as inevitable, from the moment we know that he is the only person ever to find fault with her. But the best comedy recruits chance, and the lucky change of weather in Emma is there to let us imagine how it might have been otherwise.

• John Mullan's What Matters in Jane Austen? is published by Bloomsbury (£14.99) on 7 June. To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop.

Posted on 18 May 2012 | 4:45 pm

Selected Poems by Don Paterson

A collection of 20 years of essential reading

The title poem of Don Paterson's first collection, Nil Nil (1993), tells the sped-up tale of a football team's inglorious decline. Yet its panoramic sweep takes in much more than sport. The comedy and search for ontological significance typify the mix of the quotidian, the surreal and the mystical which remain a hallmark of his writing. "From the top, then, the zenith, the silent footage" we witness a "fifty-year slide / into Sunday League", but the missing dash found in a football score also makes the title a strange double negative. "Nil Nil" is both nothing and everything, it seems to say. Both poem and collection introduced readers to a striking new voice.

Sean O'Brien has written that "few poets can have covered as much ground in 20 years as Don Paterson". Reading this remarkable Selected Poems, which ranges from the ludic depths of Nil Nil to the plainer cadences and frankness of 2009's Rain, one is inclined to agree. Yet, coupled with "Nil Nil", Rain's title poem brings us full circle, as another double negative surfaces between release and restraint: "and none of this, none of this matters". Alongside the poetry's stylistic variety and growing tonal authority, what Paterson's selection from his six volumes to date reveals is the underlying thematic consistency of his oeuvre.

The poems are often full of seeming paradox and contradiction, a feature which can wrong-foot just as it provokes and delights. "I took myself on for the hell of it," says the poet of playing pool against his double in Nil Nil's "The Ferryman's Arms", a sense of poetry's artifice jostling with the conviction that a poem should enact some seriously complex thinking. The persona is swaggering yet (literally) divided; the planetary order of balls on the pool table is undermined as "physics itself becomes something negotiable"; the false doppelgänger ends up seeming truer than the departing speaker; strangeness swells up everywhere through initially grounded reality. Nothing is ever quite as it seems. Just as the speaker's lover in "The Trans-Siberian Express" is seen "shedding veil after veil", these poems seek truths beyond the waking dream-world through which we blunder. The darkness comes to envelop Nil Nil. A handful of poems explore social class, not least the punchy "An Elliptical Stylus", but these also tend towards eerie territory, or else unpick the constructed nature of the self.

Paterson's follow-up, the irony-laden and audaciously titled God's Gift to Women (1997), is represented here by some of his most arresting poems. "A Private Bottling" beguiles with heightened lyricism and colloquialism, achieving a gently damning commemoration of the poet's former lover, both lifted and undermined by its intoxicated context of late-night whisky sampling. The tonal range is extraordinary. Where "Addenda" develops delicate snapshots of the poet's brother's lost life, the unsteady formal prowess of "Imperial" reinforces just as it collapses notions of male authority in a subtle send-up of the Renaissance love poem. Combined with the unreliable narrative of its Marvellian centrepiece – part dramatic monologue, part seemingly confessional catharsis – God's Gift documents the exhilarating struggle between Paterson's wilful sassiness and a meditative lyricism fighting for more ground.

These issues were neatly sidestepped in The Eyes (1999), a book comprising loose "versions" after the Spanish poet Antonio Machado. Notable for their unabashed spiritualism, the poems also deliver a refreshing anonymity amid the clamour of much contemporary verse. As "Poetry" has it: "Beneath the blue oblivious sky, the water / sings of nothing, not your name, not mine." Similarly in "Sigh", a fountain "sings", yet "speaks / its love-song / to no one".

It will be a shame if The Eyes – not least "Advice", "Profession of Faith" and "Siesta", all included here – is solely remembered as catalyst to the marked turn in Paterson's work evident from Landing Light (2003), in which the dark ego of the divided self blends with the emotional scope inherited from Machado. A sizeable, even baggy fourth collection, it is represented here by more work than from any other volume. Starting with "Luing", a declaration of our capacity for love, we come to poignant sonnets for the poet's sons, moving through polished rehearsals of the doubling motif and a fantastic reworking of "The Forest of the Suicides" from Dante's Inferno, before arriving at arguably Paterson's most ambitious poem to date, "The White Lie". This philosophical treatise expounds – just as this Selected Poems reveals – what he has long seen as poetry's transformative responsibility, as the world we think we know is "reconsumed in its estranging fire". It sets the tone for 2006's Orpheus, a version of Rilke's masterwork which sharpens the questing at the sonnets' cores: "But is that true?", "What was real in that All?", "O, where are we now?"

For many, Paterson's most recent collection, Rain, placed him among the front rank of English-language poets now writing. It is well represented here, with poems such as "The Swing", "The Circle", and the disquieting elegy for the late Michael Donaghy, "Phantom", all testifying to a stepped-up musical intelligence, a pithy idiomatic ease that owes debts to Robert Frost and Robert Garioch, and the undiminished ability to elevate and surprise, revivifying traditional forms with panache. Dynamic, interrogative and unsettling; crafted yet open-ended; fiercely smart, savage and stirring – from the get-go, Paterson's poetry has been essential reading. This Selected Poems blazes with the best of his meteoric ascent.

• Ben Wilkinson's The Sparks is published by Tall Lighthouse.

Posted on 18 May 2012 | 4:45 pm

Wanted: your flash critiques

Earlier this week we celebrated National Flash Fiction day by asking for our readers' flash novels. Now we're looking for your flash criticism

For those who were too deeply engrossed in an old-fashioned book to be following the week's literary news, Wednesday was the UK's first National Flash Fiction Day.

We celebrated this microcosmic event by commissioning David Gaffney, one of the pioneers of the form, to come up with a how-to guide for aspirant micro-writers. Then we waited for the truncated tale to pour in - and in they duly poured, both on the main book site and from our children's site members.

If any conventional writers were miffed by the idea that tiny tales might be taken seriously as literature, we apologise - and can assure them that their pain was nothing to ours on the Guardian book team, when it was claimed that Amazon's consumer reviews were as reliable as the those produced by the sweat of our brow.

Our grief grew as the week wore on and we were beseiged by requests from the world's non-literary media to write about the decline of the "expert" book review, which - a colleague drily remarked - was like asking a turkey to design a carving knife for Christmas.

The whole point of what we have been doing in the last year is to develop a mixed economy, whereby the best reader reviews sit alongside our own commissions in recognition of the fact that there are different kinds of expertise. So in a flash of rebellion we have decided to ask our readers to join us in a party game for the weekend: flash critique.

The challenge is to come up with a micro-review of a classic novel. To kick it off, we started a #microcrits hashtag on Twitter inviting the tweetocracy to come up with anything as pithy and insightful as Irish Times critic Vivian Mercier's 1956 description of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as "a play in which nothing happens, twice," or Walter Kerr's 1951 dismissal of a stage version of Isherwood's Berlin stories, I am a Camera: "Me no Leica".

Though many of the contributions are closer to plot precis than criticism, there were some little gems. They included, in no particular order,:
@katyha on Mansfield Park: The Price is Right.
@discobethan on Moby-Dick: how to lose a whale in three days
Lucysixmith on Clarissa: Clarissa: girl writes letters, man writes letters, their friends write letters, much disaster, more letters.
@paulcrask on Germinal: The Pits
@eilishohanlon on L'Etranger: Mum died. Killed an Arab. Didn't help. Who'd have guessed?
@ultoryan on The Count of Monte Cristo: Countdown of no-accounts being held to account.
@smanfarr: Ulysses: Yes One day in Ireland yes shit happens yes.
@CurtAntoinette on Animal Farm: Pigs are revolting

For what it's worth my own very first microreview is of William Burroughs' The Naked Lunch: Blaaargh, blghlaaar, aaarghbl

Now it's over to you. We have copies of the World Book Night classics to give away to the authors of our favourite contributlons, which we will print on Monday.

Posted on 18 May 2012 | 8:35 am

Promised land

This week, on a visit to the UK, Marilynne Robinson came along to the Guardian Review Book Club to talk to Professor John Mullan about her novel Gilead. Set in rural Iowa, it is the letter of aging congregationalist minister John Ames to his
young son from his second marriage, written as a loosely-connected series of thoughts, memories and religious homilies.

Robinson is an active member of the Congregational United Church of Christ in
Iowa, as well as an academic; she teaches literature, creative writing and sometimes theology. Professor Mullan began by asking her whether it was "useful to have God in a novel".

Posted on 18 May 2012 | 7:14 am

Nights Out by Judith R Walkowitz

A demi-monde that's all but vanished

There were three of us: me, Lorenzo Marioni, and a leather-jacketed vicar whose name now escapes me. We were sitting around one of the Formica tables in the New Piccadilly, the last surviving Italian caff on Denman Street – a place run by Lorenzo's family since the 1940s. It was an after-hours do, during which we worked our way through several bottles of fizzy pink wine and ignored the passers-by who banged on the wired glass in the hope of a frothy coffee. Lorenzo didn't look perturbed. He could remember the moment in 1956 when a dubious Hungarian customer shocked the staff by unfurling a handkerchief that contained the severed finger of a rival – and the night, not long after, when a gang of knife-carrying greasers shattered the windows with a barrage of rubble.

In the course of our conversation, Lorenzo recounted what, for me, is the quintessential Soho story: a flashback to his initiation into the Italian gang that defended its patch of W1 from its Irish equivalent. You had to be a man to join the band, even if you were only 14. Acquisition of this status was achieved with a visit to the oldest prostitute in Soho. Lorenzo was nervous, of course. He described entering the room and handing over the money. He described how the Victorian veteran manoeuvred him towards the bed and asked if he minded a friend joining them. He nodded his assent. His hostess rapped the ceiling with a broom-handle, and from the room above descended the second-oldest prostitute in Soho. At this point in his anecdote, the old proprietor's eyes became glazed with sentimental pleasure.

I wish Judith Walkowitz had been there on that night at the New Piccadilly. She might have taken Lorenzo's story and contextualised, interrogated and critiqued it. She might have countered his nostalgia with some tough data about the lives of 20th-century sex-workers. She might have enjoyed herself, too.

Lorenzo's world is the one laid out in her new book, which is a thorough and scholarly study of London's 130 shadiest acres. Bounded by Oxford Street to the north and Leicester Square to the south, Soho escaped rationalisation, boulevardisation and the intrusion of electric lighting. It became a fragment of the exotic lodged in the heart of the aggressively redeveloped capital; a zone that provided homes for waves of immigrants and a nocturnal playground for visitors from nearer to home. Its nightclubs were the haunts of Trotskyists and transvestites. Its restaurants were patronised by worshippers of Mussolini and mescaline. Jazz clubs offered white Britons an intoxicating taste of African-American culture – even if many of their black habitués came from no further away than Cardiff. The theatres on Soho's borders offered an arena for daring performers such as Maud Allan, the dancer who, in 1918, stood accused of leading the Cult of the Clitoris – a covert organisation of German spies who were said to be using homosexual seduction as a weapon against home-front morals.

Twenty years ago Walkowitz published City of Dreadful Delight, an account of the textual world shared by Jack the Ripper, Josephine Butler, Eleanor Marx and Charles Booth. It was a book that changed the conversation about late-Victorian culture. Nights Out continues where City of Dreadful Delight stopped. Its second chapter, a fair-minded re-evalution of the much-maligned Laura Ormiston Chant – a purity campaigner who tussled with the young Winston Churchill over the presence of prostitutes in the bars of the Empire, Leicester Square – might be an orphan from the earlier book.

Walkowitz remains an historian unafraid of complexity, a researcher who can squirrel a great store of facts and instances from the printed archive. Who knew that the expert on "trunks and brassieres" sent by the Lord Chamberlain's office to police the nude revue at the Windmill Theatre was called Mr Titman? Or that the philosopher AJ Ayer liked the Nest club for the marijuana and the corned-beef hash? Or that Radclyffe Hall danced cheek-to-cheek with her lovers at the Hambone club in Ham Yard, beneath a sign that bore the Oscar Wilde aphorism "work is the curse of the drinking classes".

And yet, there is something fundamentally amiss with this book. Possibly because it has been so long in the writing, possibly because its author is based on a campus in Baltimore, Nights Out has a strangely Martian quality. There are mistakes I suspect a native would not have made – Walkowitz thinks that the "Greenwich Conservatory" was the target of an anarchist bomb attack in 1894; she thinks Jacob Epstein was a writer.

More fatally, however, she has produced a study of Soho nightlife apparently unpolluted by personal contact with anyone who has ever experienced it. Much of what she describes remains within the compass of living memory, or passed beyond it during the years she was researching her book. But rather than, say, augmenting her observations about the Windmill theatre by interviewing its surviving alumni, Walkowitz is content to quote their words from a 2005 article in the Daily Mail. She looks at the reflection of Soho in the polished shield of press coverage and fictional representation, but does not seem to have gazed on the creature with her own eyes – which is why Nights Out reads like a study of the urban demi-monde by someone who goes to bed each night at 10.

Dancing, we are told, was "a potent symbol of modern urban kinesthesia" and "a cultural metaphor for urban flux and syncopated movement". Its professional practitioners "publicised iconoclastic bodily idioms that troubled corporeal norms of nation, gender, sexuality and class". I'd love to read a passage like that back to the nonagenarian actor Jean Kent – who, as a teenager strutted the stage of the Windmill in a body-stocking decorated with telephone numbers – just to watch her roll her eyes.

What's more, the scholarly study of the urban environment has been transformed by the new school of psychogeography, a way of writing about the city that's far less squeamish than Walkowitz about borrowing the storytelling techniques of "bohemian memoirists and journalists" – a group of which she seems suspicious. Indeed, so profound and widespread is the current influence of psychogeography that Walkowitz might have done us a service by subjecting it to critique – I'm quite ready to hear the new generation of academic night-walkers and window-shoppers attacked as literary men in desperate search for a respectable excuse to escape their childcare responsibilities at the weekend.

There's no bore like a Soho bore. Hell may be a version of the Colony Room, where Francis Bacon, Daniel Farson and Muriel Belcher all bray simultaneously about who said what to whom and who was sick in the gutter. But scholars working in this area must, I think, be prepared to get a little dirty in the process – not least because the sanitisation and gentrification of Soho is almost complete. It is now a place inhabited by the rich, not the poor. A sign on Berwick Street that promises massage may offer exactly that. Cosmopolitan London has been removed to the suburbs, and is no longer a tourist attraction.

And on Denman Street, the bulldozers and wrecking balls have done their work. The New Piccadilly – that backstreet haven with the pink Gaggia and the perfect egg and chips – is now as lost as the woman who initiated Lorenzo Marioni into the world of sex and the street. I would trade the whole of Greek Street for a couple of hours with the oldest prostitute in Soho, a notebook and the opportunity to ask: the 20th century, how was it for you?

• Matthew Sweet's The West End Front is published by Faber.

Posted on 18 May 2012 | 3:00 am

Listening to Fuentes with my eyes

I saw him last October, I saw him in January, but I won't see him in November. From Fuentes I learned generosity of spirit
• Obituary: Carlos Fuentes

I have spent the last few hours in my library, sitting in front of the shelf which holds my Carlos Fuentes collection (those books I have read and those I will read – I think it's safe to say very few have kept up with his prodigious output over recent years), and it has surprised me to realise how much time I have spent in the company of his work. I met Fuentes five years ago, but my relationship with his books, at least according to the personal survey I have just conducted, began in 1992, when I read The Death of Artemio Cruz and Aura and also Geography of the Novel. I always make a note of the date when I finish reading a book, so those pages bear witness to these 20 years. To put it another way: when I met him, in the summer of 2007, I had already been reading him as a classic for 15 years; and that literary admiration metamorphosed into the thrill of his friendship, of his company and conversation, of his all-too-rare curiosity. That passage from literary to personal knowledge of a novelist often leads to regret and disappointment; in this case, it was nothing short of privilege.

I saw him last October, I saw him in January, but I won't see him in November. This seems impossible to reconcile with the last image I hold of him, with the recurrent surprise of his longevity. Not his physical youthfulness, which was in itself miraculous, but the vitality of his mind: his unbelievable memory, allowing him to quote the entire cast of any film from the 60s; his quick wit and good humour, capable of defusing any solemnity. Fuentes's intellectual leadership is inexhaustible. Several generations learned from him and a few others what Latin American literature is. I learned, for instance, that this literature is the exact opposite of local literature, and that the Latin American novelist will embrace the world, accept or seek every influence of every tradition, devour every theme and every territory. I also learned to read: Cervantes and the chroniclers of the Indies and Broch and Musil. Fuentes's work passed on an idea of ambition – what it is, what it is for; it also pointed out that fidelity to a vocation does not mean hiding away from the world, but rather engaging with it and seeking its reinvention by the power of the written word. I learned, finally, about generosity of spirit, although I will never be able to practise it as he did.

A few months ago, through someone else's initiative and for reasons not pertinent here, I wrote to him asking who were his deceased. The question meant to touch upon Francisco de Quevedo's famous poem:

"Retreated in the peace of these deserts
With few but learned books together
I live with the deceased in conversation
And with my eyes I listen to the dead."

His answer reached me a couple of days later. His handwriting, which I knew before meeting him (having seen it in facsimiles, in autographs), had become almost indecipherable, but its message was as luminous as can be: "My deceased, you may imagine, are all those ancestors I remember (very few) and all those I am unable to (the great majority). I am what I am – and you are what you are – because of them." And tonight I cannot help but think that Fuentes has become one of those deceased; and after the mourning and the sadness, here, in my library where so many learned books stand together, I'm thinking at least I will live with him in conversation. I will listen to him with my eyes.

Posted on 17 May 2012 | 9:54 am

Hitler and the Nazi Cult of Celebrity by Michael Munn

A ludicrous study of Hitler recasts the Führer as a precursor of Simon Cowell

Michael Munn has spent his life – at least as he implausibly tells it – schmoozing with the beautiful and the damned. He bonded with Steve McQueen while riding pillion on his motorbike in Cornwall when he was 17. That same year, the multitasking lad made vigorous love to Ava Gardner, by then an alcoholic hasbeen of 45, in a succession of Knightsbridge hotels. Then David Niven summoned Munn to his deathbed and blabbed about his sexual infractions; Munn, a confessor who keeps no secrets, promptly published the poor fellow's delirious maunderings, along with Laurence Olivier's intimations of childhood abuse and the incredible tale of his spare-time job as an MI6 agent.

Among Munn's dozens of star-struck biographies is a volume entitled X-rated: the Paranormal Experiences of the Movie Star Greats. Checking his revelations against the facts, or against the indignant denials of survivors, it seems that he, too, operates in the ether, taking dictation from deep-throated sources who are unverifiably located in the gaseous beyond. Having consorted with so many mythomaniacs, he has ended as an incorrigible fantasist.

Munn now adds the ultimate luminary to his constellation of spangled monsters. Forget about Hitler the political nihilist and despot, the warmonger and mass-murderer. What Munn gives us is a Hitler not worse (or better) than Simon Cowell of The X Factor fame. According to Munn, Hitler was a politician by default, and grudgingly settled for absolute power only after his dreams of being a painter, architect, writer, composer and actor came to nought. "He simply wanted to be famous," and the regime he created, based on his dramatisation of himself as a culture hero like Wagner's Siegfried, therefore promoted a "cult of celebrity".

You wonder, reading Munn, how Hitler managed to gain control of a nation, mobilise and tyrannise its populace, and plan the conquest of the world. A totalitarian ruler is only satisfied if, like Big Brother, he is able to scrutinise and manipulate every aspect of a society's life, including its dreams. But Munn views Hitler as a lazy slugabed, who passed the time listening to opera (he was "simply wild about Wagner", Munn gushes) while strutting and ranting in front of a mirror as he rehearsed his own operatic tirades. When in need of relaxation, he solaced himself with starlets, who were asked to kick him while he grovelled at their feet; he limply avoided intercourse, though he liked to boast that he could sustain a Nazi salute for an hour and a half. His right arm, evidently, was his only erectile appendage.

Lacking an argument, Munn relies, as Hitler did in his rants, on the repetition of catchphrases. Like many before him, he notices that Hitler's apocalyptic policies acted out the end of Wagner's Götterdämmerung, in which the world goes up in flames. Thinking about suicide, Munn's Hitler therefore "attempts to induce his own Götterdämmerung". He then considers "one final objective: his own Götterdämmerung", during which he would die "on an altar. His Götterdämmerung" and thus "conclude his own personal drama with Götterdämmerung". All this, the merest sample of Munn's style, comes from a couple of pages: reading his book is like listening to Wagner without the music.

Worse, Munn betrays his utter incomprehension of the Third Reich and its crimes. Think about his casual remark that "the 'Jewish question' is one of the most deplorable aspects of Hitler's claim to fame". One of them? And of his "claim to fame", rather than his condemnation to eternal infamy? Perhaps the most culpable word in that bubble-brained sentence is "deplorable": can Munn do no more than "deplore" genocide, as if it were a regrettable failure of taste, not an evil assault on nature? The truth is that he can't tell the difference, which is why he likens the hysteria excited by Hitler's public appearances as "supreme star and solo act" to the adolescent frenzy of Beatlemania. John Lennon may have bragged that the Beatles were more popular than God, but he didn't order his fans to take up arms and exterminate all Christians.

Bemused by showbiz, Munn describes the bloodiest conflict in human history as if it were a musical that folded out of town: hence his comment that "when Hitler tried writing his own script of World War II, he bombed". His lack of imagination and conscience is registered in a tiny linguistic detail: that kind of "bomb", a shaming failure, is very different from those that pummelled London and flattened German cities. Munn himself, who seemingly couldn't care less about how crass his phrasing sounds, has bombed in the ludicrously non-lethal sense of the word.

Posted on 17 May 2012 | 7:35 am

What Money Can't Buy by Michael Sandel

Michael Sandel challenges the idea that markets are morally neutral

"Dead peasants insurance" is a term that sounds as if it comes straight out of Monty Python. If only that were true. Here's an example of what it means: in 1999, Michael Rice, a 48-year-old employee of the supermarket firm Walmart, collapsed while helping a customer carry a television to her car. He died a week later, and an insurance company paid out $300,000 for the loss of his life.

So far, a sad but not unusual story; the twist was in the identity of the people who benefited from the insurance. It wasn't Rice's family, who didn't get a penny, but Walmart. In a subsequent lawsuit, it turned out that Walmart had hundreds of thousands of such policies on employees, so every time one of them died, the huge corporation enjoyed a tiny windfall. And that's dead peasants insurance, or, as it is also known, "janitors insurance". They are forms of what the insurance industry calls Stoli, or "stranger originated life insurance" – in other words, an insurance policy taken out on your life by someone else, not on your behalf but on theirs.

Michael Sandel is a professor of politics at Harvard, and is one of the best known public intellectuals in America. He enjoyed a worldwide hit with his last book, Justice, the subject of a famous lecture course at Harvard, and gave the 2009 Reith lectures. His new book, What Money Can't Buy, is a study of "the moral limits of markets". For him, the story of dead peasants insurance is an example of how the encroachment of market values can change the character of an industry. Sandel shows how life insurance, which had its origins in the idea that we can mitigate the economic impact of death on survivors and dependents – an idea which was always controversial, and indeed was illegal across much of Europe – was gradually corrupted into a form of betting against other people's lives.

Another example of this process was the development of "viaticals". These were insurance policies that had been taken out earlier in their lives by people who were dying of Aids. The life insurance policies of these dying patients were valuable – so a market developed in which these policies were bought by investors, who would give the Aids sufferer a lump sum and would pay for their care during the terminal illness. Then, when the patient died, the policy would pay out: kerching! The catch for investors was that the longer the patient lived, the less money they would make. "There have been some phenomenal returns," said the president of one company that specialised in viaticals, "but there have also been some horror stories where people live longer."

This trajectory, for Sandel, is paradigmatic. We can all instinctively understand the idea of life insurance; most of us will feel an instinctive repugnance at the thought of the viatical industry or dead peasants insurance. As market thinking penetrated the life insurance industry, a moral line was crossed, and the application of market ideas was taken too far.

That shows what has happened with the increasing ubiquity of market ideas. "Over the past three decades," Sandel writes, "markets – and market values – have come to govern out lives as never before." Sandel is no socialist and isn't against markets per se. He is forthright about the positive impact markets can have in their correct sphere. "No other mechanism for organising the production and distribution of goods had proved as successful for generating affluence and prosperity." His focus, perhaps unexpectedly, isn't on the 2008 crash and the great recession that followed. Instead, Sandel is interested in what he sees as a deeper and more consequential loss of our collective moral compass. "The most fateful change that unfolded in the last three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don't belong."

This might make it sound as if What Money Can't Buy is mainly a work of polemic. It's not: Sandel isn't that kind of philosopher. He is clear about what he thinks, and the direction of his argument is clear too, but he progresses patiently, through the accumulation of examples from a number of fields. Too patiently, perhaps, for some readers. Anyone who is already in agreement with the ideas Sandel is advancing – a fairly numerous group of his readers, I'd have thought – may well want a more sweeping, angrier book, one that is more heated about the morally debased landscape brought to us by the ubiquity of market thinking.

I had moments when I wanted What Money Can't Buy to be more charged, to use more of the language of right and wrong and less of the bloodless vocabulary of "norms". But Sandel, I came to realise, is doing something very specific in this book. It's a work of political philosophy more than it is a polemic: he wants to make it unambiguously clear that markets have a moral impact on the goods that are traded in them.

To understand the importance of his purpose, you first have to grasp the full extent of the triumph achieved by market thinking in economics, and the extent to which that thinking has spread to other domains. This school sees economics as a discipline that has nothing to do with morality, and is instead the study of incentives, considered in an ethical vacuum. Sandel's book is, in its calm way, an all-out assault on that idea, and on the influential doctrine that the economic approach to "utility maximisation" explains all human behaviour.

Sandel is methodical about assembling evidence to refute the idea that markets are amoral and have no moral impact. Paying people to queue, for example: Sandel studies this practice in areas such as US congressional hearings and free outdoor theatre performances. In both cases, companies have come into being to allow the well-off to hire a homeless person to go and hold a place in the queue until the rich person turns up just in time for the main event. This is an example of something which is supposed to be a communal good being marketised and turned into cash. This has two consequences that often recur and are stressed by Sandel: one is that the process is unfair, and the other is that it is corrupting or degrading to the thing being marketised.

He sees this dual phenomenon, of unfairness and the degradation of values, at work in many areas: from the market in sports memorabilia to carbon trading to on-call doctor services to Chinese population control policy to the growth of executive boxes at sports grounds – "skyboxification", as he calls it. That leads to one of his most direct statements of political engagement: "Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life."

There's one example in particular that comes close to summing up the entire argument of What Money Can't Buy. It concerns an Israeli daycare centre, which responded to a problem with parents turning up late to collect their children by introducing fines. The result? Late pick-ups increased. Parents turned up late, paid the fine, and thought no more of it; the fine had turned into a fee.

The fear of disapproval and of doing the wrong thing was based on non-monetary values, and was a stronger force than mere cash. The daycare centre went back to the old system, but parents kept turning up late, because the introduction of market values had killed the old ideas of collective responsibility. Once the old "norm" of turning up on time had been marketised, it was impossible to change back.

This is such a vivid illustration of Sandel's thinking that it is almost a parable. Let's hope that What Money Can't Buy, by being so patient and so accumulative in its argument and its examples, marks a permanent shift in these debates. Markets are not morally neutral. Let's all be clear about that. As Sandel concludes: "The question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy?"

• John Lanchester's Capital is published by Faber.

Posted on 17 May 2012 | 3:00 am

Amazon consumer book reviews as reliable as media experts

Study shows Amazon reviewers more likely to look favourably on debut authors, while professionals prefer prizewinners

Amazon reviews are just as likely to give an accurate summary of a book's quality as those of professional newspapers, according to a study from Harvard Business School.

Professor Michael Luca and his co-authors analysed the top 100 non-fiction reviews from 40 media outlets, including the New York Times, the Guardian and the Washington Post, between 2004 and 2007 for their paper What Makes a Critic Tick? The academics used data from reviews aggregator metacritic.com, which summarises professional reviews and then awards ratings, if not given, based on content. They also looked at Amazon reviews for each title.

Although the study points out that there is "virtually no quality assurance" in Amazon's consumer reviews, which can also be "gamed" by publishers or competitors submitting false reviews, they found that, nevertheless, experts and consumers agreed in aggregate about the quality of a book.

Amazon reviewers were more likely to give a favourable review to a debut author, which the Harvard academics said suggested that "one drawback of expert reviews is that they may be slower to learn about new and unknown books".

Professional critics were more positive about prizewinning authors, and "more favourable to authors who have garnered other attention in the press (as measured by number of media mentions outside of the review)".

Discovering that an author's connection to a media outlet increased their chances of being reviewed by roughly 25%, and that the resulting review was 5% more favourable on average, the academics then investigated whether this was down to collusion.

They concluded that the bias was down to the media outlets aiming their reviews at their audience, "who have a preference for books written by their own journalists", rather than collusion.

Paul Laity, non-fiction reviews editor at the Guardian, said he "absolutely" did not choose titles to review simply because the author was connected to the paper. "It's a combination of looking for books that are interesting and of high quality, and for something that, once reviewed by a critic, will appeal to the Guardian readership," he said. "It's important to get a range of subjects and tones, and I'm looking for books by non-'names' – it's pleasing to find a surprising and wonderful book by a writer I've never heard of. If the commissioned reviewer agrees, then you feel you have played a small part in increasing the book's profile."

Laity is also keen to find new reviewers. "But they do have to be able to do what I want them to do. They have to be discriminating writers, with expertise, and stylish too. Writing the best, the liveliest kind of review takes unusual talent and it's interesting that even many published authors make disappointing reviewers. Not many people can do the particular thing I'm looking for, which is one reason why the Guardian's book pages are different from Amazon book reviews," he said.

Posted on 16 May 2012 | 12:03 pm

HHhH by Laurent Binet

Does its po-mo surface diminish this true story?

A breezily charming novel, with a thrilling story that also happens to be true, by a gifted young author amusingly anguished over the question of how to tell it … In principle there's nothing not to like about Laurent Binet's acclaimed debut, and HHhH is certainly a thoroughly captivating performance. Whether you find it something more than that will depend on how you feel about the application of breezy charm and amusingly anguished authorial self-reflexiveness to a book about the Nazi security chief Reinhard Heydrich, who must be one of the most unfunny figures in recorded history.

It's about his assassination, specifically, and the undersung Czech resistance heroes who carried it out; an angle that licenses a certain jauntiness in the tone. But Heydrich's icily demonic character necessarily dominates the book, and his pivotal roles in the key atrocities of the era, from Kristallnacht to the final solution itself, take up a substantial part of the narrative. (He was Himmler's right-hand man, and the title refers to a piece of ponderous Nazi waggishness: Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich – Himmler's brain is called Heydrich). So the question lingers: is the corpse-strewn story of Heydrich's ascent to head of the Gestapo and "Protector" of annexed Czechoslovakia (where he earned his nickname, "the Butcher of Prague") in any significant way enriched by its author's playful anxieties about his girlfriend, musings on his dreams, or even by his more obviously pertinent struggles over whether to invent the dialogue or imagine the inner feelings of his real-life characters?

The shifting nature of Binet's self-insertions, not to mention the very poised assurance of his writing, makes it a harder question to answer than you might expect. At their crudest they seem purely self-regarding: there to present him as an appealing type of slacker-scholar, glued to the History Channel, addicted to video-games, given to amiably flip outbursts of opinion, while also winningly obsessive over questions of micro-historical accuracy, and obsessed with his own obsessiveness. Was Heydrich's Mercedes black or green? Which side of the train did the exiled head of Czechoslovak secret services sit on during his clandestine trip through Nazi Germany to set up the resistance networks in Prague?

Elsewhere the intrusions seem to be more about assembling an on-the-hoof literary manifesto. Quick nods and jabs are delivered at the many books and movies that have inspired or threatened Binet along the way. Techniques of various kinds are held up for summary judgment ("faithful to my long-held disgust for realistic novels, I say to myself: Yuk"). Madame Bovary is found wanting; Salammbô is praised. Milan Kundera crops up a few times, and his light-footed, epigrammatic style is clearly a strong influence. By contrast, the appearance of Jonathan Littell's Wagnerian, horror-suffused reconstruction of Hitler's doomed eastern campaign, The Kindly Ones, provokes deep consternation. "You might have guessed that I was a bit disturbed by the publication of Jonathan Littell's novel, and by its success …" After handing it some faint praise, Binet finds the formula for what he really wants to do, which is to see it off altogether: "Suddenly, everything is clear. The Kindly Ones is simply 'Houellebecq does nazism'."

On this note, it's worth saying that although Littell's book has serious flaws, it does attempt to feel its way into the inner psychological textures of nazism, whereas Binet tends to settle for the simpler procedure of external caricature: "rodent-faced" Himmler, Rohm "like a pig". The problem with this approach becomes apparent in his description of Heydrich himself, whose "negroid" lips and "hooked" nose – offered up as evidence against his reputed Aryan good looks – raise the unintended suggestion that if he'd only been a bit more perfectly Teutonic he might not have been so evil.

Sometimes – more interestingly – the interventions function as a kind of Greek chorus to the drama of stately, fateful convergence between Heydrich and his assassins as they move through time and space toward the bend in the Prague street in May of 1942, where the momentous encounter takes place. Exhorting his heroes to action, ruminating on the contingencies of history, opening unexpected global vistas out of small intimate moments, the otherwise slightly ingratiating narrative voice becomes at once more reticent and more resonant in these passages, its excitable tones serving the real grandeur of the story rather than the fretfulness of its author.

And it really is a great story; a tale of astounding courage worthy of Binet's claim – "one of the greatest acts of resistance in human history" – and certainly powerful enough, in the end, to overcome whatever qualms one might have about the telling. It isn't that Binet brings any major new information to light, but he marshals and deploys his materials with exceptional dramatic skill.

In order for his climactic scenes – a cascade of triumphs, near-disasters and outright catastrophes, including the reprisal massacre at Lidice – to make their full impact, quite a complicated set of political and historical circumstances have to be laid in place. Aside from the well-documented career of Heydrich himself, there are the more scantily documented lives of the Czech fighters to be portrayed. There is the motivation for the dastardly traitor Karel Curda to be clarified, the effect of Chamberlain's appeasement policy on the exiled Czech government in London to be elucidated, the legacy of the original German settlers in the region to be traced down the centuries and connected to Hitler's (literal) carpet-chewing hysteria at the thought of Czechoslovak resistance to the Reich. There are crucial logistical points to be reckoned with, such as the topography of Prague streets or the disconcerting jamming tendency of the British-built Sten gun. Binet manages it all with beautiful lucidity, and by the time you reach the book's devastating finale, it's this discreet storytelling mastery, rather than the more grabby po-mo flourishes, that leaves the deepest impression. "Kundera does nazism" – to adapt Binet's own phrase – may have been the aim, but the book owes its real force to something more solidly conventional.

• James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Vintage.

Posted on 16 May 2012 | 3:00 am