Rupert Sheldrake has researched telepathy in dogs, crystals and Chinese medicine in his quest to explore phenomena that science finds hard to explain

It is not often, in liberal north London, that you come face to face with a heretic, but Rupert Sheldrake has worn that mantle, pretty cheerfully, for 30 years now. Sitting in his book-lined study, overlooking Hampstead Heath, he appears a highly unlikely candidate for apostasy; he seems more like the Cambridge biochemistry don he once was, one of the brightest Darwinians of his generation, winner of the university botany prize, researcher at the Royal Society, Harvard scholar and fellow of Clare College.

All that, though, was before he was cast out into the wilderness. Sheldrake's untouchable status was conferred one morning in 1981 when, a couple of months after the publication of his first book, A New Science of Life, he woke up to read an editorial in the journal Nature, which announced to all right-thinking men and women that his was a "book for burning" and that Sheldrake was to be "condemned in exactly the language that the pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy".

For a pariah, Sheldrake is particularly affable. But still, looking back at that moment, he still betrays a certain sense of shock. "It was," he says, "exactly like a papal excommunication. From that moment on, I became a very dangerous person to know for scientists." That opinion has hardened over the years, as Sheldrake has continued to operate at the margins of his discipline, looking for phenomena that "conventional, materialist science" cannot explain and arguing for a more open-minded approach to scientific inquiry.

His new book, The Science Delusion, is a summation of this thinking, an attempt to address what he sees as the limitations and hubris of contemporary scientific thought. In particular, he takes aim at the "scientific dogmatism" that sets itself up as gospel. The chapters take some of the stonier commandments of contemporary science and make them into questions: "Are the laws of nature fixed?"; "Is matter unconscious?"; "Is nature purposeless?" "Are minds confined to brains?"

Sheldrake is a brilliant polemicist if nothing else and he skilfully marshals all the current thinking that undermines these tenets – from apparent telepathy in animals, to crystals having to "learn" how to grow, to some of the more fantastical notions of theoretical physics. On the morning I meet him, his book is sitting near the top of the science bestseller list on Amazon. It has also, unlike most of his previous work – Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home– been generally reviewed respectfully. Perhaps it is something in the air.

One of the habits in nature that Sheldrake is interested in is polarity, and if he has a natural nemesis then it is Richard Dawkins, arch materialist and former professor of public understanding of science at Oxford. The title of his book seems to take direct aim at Dawkins's The God Delusion. Was that, I wonder, his express intention in writing it?

"Slightly," he suggests. But the title was really his publisher's idea. "It is dealing with a much bigger issue. But Richard Dawkins is a symptom of the dogmatism of science. He crystallises that approach in the public mind, so to that extent, yes, it is a pointed title."

Sheldrake is the same age as Dawkins – 70 this year – and though their careers began in an almost identical biochemical place, they could hardly have ended up further apart. If Sheldrake's ideas could be boiled down to a sentence, you might borrow one from Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Richard, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…"

"What we have in common," Sheldrake says, "is that we are both certain that evolution is the central feature of nature. But I would say his theory of evolution stops at biology. When it comes to cosmology, for example, he has little to say. I would take the evolutionary principle there, too. I think that the 'laws of nature' are also prone to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws. Much of what we are beginning to understand is that they clearly have evolved differently in different parts of the universe."

Sheldrake talks a good deal of the fact that, as all good Brian Cox viewers know, 83% of the universe is now thought to be "dark matter" and subject to "dark energy" forces that "nothing in our science can begin to explain".

Despite this, he suggests, scientists are prone to "the recurrent fantasy of omniscience". The science delusion, in these terms, consists in the faith that we already understand the nature of reality, in principle, and that all that is left to do is to fill in the details. "In this book, I am just trying to blow the whistle on that attitude which I think is bad for science," he says. In America, the book is called Science Set Free, which he thinks is probably a better title. "They were aware that if they called it The Science Delusion it would be seen as a rightwing tract that was anti-evolution and anti-climate change. And I want no part of that."

The evolution of Rupert Sheldrake, would, you guess, be a worthwhile scientific study in itself, but one for which you might struggle to attract funding. Like all heretics worth their salt, he started out in good faith, a true believer, but he has been beset by increasing doubt ever since.

"I went through the standard scientific atheist phase when I was about 14," he says, with a grin. "I bought into that package deal of science equals atheism. I was the only boy at my high Anglican boarding school who refused to get confirmed. When I was a teenager, I was a bit like Dawkins is today, you know: 'If Adam and Eve were created by God, why do they have navels?' That kind of thing."

Over a period, he found the materialist view of the universe – that matter was all that life consisted of, that human beings were in Dawkins's term "lumbering robots" – did not accord with his own experience of it. Sheldrake was a gifted musician and "electrical changes in the cortex didn't seem able to fully explain Bach". Likewise: "To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world."

The other thing that troubled him about scientific orthodoxy might be condensed into a single word: pigeons. As a boy in Newark-on-Trent, Sheldrake had kept animals – a dog, a jackdaw and some homing pigeons. He would place these pigeons in a cardboard box and cycle all morning with them and then release them to marvel how they would always beat him home. Newark happened to be a hub of pigeon racing. "Every weekend in the season, people would bring piles and piles of wicker baskets containing their birds; my father would take me there and the porters would let me help release the pigeons. Hundreds would fly up and circle round, then you would see them form into little groups and head off around Britain, back home. Pigeon fanciers were mostly plain working men, but they were fascinated by this mystery, which they did not understand."

They were not alone. When Sheldrake won his scholarship to Cambridge several years later, he asked various scientists how they thought this happened. The scientists talked about the sun's position and an internal clock and scent traces, but what "they weren't prepared to say was that it was a total mystery". That refusal, and others like it, troubled Sheldrake. "There is a lot of science that you can't directly experience," he says, "but to concentrate on quantum physics when we couldn't begin to explain homing pigeons seemed to me," he suggests, "a great distortion."

For a decade or so, Sheldrake kept some of these thoughts to himself, but as his career developed his doubts about the idea that "conventional, materialist" science would one day explain everything seemed increasingly wrong-headed. He took a job working at the University of Malaya on ferns and rubber trees and to get there travelled for some months through India and Sri Lanka. It was 1968 and India was a very interesting place to be. "I met people, highly intelligent people, who had a completely different world view from anything to which I had been exposed."

Returning to Cambridge, Sheldrake became interested in a notion of biology and heredity that shared close affinities with Carl Jung's ideas of a collective unconscious, a shared species memory. He was profoundly influenced by a book called Matter and Memory by the philosopher Henri Bergson. "When I discovered Bergson's idea that memory is not stored in the brain but that it is a relation in time, not in space, I realised that there might potentially be a memory principle in nature that would solve the problem I was wrestling with."

In 1974, Sheldrake returned to south-east Asia and took a job at an agricultural institute near Hyderabad developing new varieties and cropping systems in chickpeas. "By day, I was working on these practical things," he recalls, "but in the evening I was reading a lot about crystallography and the philosophy of form." He had become friendly with an eccentric woman called Helen Spurway, widow of JBS Haldane, the great British biologist. She lived in a remote full of animals, with a tame jackal and wasps' nests in the living room; Haldane's library was being eaten by termites; Sheldrake felt right at home.

"At around the same time," he recalls, "I had some exposure to psychedelics, and that opened me up to the idea that consciousness was much richer than anything my physiology lecturers had ever described. Then I came across transcendental meditation, which seemed to give some access to that without drugs." Alongside that, to his surprise, Sheldrake began to realise that there was "a lot more in my makeup that was 'Christian' than I cared to admit. I started praying and going to church."

Did he pray with a sense of its efficacy?

"Well," he says, "I still say the Lord's Prayer every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world. 'Thy will be done', that sense that we are part of a larger process that is unfolding that we do not comprehend." By the time Sheldrake went to live at the ashram of the exiled Christian holy man, Father Bede Griffiths, he had been confirmed in the Church of South India and was the organist of St George's, Hyderabad. It was at about that time, "living in a palm-fringed hut under a banyan tree", that Sheldrake decided to set out his decade's worth of thinking about memory being a function of time, not matter, shared by all living things, that he called "morphogenetics".

Was he aware that the book would be incendiary?

"Well," he says, "I wrote it to try to find a broader framework for biology. A more holistic one, proposing the argument that the laws of nature were also evolving in time."

For the first three months after it was published, the speculative book got a generally favourable reception. But then the "book for burning" editorial was written in Nature, by its editor, Sir John Maddox, and Sheldrake's new life began, as a discredited scientist and bestselling author.

Far from refuting his ideas in the face of this broadside, Sheldrake went on the offensive. His research since then has concentrated almost entirely on the kinds of phenomena that science dismisses out of hand "but which people are generally fascinated by and made to feel stupid about". He has a long-running experiment that collects data about how dogs "know" when their owners are coming home; another is concerned with the apparently strong deviations from chance in human ability to predict when they are being stared at from a distance. He retains an interest in subjects as diverse as the mysteries of crystal formation, the efficacy of Chinese medicine, the forces that trigger migrations of birds and animals over vast distances, and the nature of consciousness.

None of these pursuits has enhanced his standing in the professional scientific community. Sheldrake is unrepentant. He cites Darwin as an example. "If you look at his books, almost all the data there come from amateur naturalists, practical breeders, gardeners. TH Huxley, meanwhile, 'his bulldog', was very much against amateurs, largely because many of them were vicars and he was very anti-religious. He wanted to marginalise anyone who saw science and faith as compatible and mutually reaffirming."

Though he remains at best a contentious figure, and to some an irredeemable charlatan, Sheldrake sees some evidence that this old opposition is breaking down, that doubt and wonder might be returning to science.

"I think one of the reasons why my book has – so far – been well received is that times are changing," he suggests. "A lot of our old certainties, not least neoliberal capitalism, have been turned on their head. The atheist revival movement of Dawkins and Hitchens and Dennett is for many people just too narrow and dogmatic. I think it is a uniquely open moment..."

His hope is that there will be a "coming out" moment in science. "It's like gays in the 1950s," he suggests. "I think if people in the realm of science and medicine came out and talked about the limitations of purely mechanistic and reductive approaches it would be much more fun…"

The imminence of Sheldrake's three score years and ten has made questions of mortality and consciousness seem a little more pressing to him. He almost came face to face with his morphic energies in 2008; speaking at a consciousness conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was attacked with a knife by a Japanese paranoid schizophrenic. He suffered a huge wound in his thigh, which just missed his femoral artery. "Apparently," he says, "he was aiming at my heart and stumbled at the last moment. It certainly made death a bit more present."

Given his speculative nature, I wonder what he imagined, as his life flashed before him, would happen next?

"I've always thought death would be like dreaming," he says, "but without the possibility of waking up. And in those dreams, as in our dreams in life, everyone will get what they want to some degree. For the atheists convinced everything will go blank, maybe it will." He trusts in a more colourful future for himself. After Sheldrake shows me out, I walk to work across the heath, imagining how his dream eternity might work out: hammering out The Goldberg Variations on his Hyderabad organ, while the jungle grows around him, wondering all the time how he got here.

To mark National Libraries Day, the novelist adds an extra scene to his 1998 satire England, England in which he imagines what happens when the 'National Coalition' closes every library down

(As Sir Jack Pitman's project for a replica version of England on the Isle of Wight proves an enormous commercial success, the mainland, or "Old England" as it has come to be known, goes into sharp decline …)

The first signs had been misleading, and greeted by some islanders with delight. After Scotland and Wales had left the Union, and Northern Ireland been reunited with the Republic, Europe lost patience with the sulky rump that remained. Decades of carping from the sidelines, while constantly demanding special favours and the repatriation of powers, were finally repaid. Germany and France, strongly backed by Europe's newest Celtic adherents, led a swift campaign to evict England. "At last," as the 93-year-old European President-for-Life, Angela Merkel, put it, "we are repatriating to you your powers, and not just the ones you asked for, but all the other ones as well."

There was much excitement, as the country, having become smaller and less influential, had also become more xenophobic. The Daily Mail which, after the demise of the Times, was widely referred to as "the newspaper of record", funded street parties and firework displays. But the euphoria was brief. Europe, not content just to evict England, also wanted to bring her low. Subtle and sometimes unsubtle trade barriers were raised; appeals to international organisations against such tariffs failed. The United States had long been looking westward, and now tended to regard England as an embarrassing ancestor, and a case for humane termination.

Trade collapsed, and the nation's infrastructure with it. The health service, long privatised, had become known to the poor as the Death Service, since the government was now only responsible for the minimal duty to dispose of dead bodies. For the few surviving rich, there were regular flights to the continent, from which they returned with new German hips, cataract-free Czech eyes, and all manner of French cosmetic enhancement. Pensions were no longer paid and rubbish no longer collected. Looted and burnt-out shops were a common sight; communities gated themselves in; armed guards protected allotments at night.

Poverty threw up a few improvements, like the renaissance of the canal system. The re-establishment of the old barter system was welcomed by many. But it was the Defence of the Book that caused the most surprise. The widespread library protests of the early 2010s, more than a generation back, meant that much of the service had then been saved, an outcome for which all three parties had taken the credit (though it was thought that the ritual suicides of three novelists and a poet outside the Houses of Parliament had proved the tipping point). But little opposition was expected when the National Coalition announced that every remaining library was to be closed within a month. Since the digitisation of all forms of information, libraries – like churches under communism – were inhabited mainly by the elderly, that last generation which held on to the idea of the physical book as an item of value in itself.

Since the contents of libraries were deemed valueless, the Coalition simply instructed its enforcement agency (formerly known as the army) to burn the buildings to the ground. But after the first two incinerations, there were mass protests, and human shields were formed round many libraries. More menacingly, two offices of the enforcement agency were burnt down in retaliation. There was a broad suspicion, especially among the elderly, that once information and culture were only available digitally through the englandwideweb, truth would be easier for the government to control. To the surprise of many, the printed book began to take on a symbolic significance, as once it had done in the early years of printing.

This standoff continued for several months, because even to the National Coalition the notion of scores of incinerated citizens as acceptable collateral damage seemed a little excessive. There was negotiation; promises were made, and then more promises, until – to the government's surprise – the armies of white-haired activists agreed to stop protecting libraries in exchange for an official promise to keep them open, on terms and conditions to be mutually agreed. Naturally, as soon as the defendants withdrew, the government sent in its enforcers with the instruction that not a book survive. Indeed, there was a ministerial memo proposing that the very word "book" should be withdrawn from public discourse. When the thing no longer existed, the word to denote it would surely not survive either.

But when the official arsonists arrived to carry out their work, they discovered that all the libraries had been secretly emptied of their contents. One by one, often at night, books had been removed to safety. At first they were simply hidden, in attics, hayricks and henhouses. And so the government concluded that it had in any case won: the book had gone into internal exile and would die off when those arm-linking old fools who had held up progress for the length of a summer died off themselves. Yet in this they were much deceived. The truth was only pieced together many decades later. But it seems that at first there was a samizdat circulation of individual books among trusted "readers". Then, in a bold move started in West Yorkshire, the first underground mobile library was set up by a book-loving milkman, whose horse-drawn cart held a secret compartment in which a few dozen volumes could be hidden. Since books were scarce and forbidden by authority, children suddenly valued them the more. Boldly, adults began meeting in "reading groups", which passed round a single existing copy of a book and then discussed it in its absence; many of these groups were raided but without success. Finally, books began to multiply, from which the only conclusion to be drawn was that an underground publishing and printing company had been set up. The government, for all its enforcement agencies, was unable to discover either the location or the membership of this enterprise.

Later, much later, this famous Defence of the Book was regularly compared by historians to the way in which culture and learning were kept alive by monks during the dark ages until better, safer times returned. And even if others maintained that this renaissance would have occurred anyway, it is nonetheless true that this Defence of the Book, both actual and symbolic, undoubtedly led to …

• "The Defence of the Book" appears in The Library Book alongside stories by Alan Bennett, Val McDermid, Zadie Smith and many others.

Nathan Englander returns to the short story form with a collection of unflinching tales

Nathan Englander's acclaimed first collection of stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999), was a serio-comic take on the clash of flesh and spirit, viewed mostly through the prism of an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn. Drawing on a fabulist tradition running from Yiddish theatre via Kafka to Woody Allen, it used a series of farcical inversions – a rabbi employed as a Santa; a Park Avenue Wasp who suddenly finds himself "the bearer of a Jewish soul" – to animate its portrayal of a world that hadn't had much attention in fiction since the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

It was a terrific book, but a notably apolitical one. History was present in the form of the Holocaust, but there was little interest in the wider contemporary context of Jewish life. Of course, Brooklyn isn't Israel, and not every book about Jews has to take on the Middle East, but looking back you notice its absence. The final story, set in Jerusalem, featured a suicide bombing, and did seem to be reaching for some kind of political dimension. But to my mind it didn't quite know what to do with the event, other than be horrified by it.

Thirteen years on, with an intifada and the 9/11 attacks having occurred in the interim, Englander returns to the short-story form, and one approaches his new collection with great curiosity. Will this gifted writer have found a way of adapting the form to accommodate a wider perspective on his subject?

The answer is emphatically yes. The new book (which comes garlanded with praise from just about every A-list author in America) turns out to be a remarkable collection, not least because of its courageous determination to push forward in the direction hinted at by that last story.

There is one dud, or semi-dud, and as this happens to be the title and opening story, it is worth dwelling on for a moment. The name – "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" – pays homage to Raymond Carver's famous story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love". In Carver's story, two couples drink gin and talk about love in an atmosphere that grows increasingly tense as the alcohol disinhibits each speaker, leaving at least one of them irreparably exposed in all his seething weakness.

Englander's version follows a similar trajectory, while substituting two Jewish couples – one secular Floridians, the other Ultra-Orthodox Jerusalemites – for Carver's culturally indeterminate foursome, and largely replacing the topic of love with that of religious and ethnic identity. The style mimics Carver's unnervingly well, closely replicating the studied ordinariness of Carver's props and idiom ("He goes back to the counter and slings me, through the air, he pitches me a slice of white bread …"). But as the story closes in on its quarry – a game that the Floridians like to play, in which they speculate on which of their Christian friends would protect them in the event of an American Holocaust – the enterprise begins to flail.

The problem is partly one of tact. This "Anne Frank game" makes the couple, who are in no obvious danger of being persecuted as Jews in southern Florida, seem so hysterical about the present and so crass in their appropriation of the past, that they forfeit any further sympathetic interest from the reader – or they did from this one.

But it is also one of aesthetics. Offered as part of a Carveresque slice of life, the idea of an American Shoah at this moment in history has no plausible resonance or valency, even as a "thought experiment", as the couple describe it. But I suspect Englander might have pulled it off if he hadn't constrained himself so tightly within the terms of Carver's scrupulous realism. At any rate, the rest of the stories dispense with this rather unhelpful model and find, each in its own way, a much more flexible balance of the realistic and the allegorical, the mundane and the operatic, that frees up Englander's old playfulness while enabling him to articulate a new seriousness and breadth of vision.

If there is an abiding theme, it is the way in which notions of right and wrong, guilt and innocence, victim and oppressor, shift over time as memories fade or new perspectives open up on old struggles. At their lightest, the stories show this by reprising the relatively simple inversions of the earlier book. "How We Avenged the Blums", set a generation back, features some Jewish boys learning how to defend themselves against an antisemitic street bully. Along the way they ask a Chinese kid if they can practise on him. "Practise what?" the kid asks. "A reverse pogrom …" More elaborate upendings occur in the manically inventive "Camp Sundown", set at a summer resort for the elderly. Two of the residents, both Holocaust survivors, claim to recognise a third as a former camp guard, and instigate a mad, senile witch-hunt, in which the two types of camp – summer and concentration – merge preposterously. It's the kind of high-risk story that depends on a very adroit control of tone to keep it from capsizing into tasteless silliness or kitschy solemnity, and Englander manages it beautifully, bringing its teemingly disparate elements (which include a child molester and a clan of displaced snapping turtles) together into a strangely moving finale.

At the more serious end of the spectrum is "Free Fruit for Young Widows", which takes as its point of departure the apparently cold-blooded killing of four Egyptian commandos by an Israeli soldier during the 1956 Sinai campaign, and then steadily widens the historical and ethical perspective on the event until the full, intractably complex burden of the Middle East conflict seems to settle on the reader's shoulders.

And then there is "Sister Hills", the longest and most ambitious piece in the book. Spanning four decades in a West Bank settlement, it reimagines the old Bible story of the child claimed by two rival mothers (as in Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle), brilliantly mapping the fable's fraught matrix of irreconcilable bonds and allegiances on to the explosive subject of Arab/Jewish land disputes. "Look, Mother, at how our settlement grows," cries a character as the small pioneer outpost evolves into a full-blown metropolis. Few people today could read that line without some discomfort. What is so good about the story – about most of the stories, in fact – is that they orchestrate precisely such moments of discomfort into their own twisting and turning plots, always a step or two ahead of the reader, and furthermore that they do so in the service not of partisan judgment one way or the other, but of deep, clear, unflinching understanding.

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

The modern world was created by those who haunted the Austrian capital in the first 14 years of the 20th century. The writer returns to the place that gave rise to his latest novel, Waiting for Sunrise

It took me about half an hour to walk from the centre of Vienna – from the opera house – to the Freud Museum on Berggasse. It's pretty much a straight line: up Augustinerstrasse, along Herrengasse, past the stables of the Spanish Riding School, then straight across Michaelerplatz and on along the street past the Café Centrale and then across the wide avenue of the Ring by the university. Another few hundred yards and then a right turn down the gentle slope of Berggasse to number 19, the apartment building where Freud lived and practised for 47 years, from 1891-1938, and which has been transformed into a small but fascinating museum.

It was very quiet the day I went there on an early spring morning four years ago. There was no one about as I passed under the arched entryway with a view of a small inner courtyard beyond. There were three trees growing there, as I recall. I climbed the stairs to the first floor to find two adjacent doors on a landing. There was a sign on one door: "Prof Dr Freud". The left-hand door led to the Freud family's private apartments, the other to the consulting rooms. I paused for a moment on the landing and looked down at the courtyard and experienced that strange Proustian shiver – time travel. There was nothing around me, nothing in the view that said 21st century. The thought came to me that I could have been standing here 100 years ago, visiting Prof Dr Freud for a consultation. Ring the bell, be admitted, start the "talking cure". What must it have been like to be psychoanalysed in the early years of the 20th century? How weird and risky would it have appeared to decide voluntarily to tell your darkest secrets to a stranger who promised to rid you of your terrible fears and neuroses? It must have seemed the purest mumbo-jumbo, surely. But as I pushed open the door and walked into the deserted museum I knew one thing for sure – I had the idea for a novel.

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Why do certain cities haunt the imagination? Not just the city itself but the city in a particular historical period. In my own case I can identify four such cities – Los Angeles in the 1970s, Lisbon in the 1930s, Berlin in the 1920s and Vienna in the years just before the first world war. Thus captivated, I wrote fiction – short stories, chapters of novels – set in each of these cities long before I ever visited them. This is the mark and measure, I suppose, of their allure – it's vicarious, it works at a great distance – but it must be some conveyed sense of atmosphere, the spirit of place, that prompts the fascination. Perhaps the most telling factor is a powerful feeling that you would like to have lived there yourself.

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One of the amazing aspects of Vienna – or certainly the central city, the Inner Stadt bounded by the great circling boulevard of the Ring, is how easy it is to imagine living there – not just in the early years of the 20th century but in the 19th or even 18th century as well. It's so beautifully preserved and maintained that you can turn a corner and draw up with a shock, imagining that Mozart or Brahms could have seen the identical view. But Vienna in its fading pomp, in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian empire (1867-1918), is present before you in almost every street scene or vista. Freud's Vienna, Wittgenstein's Vienna, Egon Schiele's Vienna.

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It was Egon Schiele who started my Vienna obsession. Schiele and Klimt. Up until the 1970s – when Rudolf Leopold's catalogue raisonné of Schiele's paintings and drawings appeared – Schiele was a virtual unknown. I can remember while I was at university in the 70s the sudden outpouring of postcards and posters, books or reproductions that occurred. Suddenly everyone loved Schiele and was enthralled by his short, tormented life. Schiele's angular, mannered, brilliant draughtsmanship, the blatant near-pornography of his nudes, male and female, were a thrilling revelation. I went to Vienna for the first time to write a piece about Schiele, or to be more precise to write a piece about the Leopold Museum that contains the world's biggest collection of his work. Even after decades of familiarity the actual canvases and drawings retain their power to shock and disturb. In some ways, Schiele is the perfect symbol of the Viennese antithesis – namely that this small, safe, solid, beautiful, bourgeois capital city should have housed in the early years of the 20th century such a contrapuntal, boiling ferment of modernism in every art form.

It's an interesting thought experiment to stand before Schiele's large, almost life-sized, naked self-portrait – "Seated Male Nude" – and imagine what it must have been like to see it for the first time in 1910. The lurid, putrifying colouring, the emaciated body, the orange nipples, the dense, dark pubis, the clumped genitalia, the absence of feet – almost as if they'd been amputated. It's still incredibly, disturbingly powerful. Beside Schiele's graphic audacity, Klimt's etiolated nudes seem almost fey. Klimt's drawings veer tentatively towards eroticism, also, but they seem half-hearted and sketchy beside Schiele. Schiele is one of art history's greatest draughtsmen – up there with Ingres, Degas and Picasso. He was destined to take Klimt's crown as the pre-eminent artist of the Jugendstil movement when Klimt died in February 1918. However, Schiele himself died eight months later, in the influenza pandemic that ravaged Europe and the world at the end of the first world war. He was 28 years old.

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Schiele, Klimt and Kokoschka were the great trio of artists that the Viennese Secession produced. Klimt and Schiele died in 1918. Oskar Kokoschka, born in 1886, lived on until 1980 – an astonishing, mind-bending life-span when one considers what he must have lived through. I've never particularly liked Kokoschka's work – what intrigues me about him is his passionate affair with Mahler's widow, Alma – a society beauty and bluestocking somewhat older than Kokoschka. The affair lasted two years from 1912-14 and was unilaterally terminated by Alma because she felt it was getting out of hand, so passionate were the emotions it generated. In despair, Kokoschka had a life-sized wooden replica doll constructed and made to look like Alma that he kept in his studio to console his lovelorn angst and, reputedly, took this Alma-simulacrum to the opera with him as his date. Very Vienna. Again, the city produces another bizarre fusion of the personal and the art-historical that illustrates the modernity of the sexual mores that pullulated beneath the pompous and starchy moral codes that so typified the empire and its values.

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The Austro-Hungarian empire was, as empires go, comparatively short-lived. It began in 1867 with the Ausgleich– the "Compromise" – that saw the old Austrian and Hapsburg empire transmogrified into a new Austria-Hungary, a strange hybrid empire with a dual monarchy whose imperial life ended in 1918 with defeat in the first world war. In fact, Austria-Hungary contained many other countries and ethnic groups and 11 recognised languages. This curious amalgam of peoples included Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Romanians and Italians. For the duration of its existence its emperor was Franz Joseph I. He reigned for nearly 68 years, dying in 1916 at the age of 86. The multi-generational length of his reign gave an illusion of permanence, of timeless durability, but as the old man grew ever more aged, so too the prospect of his death generated a collective sense of impending disaster. This growing fearfulness resonates in the literature of the period but there was a general feeling throughout the empire that everything would change once the old gentleman passed away. His son and heir, Crown Prince Rudolf, committed suicide at Mayerling in 1889. Franz Joseph's nephew, Franz Ferdinand, became archduke and the heir presumptive to the empire. There was at least the notion that the dynasty would continue until – in June 1914 – Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, made a state visit to Sarajevo.

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Almost every day, the Emperor Franz Joseph drove in his state coach from his Shönbrunn Palace just outside Vienna to his Hofburg Palace in the centre of the city. And over a six-week period in January and February 1913 this progress was observed from an apartment in nearby Schönbrunner Schloss-strasse by one Josif Dzhugashvili, later to be known to the world as Josef Stalin. Stalin was in Vienna to research and write a communist pamphlet. Intriguingly, Trotsky – Lev Bronstein – was also in Vienna at the time. Trotsky loved the city and lived in Vienna between 1907 and 1914. By one of those extraordinary accidents of history it's entirely possible that, as they wandered through the city, Stalin and Trotsky could have crossed paths with a shabby, odorous young vagrant hawking his talentless watercolours. Adolf Hitler's Vienna years (1908-13) are difficult to document (he took care to expunge as much of the record as possible). However, there are witnesses enough to provide a portrait of a young down-and-out, bearded, long-haired, living in grim hostels with the impoverished flostam and jetsam of the empire, its many castes and races. Apparently Hitler used to wear a rubberised yellow cycling jacket-cum-cape with no shirt underneath. In Vienna's summer heat the rubber made him sweat – and smell. It is eerie to imagine the idea of Hitler, Stalin and Trotsky walking Vienna's streets during those few weeks in 1913 that they were all in the city together. It is a disturbing contemplation: in Vienna in 1913 Hitler was a shabby, mentally disturbed, embittered and near-desperate member of the Austro-Hungarian underclass. Twenty years later he was the chancellor of Germany.

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The great novel of Vienna in those years – Vienna's Ulysses, if you like – is Robert Musil's vast, 1,000-page opus The Man without Qualities. Musil (1880-1942) wrote the novel over a number of years between the wars. It's a curious book, alternating passages of utter tedium with beguiling and acute social observation, but what is particularly intriguing about it is its tone of voice – this is the mindset of the Viennese intellectual at the beginning of the 20th century. Cynical and disenchanted, Ulrich, the principal character, the "Man without Qualities", drifts through the upper echelons of Viennese society, visiting friends, half-heartedly participating in public events, enjoying casual affairs and idly watching his Viennese world drifting helplessly, complacently, towards the nemesis of the first world war.

If Musil is the great novelist of the city, then Joseph Roth (1894-1939) is the great novelist of the empire. Roth was born in the eastern province of Galicia (now part of Poland), and his many works of fiction are a loving recreation of the "Crown lands", as the further-flung regions and principalities of the dual monarchy were known. Roth's novels are set in provincial towns and isolated estates, peopled by lonely young officers in decrepit army barracks and melancholy bureaucrats whiling away their lives in rural backwaters. Roth's masterwork, The Radetzky March(1932), barely features Vienna at all, in fact, but, like Musil, he wrote it with the full benefit of hindsight. That world of the empire's twilight years had been forever transformed by the edicts of the Versailles conference in 1919. Austria was now a republic – the victors had split the empire into its various discrete parts, establishing new countries and enlarging and diminishing others. Europe would never be the same again, and both Roth and Musil in their novels bear rueful witness to a vanished world.

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Not entirely vanished – traces of that world do remain in Vienna. You can still go to the Café Landtmann where Freud enjoyed a kapuziner and a cigar. You can sit in the Café Sperl – my favourite – and imagine Egon Schiele wandering in with one of his models. You can eat Sachertorte and drink schnapps in the Hotel Sacher and watch the patisserie chefs at work in Demel, much as Roth and Musil would have done. Somehow, Vienna has managed to preserve the authenticity of its old style of life in a way that most other European capitals haven't. It's true that Jean-Paul Sartre would still recognise the Café de Flore, Alberto Moravia the Caffè Greco, and Charles Dickens would feel at home in the Grapes by Limehouse Basin, but the relentless, homogenising, modernising hand of the 20th and 21st centuries is making all cities of western Europe come steadily to resemble each other. But for the moment, at least, parts of Vienna seem miraculously preserved.

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Perhaps this is because the clock metaphorically stopped for Vienna when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in June 1914 and the first world war began a few weeks later. In those first 14 years of the 20th century, Vienna, more than anywhere else, was the fulminating, bewitching crucible where the modern world was invented. It doesn't seem too fanciful to posit the idea of a form of modern renaissance that took place in the city over the first decade or so of the 20th century and that transformed our culture permanently. There have been artistic and social upheavals in other cities at various times – Paris, London, New York and Berlin have all been the cynosure of cultural movements – but was there ever such a concentration of genius across the broad spectrum of thought and culture that could be found in Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian empire during those early years of the 20th century? If we start drawing up some lists of names the idea appears ever more plausible. In literature: Rilke, Kafka, Roth, Musil, Zweig, Schnitzler. Music: Mahler, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg. Architecture: Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos. Painting: Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka. Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the origins of the Vienna Circle school. Journalism: Karl Kraus. The brew is almost too rich. Then throw in Adolf Hitler and, of course, the sine qua non, Sigmund Freud.

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However discredited Freud is today, as a thinker and founder of psychoanalysis, there is no doubt that we are, like it or not, all Freudians now. What Freud did – to put it very simply – was to schematise the workings of our unconscious mind. However wrongheaded and unscientific his theories proved to be, they had the effect of creating one of those revolutions in human understanding and self-knowledge that ranks with, for example, Copernicus (we go round the sun, not vice versa) and Darwin (we are animals, part of the fauna of this small planet). Freud established that our conscious mind perhaps accounted for only 50% of our behaviour – the irrational, the unknown, the repressed, the neurotic and the taboo became an irreducible part of the explanation of our human persona. A modern, complex, troubled sensibility was established for the new century – a century that very quickly was going to upset all certainties and all complacent confidence about human progress.

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The first fiction I wrote about Vienna was a short story about Ludwig Wittgenstein called "Transfigured Night" (the title is lifted from Schoenberg's exquisite sextet, Verklärte Nacht (1899). I'd studied Wittgenstein at university but became more and more intrigued with the man himself. Wittgenstein was born into a vastly rich and cosmopolitan Jewish-Austrian family who had converted to Catholicism. Three of his brothers killed themselves. Even more intriguingly, he attended the same school as Adolf Hitler – the Realschule in Linz – where they overlapped as pupils for a year in 1904-05. Before the war Wittgenstein went to Cambridge, where he met Bertrand Russell and began to make his name as a philosopher, but he returned to Vienna in 1914 when war broke out and joined up. He fought with gallantry on the Russian and Italian fronts and was decorated. He was captured at Trentino and spent nine months in an Italian prisoner of war camp. It was while he was a prisoner of the Italians that he began to write the seminal work that made his reputation – the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. However, what makes Wittgenstein a true son of Austro-Hungarian Vienna is not so much his difficult and uncompromising philosophy as the way he casually turned his hand to architecture. After the war he contributed to the design and building of a house for his sister, Gretl. There can be very few philosopher-architects (not the same as architect-philosophers – they are legion), but Wittgenstein concentrated his energies on Gretl's house with a fanatical and obsessive attention to detail. Wittgenstein's house still exists (3, Kundmanngasse) and can be visited, even though it now the cultural centre of the Bulgarian embassy. It took minimalism to new heights or rather to a new, bleaker austerity. No carpets or curtains, lit by naked lightbulbs, painted cement walls and ceilings, exposed radiators, with automated metal grilles to shut out the light from the windows – it must have been the most uncomfortable house ever created. It is in its way the best monument to Wittgenstein and the unsparing rigour of his brilliant mind.

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Joseph Roth's last, short novel – Die Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor's Tomb is its English title) – is a kind of sequel to The Radetzky March and, rare among his novels, is set largely in Vienna, before, during and after the first world war. At one stage, his central character, Franz Trotta, thinks about his life in the old empire: "Before me spread the whole bright landscape of life, scarcely bounded by the rim of a far, far distant horizon. I lived in the cheerful, carefree company of young aristocrats whose company, second only to that of artists, I loved best under the old empire. With them I shared a sceptical frivolity, a melancholy curiosity, a wicked insouciance, and the pride of the doomed, all signs of the disintegration which at that time we did not see coming. Above the ebullient glasses from which we drank, invisible Death was already crossing his bony hands." The image is telling and powerful, and "invisible Death" had an appointment at the rim of that far horizon – in Sarajevo.

Roth's hero feels doomed, as if there was something inevitable about the catastrophe that was coming, but the details of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 could not be a better example of brute chance in action, of utter contingency determining events. In the morning of the 28th, as the royal motorcade drove through the streets of Sarajevo, a bomb had been thrown, bounced off the rear of the archduke's car and exploded further down the street. Warning enough, one might have thought, but Franz Ferdinand proceeded with his duties, attended an official reception at the town hall and made a speech. The motorcade set off again but the driver of the royal car took a wrong turning and headed – irony piling on irony – into Franz Joseph Street. The car stopped and began to reverse out, and its engine stalled. It was at this moment that one member of the gang of Serbian irridentists, Gavrilo Princip – whose assassination attempt had seemed to have ended in total failure – spotted the open-topped car reversing and saw who was in it. He stepped forward and shot Franz Ferdinand in the throat and his wife, Sophie, in the abdomen. Both died shortly after.

This assassination on 28 June 1914 was the single direct cause of the first world war. It's highly unusual to be able to point to this utterly random congruence of events, this arbitrary chain of sheer happenstance, and to see it as the tipping point, the moment the world changed for ever. Gavrilo Princip's squeeze of the trigger as he aimed at Franz Ferdinand was, so hindsight now tells us, like a shot from a starting pistol. It signalled the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire – and the fact that nothing would ever be the same again. The modern world – our world – had begun.

From Dostoevsky to Zadie Smith, the novelist picks his favourite portrayals of characters struggling with faith

Alex Preston was born in 1979. He lives in London with his wife and two children. His first novel, This Bleeding City, was published in 2010. His second, The Revelations, is published this month by Faber and Faber. He also writes reviews for the Observer and the New Statesman and a regular panellist on the BBC Review. He tweets as @ahmpreston.

Buy The Revelations at the Guardian bookshop

" Steady, plodding relationships are not the stuff of great literature. As we all know, happiness writes white. Friction, fissures, flaws – love stories take their energy from impediments, they thrive under the heat of conflict. The same goes for belief. Quiet, placid faith fails to stir us. It's the dark night of the soul that we want in our fiction, the adolescent torment of Salinger's Franny or the guilt-ravaged Bendrix coming reluctantly to God in The End of the Affair.

"In previous centuries authors would have presupposed both faith and familiarity with the scriptures in their audience, but now religion has withered in the bright glare of science (at least in Britain), and our churches are increasingly Larkin's 'accoutred frowsty barn[s]'. Yet we still, some of us, feel the God-shaped hole, and courses and cults have sprung up to cater to those looking for meaning disenchanted world.

"I have always been fascinated by the outer reaches of religious experience, by the titanium-plated smiles of the born-again, by the visitations and mass-hysteria of Christian evangelicals. It's not only the secrecy and intrigue of those closed worlds; it's the way their members seem to have found an answer to so many of life's great questions. Frankly I'm envious. So when I read and write about believers, it's partly that I'm trying to find an authentic way into what they've got. So far I've not had much luck. Perhaps this is why it's characters in books who struggle with, rather than revel in, their faith who attract me.

"The four young friends in The Revelations all believe, but their conviction is tested to breaking point by the tragedy that unfolds over the course of a weekend religious retreat. Doubt stalks their every footstep, the charismatic priest who leads them suffers his own crisis of faith; that some of them are still believers at the end of the book is a kind of miracle."

1. Franny in Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger

Marcus and Abby Glass, two of the heroes of The Revelations, take their surname from Salinger's precocious family. Franny's breakdown in the second story perfectly captures the headrush of adolescent spirituality (and its resultant comedown). I have always been a little bit in love with her which is, I suppose, creepy, now I'm over 30 and she's still at college.

2. Alyosha Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Alyosha is a novitiate Russian Orthodox monk, Jesus-like, compassionate but totally powerless. He clashes with his brother Ivan, a rationalist and an atheist. Alyosha isn't divorced from the real world, though; he is a realist. As Dostoevsky says: "Faith, in the realist, does not spring from the miracle. But the miracle from faith."

3. Samad Iqbal in White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Literary grandees from Updike to DeLillo tried (and mostly failed) to represent the east/west cultural clash in the post-9/11 years. The most nuanced and sympathetic portrait of the experience of British Muslims comes earlier, in the form of Samad Iqbal, a devout believer attempting to fit his faith to his adopted nation. When tempted by his children's music teacher "he felt a cold thing land on his heart and knew it was the fear of his God". A character funny, touching and tragic in equal measure, through Samad Iqbal we understand the burden of the comfort of faith.

4. Sir William Gull in From Hell by Alan Moore

A high-ranking Freemason who suffers an extraordinary theophanic episode when the god Jahbulon is revealed to him in a vision, Sir William Gull uses the prostitutes he kills in the East End of London to satisfy an ancient religious blood rite. The image of the future in which a vast City skyscraper rears up above the crazed royal physician seems strikingly relevant as we survey the wreckage of the post-crash financial system: Gull's mystical cult seeks to perpetuate male dominance of society. Written at the start of the bubble that just burst, testosterone-fuelled derivatives traders were the offspring of Sir William Gull's gruesome satanic rituals.

5. Herr Naphtha in The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

A Marxist Jesuit practicing a kind of religious fascism, Naphtha is one half of the dialectic duo that will bring Hans Castorp to his Bildung. The dark mirror of Settembrini's rational humanism, for Naphtha piety and cruelty are inseparable. Naphtha struggles with his inability to achieve the "graveyard peace" which he sees on the faces of his fellow believers. His death, like his life, is shockingly uncompromising.

6. Oscar in Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

Brought up by a fundamentalist father from the Plymouth Brethren, Oscar sees "God's hand everywhere about", whether in gambling dens, at the racecourse or in the fate that brings him to Lucinda. "Our whole faith is a wager," he tells her. "We bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it."

7. Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix in By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño

A Chilean priest and member of Opus Dei, Lacroix is the narrator of this deathbed novella of religious compromise and hypocrisy. A priest for the ease of lifestyle it offers, Lacroix's real calling is literature. He meets Pablo Neruda and Ernst Jünger, gives lessons in Marxist theory to General Pinochet, and then, in a brutal final scene, realises that Santiago's principal literary salon has been held above a torture chamber. As he slips towards death, a hesitant truth begins to reveal itself …

8. Esti Kuperman in Disobedience by Naomi Alderman

Esti is the barren, lesbian wife of an Orthodox Jew, Dovid. Although only a foil (and lover) to the ballsy heroine, Ronit, this frail, silent character carries the heart of the novel with her. Esti is trapped with a paunchy, neurotic husband she doesn't love by her devotion to her religious belief. A book about a world that is at once bafflingly alien and surprisingly familiar.

9. Maurice Bendrix in The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

While his lover Sarah's faith is stronger, Bendrix's tentative, stumbling epiphany brings the novel to its breathtaking end. Greene pits the jealous lover against a jealous God; there will only ever be one winner. Bendrix's lament of "I hate You as though You exist" finally, reluctantly, becomes a prayer: "O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever."

10. Margery Kempe in The Book of Margery Kempe

Kempe's autobiography, dictated to an amanuensis, is the occasionally hilarious record of her attempts to relive Jesus's life. Her visions are full of male genitalia and gore, but they are also surprisingly touching (particularly the scene in which she makes a hot drink for the Virgin Mary to comfort her after the crucifixion). We read of Kempe's meeting with that other great medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich. Julian's Revelation of Divine Love is more spiritual and pious; The Book of Margery Kempe is more fun.

An audacious collection of short stories in which events come out of left field

I was at a literary festival recently when an audience member asked the panel if they thought the short story would make a comeback in this country. I was surprised at the time because, as far as I'm aware, the short story has never gone away. The genre in Britain may not perhaps share the robust health it enjoys in North America, especially after the BBC revealed plans to reduce its short story programming. But all is far from lost. We have Helen Simpson, Dan Rhodes, Ali Smith: skilled short-story writers, all. We can now add Jon McGregor's name to this roll-call, with his generously titled collection, This Isn't The Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You.

McGregor's short stories have appeared in magazines and journals, but are brought together here for the first time in book form. Fans of his novels, in which he has finessed his own inimitable style, won't be disappointed. They will find all the linguistic risk, the formal experimentation, the authorial compassion of his earlier works – and more.

McGregor's fiction resembles those fairy stories in which size and scale are unstable, except that it isn't his protagonists who can suddenly loom into giants, it's the workings of his plots. His debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, was a novel dedicated to how the tiny mathematics of human lives can have enormous consequences. He is a writer much concerned with the minutiae of existence; minor events in human lives assume, in McGregor's fictional world, collossal scale.

As the title of the collection suggests, the stories are peppered with events that come out of left field, with characters whose lives change in an instant, mostly for the worse. These are, in a sense, tales of the unexpected, but don't expect any supernatural pyrotechnics from McGregor: the changes of fortune are entirely grounded in the real world, things that could happen to any of us. The stories wrap themselves around the wholly disconcerting premise that catastrophes can rear up in anyone's life without warning.

There is the teenager who, on the way back from his first date, knocks over and kills a man. He buries the body in a field so that he can be with the girl, so that he won't lose the life that seems suddenly so precious. Elsewhere, a man is refused entry to his daughter's nativity play on the grounds of divorce and a restraining order, but he will not take no for an answer. A boy swimming in the shallows tells his friends that he'll be out in a minute but then gradually finds himself drifting out to sea.

The stand-out story, "Wires", opens with a shock that quite literally falls from the sky. A young woman, Emily, is driving along a motorway when she sees a sugar beet blow off the lorry in front of her and fly towards her windscreen. She has time, she observes, "to make a list of all the things she was having the time to think about … Item Seven was just, basically, wtf." She pulls over, her windscreen shattered, the sugar beet in the passenger seat, giving off "an earthy smell, like wet earth, like something rotting in the earth". A van pulls over and its occupants, two men, tell her they have called the police.

The story is, at this point, unsettling enough, but as Emily stands on the verge, considering whether to end things with her boyfriend, the reader realises the two men from the van aren't quite what they seem. The younger one is gripping her arm while the older is waiting for them on the other side of the embankment, at "the edge of the woodland".

Edges are important to McGregor. The whole collection is set in the fenlands of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, those landscapes dominated by sky. The fear of flood runs throughout the book, and is personified by McGregor's most disturbing protagonist, in "If It Keeps on Raining". He is an estranged husband and father, keeping an eye on the rising waters of the river, "the swirl and turn of … driftwood and debris". He is building himself a tree-house, despite the mockery of others, so that he alone will survive when the floods come.

To the anxious literary festival audience member – and anyone else feeling downcast about the state of the short story today – I say, read Jon McGregor's new book. Its verve, its inventiveness, its sheer quiet audacity will reassure you that the short story is alive, well and reaching new heights.

• Maggie O'Farrell's most recent book is The Hand That First Held Mine (Headline Review).

As the film company Hammer – famous as a purveyor of horror movies – moves into publishing, we hear from its boss Simon Oakes about the thinking behind the new venture, which has just produced its first literary title, The Greatcoat, Helen Dunmore.

Dunmore, an Orange prize-winning novelist, reads from her ghost story involving a dead second world war airman and a lonely young doctor's wife, and discusses the undying appeal of the supernatural to writers, ranging from Henry James's Turn of the Screw to Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now.

And film critic Peter Bradshaw joins us to investigate the history of the ghost story in literature and film, the latest product of which is Hammer's movie version of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black.

Reading list
The Greatcoat, by Helen Dunmore (Hammer Books)

Bright sparks amid gloom over the number of foreign-language books reaching English readers

That nasty rumour still won't go away: publishing houses in the UK are allergic to literary fiction in translation. A recent report by English PEN even warned that "future geniuses comparable to Murakami or García Márquez might never become accessible to English readers" if the situation isn't properly addressed. Are we really on the verge of a drought?

On Monday night, a conversation had around a stove-heater in a greenhouse in Wapping gave reason for a bit more hope. It was the latest reading group of young publisher And Other Stories, which has jettisoned one traditional tool of the translated-fiction world: the book report. Usually written by readers outside the company, these short assessments are often all a commissioning editor has to go on when deciding whether or not to buy the rights to a foreign book. So although insufficient, they have up to now been indispensable, too.

But what if you gather together readers, translators and editors, all grounded in the literature of a region, to talk for a whole evening about the books you're considering? One of the reasons this doesn't sound plausible is that no money is offered to readers. (Book reports are done for a fee which, although it won't get you much more than your groceries and bus fares for a week, at least recognises that there is some expertise involved.) It is And Other Stories's modus operandi, though, and it seems to be working.

Monday's meeting, at the Wapping Project Bookshop, was of the Spanish-language group. The debate – about a recent crop of Latin American novels – surely beats a small attachment quietly dropping into the inbox. Does Colombian Antonio Ungar stretch credibility too far? (Half an hour.) Can any Latin American novelist – Cuban Abilio Estévez, in this case – use a house as a metaphor for family history and not make us feel like we've heard it all before? (See One Hundred Years of Solitude.) For warmth, we'd transferred to the pub by the time we got on to the third book. Can the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa crowd her narrative with dead writers revived for a literary conference and get away with it?

Each book tends to end up having a lead proponent and 10 dissenters to sketch a full web of possible objections. And Other Stories's publisher Stefan Tobler told me that Bolaño's Savage Detectives was an inspiration "with its brawling poets of Mexico City". No brawls were had in Wapping, but the group left exercised, confident of having made a real contribution to editorial decisions. And the publisher went away well informed.

Even its advocates are divided about the likely future health of literature translated into English. In the best-of-times camp, people point to the Scandinavian crime-fiction wave, and mention that the low production costs of ebooks mean that publishers have less of an excuse not to invest in literature from overseas. In the worst-of-times camp, editors wring their hands about paying two advances, not to mention how much harder these books can be to market and publicise. With its open, public-spirited approach, And Other Stories is showing that there is another way, calmly removing one or two of the obstacles.

Translators stand to benefit from this, too. Of the three translations published by And Other Stories in 2011, two were translated by the readers who recommended them. What's more, And Other Stories may make a small increase in the number of translated books published elsewhere, by sharing their author pages and the results of their reading groups online. They recognise that they can't publish all the books they enjoy: so why not share the wealth?

A Room for London is a small living space in the shape of the Roi des Belges - the boat in Joseph Conrad's novella The Heart of Darkness, which has been moored on the top of the South Bank as part of the Cultural Olympiad.

For four days every month, as part of a year-long project by Artangel, a writer will stay in it, tasked only with writing an essay on the theme of London, rivers and/ or Conrad. We meet the first occupant, novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez as he leaves the boat at the end of his four-day stay. And we listen in to the thoughts it inspired in him on Conrad, Colombia and London in the 21st century.

During the year we are live streaming a series of concerts from the Room for London. We have extracted the first one, by violinist Andrew Bird, in the introduction to this podcast. Watch the full concert here
The next A Room for London live stream is Heiner Goebbels at 6pm on Sunday 26 February.

'Having experienced the lower depths, he never ceased to commit himself to trying to right the wrongs inflicted by society'

You start with the work, of course. In my case The Pickwick Papers, thrust into my hands at the age of 13. It danced before my eyes, a great hokey-cokey of eccentrics, conmen, phony politicians, amorous widows and wily, witty servants, somehow catching an essence of what it is to be English, celebrating companionship, generosity, good nature, in the figure of Samuel Pickwick, Esq, one of the great embodiments in literature of benevolence.This quality mattered a great deal to me then, and it does now.

A tear sprang to my eyes when I read the book's great closing words: "Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light. We, who have no such optical powers, are better pleased to take our last parting look at the visionary companions of many solitary hours, when the brief sunshine of the world is blazing full upon them." When I first read it, I had no idea how hard-won that sunny vision had been for its 25-year-old author. Only 12 years before, he had been a drudge in a shoe-polish factory, living on his own, his family in debtors' jail; he felt abandoned, humiliated, hungry, heart-broken, close to annihilation. By a supreme effort of will, the moment he was liberated from the factory, he turned away from the dark feelings that threatened to engulf him and threw himself into life with a blazing enthusiasm, becoming a beacon of energy and fun. The rest of his life was a negotiation between those high spirits and the dejection with which he had been acquainted so early.

This alone would not be enough to make him my hero, though it is a heroic effort, this attempt to keep faith with life. The reason I love him so deeply is that, having experienced the lower depths, he never ceased, till the day he died, to commit himself, both in his work and in his life, to trying to right the wrongs inflicted by society, above all, perhaps by giving the dispossessed a voice. From the moment he started to write, he spoke for the people, and the people loved him for it, as do I.

• Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812

Variations on the theme of a secular religion

At the end of his previous book, Howto Stop Living and Start Worrying, Simon Critchley wrote: "If morality becomes a question, as it is on BBC Radio 4, of nicely educated people with shrill voices making choices between different courses of action and being able to account for them, then this is awful." With The Faith of the Faithless, Critchley shows what a moral philosophy that goes beyond media bloviating might look like, and moves his own thinking beyond the traumatic aporia with which How to Stop Living and Start Worrying ended. Critchley was one of the first thinkers to stress that so-called "continental philosophy" had an ethical dimension over and above its worrying and fraying at the textures of language, and that manner of analysis typifies this new, movingly optimistic, work.

In Infinitely Demanding, Critchley had already begun to articulate the methods by which the state of being a "dividual" – "the self which shapes itself in relation to the experience of an overwhelming, infinite demand that divides it from itself" – might represent the precondition for committed engagement rather than a paralysing paradox. The Faith of the Faithless outlines in more detail his views on the nature of conscience and the possibility of an "anarchism of responsibility".

It does so through close and nuanced readings of Rousseau, Heidegger, Oscar Wilde, St Paul and Kierkegaard. Along the way, he has some pointed and precise things to say about two other high-profile contemporary philosophers, John Gray, and Slavoj Žižek, over whose review of Critchley's Infinitely Demanding there was a testy public debate. (Žižek used the review to fulminate about anti-war protesters as tacitly providing support for the war: the state could say "see how we allow demonstrations against us" while the protesters could not bring themselves to deploy the "divine violence" that would effect revolutionary transformation.)

The chapters of this new book do not establish and develop an argument. Instead, they parry and complement each other; it is better to think of them as symphonic movements. The theme on which Critchley plays his variations is established in the introduction: "Rather than seeing modernity in terms of a process of secularisation, I will claim that the history of political forms can best be viewed as a series of metamorphoses of sacralisation." Wilde's idea of a "confraternity of the Faithless … where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine" motivates the interlinking ideas: how can those who "cannot believe" reclaim from the vestiges of religion the moral authority and political radicalism that it once had? How can Wilde's italicised "cannot" stand upright? "Everything to be true must become a religion," Wilde says, and Critchley, poetically and persuasively, suggests ways in which this might be accomplished. Yet he seems racked by doubt on whether it ever will.

The first variation is on Rousseau, and his letter to Voltaire asking – or demanding: Rousseau is always the sly hysteric – that Voltaire write a "catechism of the citizen". How could secular societies find a binding mechanism that effectively replaced traditional forms of unity? Critchley doesn't raise the spectre of Robespierre's cult of the Supreme Being, the practical (and failed) application of Rousseau's ideal.

The second chapter carefully unpicks the persistence of original sin in the thinking of Carl Schmitt and John Gray, whose "passive nihilism" – a profound pessimism that we "killer apes" can ever improve ourselves or the world, leads him to cling to the aesthetic as the only consolation in this vale of tears.

In his penultimate experiment Critchley turns to St Paul and the idea of faith, with particular reference to Heidegger's references to Paul. And Crichley's account of the "Pauline turn" in the work of Agamben, Badiou and Taubes is astonishing. But he relies a little too much on the figures he is deconstructing, rather than on Paul himself. In the first and second letters to the Corinthians, the self-abasing Paul is just as Critchley depicts him: a man suffering Critchley's infinite demand. But, historically, by the time Paul is imprisoned and writing to the Ephesians and in his so-called "pastoral letters", a different Paul emerges; a braver Paul, a man who has somehow discovered confidence. Whence this power? Whence this bravery?

The final chapter is the most rebarbative, and the funniest. Critchley is obviously peeved at Žižek, and, rather than simply opposing his beliefs, puts him on the couch instead. Coyly claiming to "depolemicise" the debate, he turns Žižek into a teenager, who sits by idly while fantasising about smashing up either the state or the local Tesco. Critchley writes in sorrow: while being the best proponent of hope, he is stricken with hopelessness; while imaging a better tomorrow, he can't help but remember yesterdays. He is moving when he describes "the faithless who can best sustain the rigour of faith without requiring security, guarantees or rewards". But believers, as well as non-believers, are no longer allowed the naivety of a pre-Kierkegaardian faith. As the old hymn goes, the difference is in the possibility of "love to the loveless shown / that they might lovely be".

• Stuart Kelly's The Book of Lost Books is published by Polygon.

He had the world at his paws, and earned $1,000 a week

The creature at the centre of this remarkable book is an enigma. We never really know what he is thinking, and in fact he may not think at all, in the ratiocinatory sense. Susan Orlean presents to us a being who is driven by instinct, operating by a set of large, simple affects – love, honour, bravery and above all loyalty. He remains faithful throughout his life to the companion with whom at an early age he found himself paired, and while he acknowledges and even shows affection towards others, in truth he loves only his best friend. "He had become," Orlean writes, "as familiar to me as a family member, and, as is often case with a family member, he also remained a mystery. He was at once ingenuous and impenetrable …"

And then there is the dog.

Lee Duncan, the owner and, it might be said, the inventor of Rin Tin Tin, was born in 1893. When he was five, Lee's father abandoned his young wife and family and disappeared, and shortly thereafter the boy was put into the Fred Finch Children's Home in the East Bay Hills in California. The institution, Orlean writes, "operated as a peculiar sort of pawn shop", since if their fortunes improved parents who had deposited their children there could redeem them, unless they had been adopted in the meantime. And indeed, in 1901, Elizabeth reclaimed Lee and took him to live on her parents' farm. There he had a pet dog named Jack which he dearly loved, but soon his restless mother was on the move again, and Jack had to be left behind.

The first world war had been grinding on for three years when Duncan enlisted in the army at the age of 17, hoping to become a flyer, although he only got to fly once, and was wounded on his first sortie. He endured the military life with an orphan's stoicism, and his later account of his fighting days was, Orlean tells us, "soldierly and understated". Everything changed for him, however, on 15 September 1918, when in the village of Fluiry, near Verdun, he stumbled on a dog kennel that had been abandoned by retreating German forces.

One of the countless fascinating matters discussed in this fascinating book is the extent to which animals were deployed in the wars of the 20th century – 16 million in the first world war alone, including horses, mules, pigeons, oxen and dogs. The German army regarded dogs as "important auxiliaries", and in particular favoured German shepherds. It was a family of this breed that Duncan found in the bombed-out kennel in Fluiry that September morning, a mother and her five pups, the only survivors of a pack of 20. He brought the dogs back to base and made a shelter for them in an empty oil barrel. "And then," he wrote in his diary, "the little family started light housekeeping."

He ended up keeping two of the puppies, whom he named Rin Tin Tin and Nanette, after a pair of fingerling dolls that French soldiers kept as good-luck charms. After the armistice, through persistence and the odd stroke of good fortune he managed to get the dogs back to America, and began to train them. Orlean writes: "His plan for Rin Tin Tin was quite modest: he wanted to breed him and Nanette, sell a few puppies, and maybe make a name for himself and Rin Tin Tin at dog shows." Instead, he created one of the most extraordinary and enduring of Hollywood mythical figures.

By the middle of the 1920s, Orlean tells us – another amazing fact – almost 100m movie tickets were sold each week to a population of 115 million. Warner Brothers, the studio where Rin Tin Tin began his career, was worth $16m in 1928, $200m two years later. Much of this success was thanks to Rin Tin Tin. The adventure films in which he starred were an immediate and immense success, and Rinty became a national icon.

… Rin Tin Tin's name and phone number were listed in the Los Angeles phone book, and … he had an open invitation to the Warner Bros commissary and was welcomed there like a star. He got his own salary, separate from Lee's salary as his trainer, and he earned more than most of his costars; in Lighthouse by the Sea, for instance, he was paid $1,000 per week, while the lead human actor, William Collier Jr, was paid only $150.

The effect on Rinty's owner of this lavish success is impossible to judge. In fact, it is hard to know anything much of Duncan's deepest feelings. He was not exactly garrulous. In his memoirs he hardly mentioned his first wife, a wealthy socialite, and Carolyn, his daughter by a second marriage, asked by Orlean if she felt sibling rivalry towards her father's dogs, laughed and said: "No, there was never any rivalry. The dogs came first."

The emotional strand that runs unbroken through Duncan's life is his obsession with the figures of the emblematic lonely boy and his faithful dog. One of his most cherished ambitions was to see a film made of his own story – of the story, that is, of Rin Tin Tin and all that he was and meant to America, and of Duncan's secondary role in the fable. When the original Rinty died – there were many successors, for how could a myth die? – Duncan wrote a poem to him, ending: "A real selfish [sic] love like yours old pal / Is something I shall never know again / And I must always be a better man / Because you loved me greatly, Rin Tin Tin."

Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, another tale of mystery and obsession, has here written a wonderfully entertaining account of one of the strangest partnerships in a very strange milieu. Hollywood eccentrics abound in these pages. There is the silent-movie director Laurence Trimble, who bought a pack of wolves and lived with them, sleeping in a hole in their enclosure and eating off the ground; "Unsurprisingly," Orlean writes, "his personal life was unsettled." One of Trimble's associates, the journalist and film producer J Allen Boone, cousin to the more famous Daniel, made friends with a housefly he named Freddie, whom he talked to "not," as he said, "in a condemning way but as a fellow human being." And there is more – much, much more.

Orlean tells of going through Lee Duncan's papers and finding there "the details and the ordinariness, the asides and incidentals, and even the misfires and failures that might otherwise have gone unnoticed", which is a fair description of what she in turn offers us in her book. The story of Lee and Rinty is at the public level a Hollywood fairy tale, yet fundamentally it is no more, and no less, than the tale of a boy and his dog.

• John Banville's The Infinities is published by Picador.

The first novel from Newsnight's economics editor is an enjoyable romp through China

It's a conspiracy theorist's dream. One nation holds most of the planet's supply of "rare earths", the metals and alloys key to building many of the developed world's must-have items, including mobile phones, computers, cameras and precision missiles. And that country happens to be China: the world's last great bastion of communism (if you don't count its basket-case dependent, North Korea) and for centuries the focus of western fear, loathing and grudging admiration. This is the dramatic factual premise behind this febrile but enjoyable first novel by Paul Mason, Newsnight's economics editor.

A paunchy middle-aged reporter called Brough – "a has-been hack with a Yorkshire accent" reeking of whisky – washes up in deep northwest China in May 2009, to make a documentary about the state of the Chinese environment. He is accompanied by his producer, Georgina, a ruthless blonde alumna of Cheltenham Ladies College desperate to swing a Chinese television distribution deal; by an even more washed-up cameraman called Carstairs; and by Chun-Li, their enigmatic Chinese interpreter. After an afternoon filming townspeople sick from factory pollution, the crew is arrested and barely escapes an assassination attempt by a crazed underling from the local propaganda office.

While Brough fakes his own death and flees into the Gobi Desert, Chun-Li (a freelance spy, we learn) promptly dopes a psychotic Mongolian sex maniac with Russian truth-drug, and discovers the area is ruled by a cartel – half-gangster, half-government – that has enriched itself on illegal mining of rare earths.

Brough, meanwhile, is kidnapped by a motorbike gang of paramilitary fashionistas called the Steel Fuchsias, all of whom are both fervent believers in the full operation of market forces and staunch supporters of the Communist party. He eventually escapes to a forced-labour camp inhabited by political prisoners riddled with mining-related cancers, and learns for himself about the rare earth racket. Throughout, Chun-Li and Brough are pursued across the Gobi by a thuggish police superintendant, while Brough's efforts to get the story down on film are frustrated by business-conscious Georgina's desire for a whitewash documentary to keep her official Chinese media contacts sweet.

All of this is imagined, of course. "I wrote Rare Earth," Mason says, "because I got tired of trying to tell the China story as fact – with so much of the political reality hidden from view, it would be easier to tell it as fiction." For sure, there's a good deal of silliness amid the invention. Reading the passages rich in masochistic sex, you easily imagine Mason joyfully kicking free of BBC fact-checkers. Challenged about some of the book's fruitier scenes, Mason has shrugged his shoulders: his characters "just became real and started mating with each other". But as a warning to anyone questioning his authenticity, he has also threatened to make public "the academic source literature for Mongolian horseback sex. It exists." This reviewer is willing to take that episode on trust.

But given that the book was apparently written on the back of one Newsnight research trip to China in 2009, Mason's thriller-parody also manages a respectable sprinkling of insights into the country. The Steel Fuchsias are a burlesque of the fervent party loyalty observed in some of China's most privileged, internationalised youth today. Contemporary China, one of Mason's protagonists remarks acutely, has recreated the late Qing dynasty, which toppled a century ago: "Whole swaths of China are ungoverned: ruled by mobsters and corrupt officials … At the centre is a walled palace, only it's not the Forbidden City, it's the Communist party HQ."

There are entertaining jokes and smart, no-nonsense descriptions: air "baked by blast furnaces and hung heavy with the odour of coal and gasoline; the odour of 9.9% GDP growth". It's hard to decide who comes off worst in the book: the greedy party apparatchiks wallowing in small-town massage parlours, or the opportunistic western TV executives ensconced in their five-star Beijing hotels. Although Mason has clearly relished his liberating foray into fiction, the discipline of years observing the BBC charter's stipulation on balanced reporting has left its mark on Rare Earth.

• Julia Lovell's The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China is published by Picador. To order Rare Earth go to www.orbooks.com

Caitlin Flanagan's tips on raising teenage girls are muddle-headed and laughably outdated

When Caitlin Flanagan was a teenage girl, she would come home from school, put on "a pug ugly forest green tracksuit" and disappear into her bedroom for hours at a time. Here she would "let the cat in and sit on the bed and stare at the wallpaper for an hour" to recover from yet another hectic, hormone-ridden day.

In Girl Land, which touts itself as "a lively social history… and a rousing reminder to parents to protect their daughters", Flanagan suggests that it was only by sitting on her bed, gazing aimlessly into space, reading Judy Blume books and stroking the cat that she was able to survive this perilous time of transition from childhood to adulthood with her rightwing morality intact.

These days, Flanagan is worried that there is an altogether different type of pussy in the bedroom – internet porn. "Allowing girls to have internet connections in their bedrooms is one of the worst decisions a parent can make," Flanagan opines. "It violates the space – physical and psychological – of that room and it robs them of the essential requirements of keeping a diary."

As evidence for this sweeping thesis, Flanagan – whose previous book, To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, firmly established her as the darling of conservative America – types "porn" into the search engine and discovers it can throw up some fairly edgy stuff "far afield from the mutually satisfying exploits of [Judy Blume's] Forever". Who'd have thought it, eh?

According to Flanagan, a former staff writer for the Atlantic, the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, today's innocent wisps of youthful femininity are constantly assailed by this same pornographic content. They are creating "vulgar, highly sexual, crude" personalities for themselves on Facebook. They are no longer wearing green tracksuits or pulling petals off daisies, but instead spending their time instant messaging each other about "the teenage oral sex craze" or "a barmitzvah dinner dance on the north shore of Chicago, where the girls serviced all the boys on the chartered bus from the temple to the reception hall". Flanagan thinks parents should do something about this. It's just that she's not quite sure what.

Flanagan knows all of this about teenagers because… well, she just does. It's not that she's done all that much research, other than asking a few of her like-minded friends what they think (expert sources in Girl Land include "a friend who attended a leadership conference for girls"). It's not that she has experience of raising teenage girls of her own – in fact, her author biography states that she is the mother of two sons. And it's not that she seems to have spoken to any actual teenage girls living in the 21st century – the most prominent adolescent girl quoted in the book is Anne Frank, whom Flanagan describes as someone who "understood fame… a girl of the modern era".

But it's all right because Flanagan, as she repeatedly reassures us, remembers really, really clearly what it was like to be a teenager herself. As do all her friends. "Every woman I've known describes her adolescence as the most psychologically intense period of her life," she writes in the opening sentence, a statement so crass as to render it almost comic.

Still, let's assume that Flanagan has indeed asked every woman she's ever encountered the same question about their adolescence and that they all agreed it was "psychologically intense", can the author offer us any new insights about this crucial transition from girlhood to maturity?

Sadly, the answer is no (and I'm sure every woman I've known would agree). Instead of providing us with a cogent polemic against the highly sexualised, hyper-connected world in which teenage girls are bombarded with images of semi-naked, airbrushed females claiming that boob jobs and Brazilian waxes are empowering, Flanagan's only premise seems to be that things were better in her day and wouldn't it be simpler if we all just wound the clock back?

To this end, she litters her text with references to women born at the turn of the last century: Betty Smith (b 1896), the author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is mentioned, as is the publisher Enid Haupt (b 1906) and the silent film star Clara Bow (b 1905) whom Flanagan describes, in a desperate bid to be down with the kids, as "the forerunner to... Lady Gaga."

Unlike Natasha Walter in Living Dolls or the other Caitlin (Moran) in How to Be a Woman, Flanagan makes no attempt to engage with the knotty complexity of present-day reality.

Instead, after recounting her own tale of an unpleasant sexual episode with an aggressive boy in the 1970s, Flanagan concludes that the most effective way to stop this sort of behaviour is to ensure that a girl's father is "involved in her dating life".

"A father at home is… invaluable to adolescent girls because it makes them far less likely to be targets of the kinds of boys who become emotionally, physically or sexually abusive," Flanagan writes breezily. "Those kinds of teenage boys are punks, and the one thing punks can't stand is coming under the authority and scrutiny of a powerful adult male."

Leaving aside the fact that the last person to use the word "punk" with a straight face was Dirty Harry, there are several things to object to here. One is the implication that a mother – single or otherwise – would somehow not be able to cope (perhaps they're all too busy unplugging their daughter's internet connections upstairs). Then there is Flanagan's ridiculously outdated notion that adolescent relationships still involve a boy turning up at a doorstep to pick up his date, perhaps accompanied by an upbeat Beach Boys track. As far as I know, teenagers stopped doing this about 30 years ago. These days, it's more about hanging out in groups on park benches necking vodka and talking about the latest episode of Skins.

Finally, there is the sense – reflected throughout – that Flanagan's musings are only ever addressed to the tiny proportion of the population that is white, middle-class and more or less like her. Nowhere does she analyse the rising rates of teenage pregnancy or abortion among less affluent quarters of the US population, or examine the fact that – according to one study recently quoted in New York magazine – African-American girls are more than twice as likely as white girls to have sex before they are 13.

Instead, it's all Judy Blume and Betty Smith and the seminal 1936 work Complete Practical Suggestions for Staging the Junior-Senior Prom. I'm glad Caitlin Flanagan got through her adolescence relatively unscathed but I can't help thinking it might have been better if she'd confided these muddle-headed thoughts to the "essential" teenage diary she once kept. Then, at least, the rest of us wouldn't have to read them.

Elizabeth Day's Scissors Paper Stone is out now in paperback (Bloomsbury).

Tony Judt's last book is an admirable assessment of intellectuals and politics in the last century

In this marvellous book, two explorers set out on a journey from which only one of them will return. Their unknown land is that often fearsome continent we call the 20th century. Their route is through their own minds and memories. Both travellers are professional historians still tormented by their own unanswered questions. They needed to talk to one another, and the time was short.

Tony Judt, author of Postwar, found that he was suffering from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), an incurable degenerative disease. His friend Timothy Snyder, a younger American historian, offered to help Judt create his final work. It takes the form of a series of conversations, recorded and then transcribed for Judt's approval over the best part of two years. Judt died in August 2010, a few weeks after dictating a long "afterword", which is as lucid as anything he had written. He was 62 years old.

The two are talking without notes, references or inhibitions. As they grow excited, one thing leads off into another, and Snyder – as editor – hasn't made the mistake of imposing too much thematic order. He did, however, persuade Judt that he ought to talk about himself and his personal life as well as his opinions. As Judt himself says at one point: "You cannot fully appreciate the shape of the 20th century if you did not once share its illusions."

Born in London in 1948, into a Jewish immigrant family, Judt acquired commitments but surprisingly few illusions. He was a "Marxisant" historian, but not a communist. He gave much of his early career to the history of the French left, but could not buy its arrogant assumption that the Russian revolution was merely the continuation of 1789. He was briefly "swept away" by the évènements of 1968, but "my residual socialist-Marxist formation made me instinctively suspicious of the popular notion that students might now be a – the – revolutionary class."

Only Zionism seized and then deluded him, at the age of 15. He worked loyally on leftwing kibbutzim and served in the Israel Defense Forces until it dawned on him that he had never met an Arab and that most Israelis "out there" were anything but socialist and ethnically tolerant. Since then, his criticism of the state of Israel has been biting; his New York Review of Books article in 1993 calling for a "single-state" solution, aroused what he calls "a firestorm of resentment and misunderstanding". In these dialogues, he returns often and irritably to American Jews "who have cast their lot with Likud". To him, "the fear that Israel could be "wiped off the face of the earth" … is not a genuine fear. It is a politically calculated rhetorical strategy."

Though they agree that intellectuals made fearful mistakes between the rise of Stalinism and the Iraq war, neither Judt nor Snyder quite define what an intellectual is. At one point, Judt says that an intellectual needs to show that "the way in which he or she contributes to local conversation is in principle of interest to people beyond that conversation. Otherwise, every policy wonk and newspaper columnist could credibly claim intellectual status". This rather contrasts with his view that American intellectuals failed over the Iraq war and that only certain journalists displayed integrity and consistency. But elsewhere he declares that "The role of the intellectual is to get the truth out … and then explain why it just is the truth." What he doesn't want is intellectuals offering grand narratives or "large moral truisms".

The intellectual sin of the century, for him, was "passing judgment on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it …" For Judt, "the biggest story of the 20th century" was "how so many smart people could have told themselves such stories with all the terrible consequences that ensued". Here Snyder intervenes. Eric Hobsbawm is cited repeatedly and with great respect in these conversations, but Snyder asks: "How can it be that someone who made that kind of mistake" – staying in the Communist party – "has become in the fullness of time one of the most important interpreters of the century?" Judt answers with his remark about the need to have shared the illusions of that period, "especially the communist illusion"; Snyder concedes that such experience grants a historian "sympathetic understanding".

Snyder is by no means a mere prompter, although the main voice here is Judt's. Twenty-one years younger, he pokes gently into gaps in Judt's account of himself. Why did he evade for so long "the manifest centrality of the Holocaust" to his subjects, like other Jewish scholars of his generation? Or how, as a new American citizen, can he say that "I profoundly do not identify with America, the United States" and yet – a few minutes later – talk about "our American failure to address this subject" of Israel? And he seems puzzled by Judt's punctilious habit of referring to "England" rather than "Britain" in matters of culture and identity.

On the other hand, Snyder knows things about east European cultural history which Judt doesn't. And it's Snyder, by asking whether intellectuals can really operate with vague global categories, who provokes Judt into proclaiming that "there is no such thing as a 'global audience' … labels to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no such thing as a 'global intellectual': Slavoj Žižek does not actually exist." Judt insists that it's the "middle ground", still essentially the individual nation, that matters: "Anyone seriously concerned with changing the world is likely, paradoxically, to be operating above all in this middle register."

Brilliantly eloquent, and apparently recalling every book they have ever read, the two historians find something striking and original to say about almost everything. Judt takes a devastating slash at English comprehensive education ("Britain proceeded backwards, from a recently established social and intellectual meritocracy to a regressive and socially selective system of secondary education whereby the wealthy could once again buy an education all but unavailable to the poor"). He is testy about postmodern "cultural studies" ("a sort of half-conscious academic charivari") and pseudo-Marxist social history that "merely replaced 'workers' with 'women' or students, or peasants, or – eventually – gays".

They discuss how the first world war led intellectuals not only to pacifism but also – especially in Italy and Germany – to a celebration of violence and bloodshed, in which fascist writers could admire Lenin for his sheer ruthlessness. They compare French intellectual reactions to the Dreyfus case with American failure to speak out against the 2003 Iraq war, ask why Marxism caught on so strongly in Catholic countries, and recall that "socialist" Britain after 1945, supposedly so regimented, actually had no national plan at all – in contrast to continental nations.

But the dialogues converge, slowly but surely, on Judt's passionate alarm about the world we now inhabit. In Postwar and in the blazing, urgent polemic of his last book, Ill Fares the Land, Judt defended the European "social democratic" consensus of the postwar years and demolished the intellectual foundations of the Reagan-Thatcher epoch that followed. Today, he says here, all the postwar certainties about employment, health, culture or comfortable retirement have been replaced by a new condition of fear. "It seems to me that the resurgence of fear, and the political consequences it evokes, offer the strongest argument for social democracy that one could possibly make."

Judt suggests that the main conflict of the 20th century was not simply about freedom versus totalitarianism, but about the role of the state. After 1945, liberal reformers "forged strong, high-taxing and actively interventionist states which could encompass complex mass societies without resorting to violence or repression". They replaced "the erosion of society by the politics of fear" with "the politics of social cohesion based around collective purposes".

He's right, surely, that we should remember that century not only for war and Holocaust, but for the most magnificent humane achievement in history. Judt and Snyder ask each other if it would take disaster, even wars, to retrieve that spirit. No, it's for intellectuals "to remake the argument about the nature of the public good". Tony Judt's last words are hot with his typical courage: "This is going to be a long road. But it would be irresponsible to pretend that there is any serious alternative."

• Neal Ascherson's Black Sea is published by Vintage.

Reader review: EKareno Munro has an impressive ability to compress whole lives into a few pages

Booksellers hint at a possible 'labelling strike' where they would simply refuse to stick new price tags on books

Behind nine vast window displays of graphic novels, art and politics books, hand-written reviews were tacked to recommended fiction and booksellers greeted customers by name while welcoming passing trade from the neighbouring organic market.

"In London I was shocked to see tables of three-for-two book offers as if they were selling socks," said Karine Henry, co-manager of the Comme Un Roman independent bookshop in Paris's trendy northern Marais. "We're a smiling, cultural service to the neighbourhood – with an added human value you could never get from a website."

France's 3,000 independent bookstores may seem like a literary utopia to small book-traders across the Channel. A French law fixing book prices means readers pay the same whether they buy online, from a chain or from a small bookseller.

Discounting is banned. The government boasts this has saved independents from the ravages of free-market capitalism that hit the UK when it dropped fixed prices in the 1990s.

But all is not well in the world of small French bookshops, as literature becomes a small but significant part of the political row over how to fix France's economic crisis. In Nicolas Sarkozy's second crisis-budget plan, which raised taxes to try to plug the deficit, he raised VAT on books from 5.5% to 7%.

Booksellers' unions are up in arms against the measure, which comes into force in April, warning that their tiny margins could shrink further while they struggle with high rents and business charges.

Selling books in France is one of the least profitable sales businesses, with a far lower margin than the ubiquitous opticians or perfumeries. Other countries, including the UK, exempt books from VAT.

"This sector is fragile and delicate, its margins can't take the hit," said Henry, who was preparing a window display of protest postcards by a major Paris cartoonist. Some booksellers have hinted at a possible "labelling strike" where they simply refuse to stick on new price tags.

The culture minister has ordered an urgent review into how to help small booksellers stay afloat. But VAT on books has become a cultural battleground between Sarkozy, who has fought off charges of being the least cultured French president in history, and the Socialist presidential candidate, François Hollande, who recently misquoted Shakespeare at his first major rally.

Hollande promised to roll back the VAT increase on books, saying "culture should be a political priority".

Guillaume Husson, of the booksellers union Syndicat de la Librairie Française, said: "We're against the principle of VAT on books. Books should be considered a product of necessity in society."

The row comes as the fixed price law has been extended to French ebooks, and small booksellers debate how to compete against the rise of high-street chains and online stores.

A group of independent booksellers recently published an appeal in Le Monde begging French readers to avoid "soul-less global giants".

Penguin Books poll to mark 200th anniversary of author's birth reveals miser from A Christmas Carol as best loved

A cold-hearted miser bullied by ghosts into gaining a conscience has triumphed over a festering, jilted bride and an alcoholic, nihilistic barrister – not to mention the odd pickpocket and escaped convict – to be named the most popular Charles Dickens character.

Ebenezer Scrooge saw off many of the writer's best known and loved creations, including Miss Havisham, Sydney Carton, the Artful Dodger, Fagin, Nancy and Magwitch, in a Penguin Books poll commissioned to mark the 200th anniversary this week of Dickens's birth.

The top 10 is light on unadulterated goodness, with only Pip and Joe Gargery from Great Expectations and Betsey Trotwood from David Copperfield representing the kinder faces among the Dickensian ranks.

And although the list is heavily slanted towards Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, Oliver himself was left wanting more votes at No 11.

Claire Tomalin, whose highly acclaimed biography of Dickens was published last year, said that Scrooge's popularity was surprising given that his 21st-century equivalent might be a banker.

"But Dickens excelled in creating villains, and always gave them more energy and brio than his good characters, so that we never forget them," she said. "Scrooge is a monster, a wicked employer and a heartless miser, but he is allowed to repent and see the error of his ways."

Some of Britain's bestselling authors also picked their favourite Dickens characters. Tim Lott and Josephine Cox opted for Pip and Oliver respectively; Freya North chose Uriah Heep, describing him as a "loathsome character who seeps from the pages like a noxious gas"; Daisy Goodwin went for "the anti-heroine of Bleak House", Lady Dedlock, while Adele Parks favoured the "morally ambiguous" Nancy from Oliver Twist.

Tomalin has also used the anniversary to lament young readers' inability to get to grips with Dickens.

"Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner," she said.

"Children are not being educated to have prolonged attention spans and you have to be prepared to read steadily for a Dickens novel and I think that's a pity."

Tomalin described Dickens as "the greatest creator of characters in English" after Shakespeare and stressed his enduring relevance to Britain in 2012.

"When he went to America in 1842, one of the points he made was that the 'unimportant' and 'peripheral' people were just as interesting to write about as 'great' people," she said.

"You only have to look around our society and everything he wrote about in the 1840s is still relevant – the great gulf between the rich and poor, corrupt financiers, corrupt members of parliament, how the country is run by old Etonians, you name it, he said it."

Events are taking place across the globe to mark Dickens's 200th birthday on Tuesday 7 February, including a street party in the road where he was born in Portsmouth, and a wreath-laying ceremony at his grave in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, London. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall will attend the abbey ceremony, where readers will include Tomalin and the actor and director Ralph Fiennes. The British Council has also organised a global Dickens read-a-thon, which will see a reading marathon lasting 24 hours in 24 different countries from Albania to Zimbabwe.

Publishers face secrecy over sales and an absence of industry-wide data to help them plot strategy

Kindle-owning bibliophiles are furtive beasts. Their shelves still boast classics and Booker winners. But inside that plastic case, other things lurk. Sci-fi and self-help. Even paranormal romance, where vampires seduce virgins and elves bonk trolls.

The ebook world is driven by so-called genre fiction, categories such as horror or romance. It's not future classics that push digital sales, but more downmarket fare. No cliche is left unturned, no adjective underplayed. At the time of writing, the bestselling Amazon Kindle book was Asylum Harbor, by Traci Hohenstein. Crime sells. Try a sample, I dare you. In digital, dross rises. But does this have implications for publishers' decision-making, as we increasingly migrate?

One of the problems publishers face in setting strategy is the absence of industry-wide data on ebook sales. Amazon, the dominant player, is secretive with its numbers. As the company revealed its mixed results for 2011 last week, all its UK division would say was that ebook sales over the past three months were up five-fold on the equivalent period last year. No actual data.

Amazon has started supplying data to Nielsen BookData in the US for the Wall Street Journal's bestseller lists, but the information is limited. UK publishers know their own genre titles do best as Amazon tells them this privately; across the industry there is nothing to go on.

A study in the US last year by Publishers Weekly and Bowker found that literary fiction outsold all forms of genre fiction, winning 20% of market share. But this figure includes classics. Most new Kindle owners buy an avalanche of classics in their initial excitement. All of Trollope for £1.99! All of Dickens for £3! But are they actually read? The genre of sci-fi came in at 19% and Christian fiction, God help us, third, at 16%.

Price is a big driver of digital sales. Self-publishing authors have cannily priced themselves into the game. Publishers watched the demise of the music and newspaper industries. Should they keep prices high and differentiate their wares from the unedited efforts of the self-published? Should they cut prices for ebooks and risk accelerating the decline of print?

But price is not the only factor. Industry figures point to the mechanism of searching for new titles – genre sells well because its readers know what they like and where to find it. On finishing one read, it's the matter of seconds before you can summon another from the ether.

Mills & Boon has done particularly well. While 6%-12% of the UK book market is digital, depending on whom you speak to, Mills & Boon publish in excess of 100 digital titles every month, and only 55 physical ones. Tim Cooper, its digital marketing director, says it is helped by its "habit-forming books". Fresh subgenres are emerging. Fancy a Christian romance, or a racy paranormal shagathon? Easy. Last week, on its website, it was promoting "Sheikhs vs Greeks". The realist version would be "megalomaniac misogynist vs bankrupt tax-dodger". Mmm, which should a girl choose!

There is a literary snobbishness at play here, clearly. Reading has always been a competitive sport. Why else would anyone have read Ulysses? Consider those boys who read ostentatious poetry to pull winsome girls; the girls who read Vanity Fair to let the poetical boys know that they are clever and minxy.

The reading public in private is lazy and smutty. E-readers hide the material. Erotica sells well. My own downmarket literary fetish is male-oriented historical fiction (histfic). Swords and sails stuff. I'm happier reading it on an e-reader, and keeping shelf space for books that proclaim my cleverness.

Publishers say that there is little real change going on, just substitution: those who buy genre books start buying digitally instead. I'm not so sure it is wise to underestimate the boundless idiocy of the unobserved reading public. They may intend to go to the Economist website to read the latest in the euro crisis, but oops! they've ended up on Mail Online reading about the Kardashians. Traci Hohenstein, anyone?

Bronze sculptures by my friend Mike Gillespie, who has died aged 82, can be seen in several Cambridge colleges, at the Gas Research Centre at Loughborough University and in numerous private collections in Britain and abroad. He urged people not to look for "meaning" in his work but to attend to it as they might listen to music.

Born in London, he was educated at St Paul's school and Hammersmith College of Art (1952-56). Mike's sculpture was often abstract, dealing with balance and weight in a way that created a sensation of movement and dance in bronze, but he also created figurative works, including a number of commissioned bronze portraits, and a powerful series based on images from the second world war. In all these works, whether abstract or figurative, there is a strong sense of inner forms being revealed, not in a static way but always with the possibility of motion.

Mike will also be remembered by many as a fine bronze-caster, working for Jacob Epstein to produce numerous bronze heads and also for Elisabeth Frink, who called him the best bronze caster in England. In 1969 he wrote Studio Bronze Casting with John W Mills. In 1979 Frink arranged that Mike should cast a copy of the great bronze sanctuary knocker on the door of Durham Cathedral. This fearsome object was kept in the family bathroom for a while, hung above the bath, waiting for steam to turn the patina an ancient green.

After suffering a stroke in 2002, Mike was no longer able to cast bronze, but he continued to work, welding metal one- handed to create the forms that meant so much to him. He kept working until the end of his life. A keen lover of music, he rote extensively about his philosophy of art.

Mike was a respected teacher of sculpture, portraiture and life drawing. As a dedicated craftsman as well as an artist, he also taught bronze casting at his alma mater Hammersmith, and at Cambridgeshire College of Arts and Technology and Hertfordshire College of Art.

Mike is survived by his wife, Lesley, and their children, Nick, Anna and Douglas, as well as eight grandchildren.

My father, the poet and writer Basil Payne, has died aged 88. Basil believed a poet's job was to act not as an oracle, but as a catalyst. He wanted his words to take the reader on a reflective journey of enlightenment, shaped by their own experience.

He was born in Dublin. As a child, he attended the city's Synge Street Christian Brothers school, known for its stern teachers. He then worked as a shipping company clerk while attending night classes at University College Dublin. Upon completing his degree, and on the basis of a paper he wrote on health insurance in Ireland, Basil was asked to join the board of Ireland's first voluntary health insurance company, the VHI. At this time, he was also writing poetry and plays, and reviewing books and films for the Irish Times and writing plays and reviews for Radio Éireann.

Basil won the Guinness international poetry competition for his poem Enemies in 1964. During the 1970s he began lecturing on poetry at Trinity College Dublin and presented his one-man show, In Dublin's Quare City, at the Peacock theatre. In 1971, he left his job at the VHI and moved to the US with his wife, Monessa, and their family on a six-month university lectureship which turned into a four-year "voluntary exile". After his return to Ireland, he occasionally interrupted his writing to give readings and presentations, but in the main he became reclusive, often suffering from bouts of depression.

Basil often told the tale of how his mother "sung him awake" when he was born. The nurse who was with him at the end told me how she used to sing him to sleep. He died as I was on a ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea, on my way to see him for the last time. I had hoped to see his face light up as I told him of an invitation to read his work at the Cheltenham poetry festival and that his first poetry book, Sunlight on a Square (1961), was now on Amazon's Kindle. From that collection, Lines in Memory of My Father personifies his role as a catalytic and cathartic poet. It opens:

Fishing, one morning early in July
From the canal bank – that was the closest ever
We came to entering each other's world

Basil died on Little Christmas (Epiphany), the day that Joyce's short story The Dead takes place. In his later years Basil would often recite the final paragraph verbatim. We shared a love of those words, sadly one of the few things we had in common.

Monessa died in 2003. Basil is survived by his children, me, Norbert, Lucy, Gregory, Bernard, Michael and Christopher; and his 11 grandchildren.

The Australian writer Andrew McMillan has died at the age of 54. When he was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2010, Andrew announced a "living wake", which was documented by an Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV crew. His friends rallied to his cause, funding a comfortable venue and nursing staff, and, from an apartment in Darwin's main street, he held court bedside, continued writing and formed a band, the Rattling Mudguards, with whom he recorded a CD.

He had begun his writing career under the influence of gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson. As a schoolboy in Brisbane, he freelanced for Rock Australia Magazine. He later wrote for Rolling Stone and a range of mainstream Australian papers.

He travelled to Darwin in 1986 to follow a pioneering tour of remote Northern Territory communities by Midnight Oil and the Warumpi Band. This resulted in his book Strict Rules: The Blackfella-Whitefella Tour, published in 1988. Andrew moved to Darwin permanently that year. In the words of his friend Chips Mackinolty: "He came to the Territory chasing music as a journalist … and never looked back as a writer."

In 1991 he formed the Fourth Estate, a ragtag band of journalists playing typewriter chorus alongside professional musicians; I played occasionally with the band. In 1992, Sceptre published Death in Dili, in which Andrew bore witness to Indonesia's military occupation of East Timor. His best-known work was An Intruder's Guide to East Arnhem Land, published in 2001. Catalina Dreaming, a history of Darwin-based flying boats in the second world war, followed a year later. In 2008 he contributed to Tiwi Footy, a beautiful photographic work by Monica Napper and Peter Eve about the champion Aboriginal footballers of the Tiwi islands, in a bilingual English-Tiwi edition.

Andrew etched his personality on to Northern Territory society and was deeply engaged with the Aboriginal community, following in the footsteps of tropical chroniclers such as Ion Idriess, Bill Harney, Douglas Lockwood and Xavier Herbert.

He is survived by his mother, Lorna.

"I would recommend this book to anyone aged between eight and twelve who likes to find out about other children's lives. It is so beautifully written and easy to read"

Julie is like any other year six schoolgirl thinking about clothes, boys and best friends until, in her last term of Primary school, her teacher asks her to be the good guide to two Mongolian brothers who turn up at the school. They are oddly dressed in huge woolly coats which they don't want to take off and Chengis, the older one is very protective of his younger brother Nergui. Chengis has a polaroid camera and he shows Julie a lot of photographs showing scenes from Mongolia. Julie's mother welcomes the boys into her home and Julie would like to pay a return visit but she soon finds out that this is not likely to happen. The whole family lives in fear and thinks that demons are trying to steal Nergui, so Chengis is constantly doing things to try to confuse the demons. One day the boys just disappear and it is not until she returns to the school as a grown up and finds Nergui's coat, still in the lost property cupboard, that she really understands what happened to them and why they behaved in the way they did.

This is a book that really made me think because Chengis, Nergui and their mother are afraid all the time. Chengis took great responsibility for looking after his brother. It was especially interesting for me because my Uncle's wife is Mongolian. I have found out that it is an absolutely enormous country and once it had the biggest Empire that the world has ever known. The characters are very real and the story made me glad that I live in a country where the thing that I am most frightened of is the possibility of a big hairy legged spider that might be lurking under my bed. I was so pleased that the book had a happy ending.
I would recommend this book to any one between eight and twelve who likes to find out about other children's lives. It is so beautifully written that it is easy to read.

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Former Cuban president makes rare appearance to present 1,000-page book, Guerrilla of Time, charting his rise to power

Fidel Castro has made a rare public appearance to launch his memoirs.

The increasingly reclusive former Cuban president spent six hours presenting the two-volume book to an audience in Havana.

State television showed a smiling, animated Castro wearing a dark tracksuit over a blue plaid button-up shirt. Audio of him speaking was not broadcast, but the Communist party newspaper Granma said he told attendees at the event on Friday that they would hear about "two books you haven't had any news of".

The memoir, Guerrilla of Time, is almost 1,000 pages long and covers Castro's life from childhood until December 1958, the eve of the triumph of the Cuban revolution. It is based on interviews with the journalist Katiuska Blanco.

"I have to take advantage now, because memory fades," Granma quoted Castro as saying.

The 85-year-old stepped aside provisionally in 2006 because of a life-threatening illness and retired permanently two years later, clearing the way for his younger brother and long-designated successor, Raúl, to take over.

Fidel Castro is seldom seen in public, though he did appear at a Communist party congress last April, holding the arm of an aide as he entered to tears and a standing ovation.

Granma said he mused about a wide range of topics on Friday, including visits from foreign dignitaries, world events and technological advances. He reportedly expressed deep opposition to private education and said Cuban leaders were wrong to think that simply by implementing socialism, all the island's economic problems would be solved. "Our duty is to fight until the last minute for our country, for our planet and for humanity," he was quoted as saying.

Castro generally speaks to Cubans through occasional columns called Reflections that are published in government-run newspapers and presented on television by newsreaders.

'Tim and Ginger are in a lot of books by Edward Ardizzone and I love all of them'

This book is about a little girl called Charlotte. It is also about two boys called Tim and Ginger. Tim and Ginger are in a lot of books by Edward Ardizzone and I love all of them.

Tim and Ginger live in a house called Sea View, right by the seaside. They love ships and sailing and have many adventures.

In this book, Tim and Ginger find Charlotte washed-up on the beach after a storm. She is wearing a pink frock and a life belt and she is unconscious. They take her home to Sea View and Tim's mother puts her to bed with lots of hot water bottles and calls the doctor.

Charlotte has lost her memory. Despite putting up posters all over town, Tim's family cannot trace her parents.

Charlotte is about five years old and has blue eyes and curly hair. She is very happy living with Tim's family.

One day, her Aunt Agatha arrives at the house. Instantly, Charlotte recognises her and she cries, 'Aunt Agatha! Oh, now I remember who I am!'

It turns out that Charlotte is an orphan and Aunt Agatha is her guardian. One day, she was washed-overboard from a yacht. Luckily, she was wearing her lifebelt. Aunt Agatha had been looking for her everywhere but could not find her. In the end, she had almost given up hope.

Aunt Agatha takes Charlotte back to their home - a great big house with lots of servants and toys. Tim and Ginger miss her very much - and she misses Tim and Ginger so dreadfully that she gets so thin and ill that doctors are called. Each one is more expensive than the next but it does not good. However, a very, very expensive doctor comes and he is kind and talks to Aunt Agatha and Charlotte and finds the cure.

One of my favourite parts of this book is when Tim and Ginger have a fight at school because the other boys find letters Tim is writing to Charlotte and say that he is in love with her. Tim and Ginger are very brave and win the fight.

I won't tell you everything that happens in this story as you should read it yourself and I don't want to spoil it. It is very exciting indeed.

This book looks wonderful as it is full of beautiful paintings and drawings. Some of the pictures have speech bubbles in them and I particularly like reading these out and making-up voices for the characters. The seaside is everywhere in the book, and I would love to go and live at Sea View and have all those adventures.

I am desperate to write a list of all the other Tim and Ginger books, so here I go ...

This one - Tim and Charlotte
Tim All Alone - my next favourite
Ship's Cook Ginger - also a favourite, especially the line, 'Don't Eat the Pie! It is poisonous!'
Tim and Lucy Go to Sea - I love this one, too. My favourite bit is when the pirates come aboard.
Tim's Friend Towser - with a brilliant dog in it.
Tim to the Rescue
Tim in Danger
Tim and Ginger
Tim to the Lighthouse
Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain
Tim's Last Voyage

I also really like another book by Edward Ardizzone called, 'Diana and her Rhinoceros'. My favourite bit is when the rhinoceros, 'made a noise which sounded just like "Toast"'.

Please read them all!

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Jonathan Franzen says the e-reader is a threat to our very systems of justice and self-government. He couldn't be more wrong

In the last few years of his life, Charles Dickens went on the road for a punishing schedule of public readings, which certainly hastened his end. In her magnificent biography, Claire Tomalin describes how he dragged himself from venue to venue, alone except for the retinue of characters in his head – lame, poorly fed and dreadfully tired, yet with an urgent need to communicate with his readers.

These readings, the precursor of the modern literary festival, remind us that the primary business of any novelist is still to connect. They came to mind last week when the American novelist Jonathan Franzen was speaking at the Hay literary festival in Cartagena about the e-reader, which he said threatened the sense of permanence found in the printed book. He went on to suggest that this loss of permanence might eventually prove "incongruous with a system of justice and self-government".

I am all for taking shots at Amazon and its popular Kindle, because the company is showing the unmistakable ticks of the power-mad monopoly, but Franzen was talking nonsense and was being a mite precious to boot.

If the printed word were the guardian of all democratic values, how is it that the country where, in 1439, a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press succumbed almost 500 years later to a totalitarian hell, in which books, and the knowledge in them, were suppressed with a relatively small number of bonfires? Ink on paper is no more a guarantor of good government than oil paint on canvas.

So we need to tamp it down a bit: the e-reader is not the barbarian at the gate; governments become corrupt and civil society is lost for other reasons.

What I guess Franzen is complaining about is that people using e-readers may not bring the serious attention to a book that he applies in his writing, which is famously undertaken in conditions of monastic rigour that exclude an internet connection. Like many, he believes that we have become shallow readers, less able to focus on the deeper meaning of books and are the worse for it.

This orthodoxy about our attention-deficit is not proven, but the obvious point is we still have a choice between screen or print, which is likely to remain, because people will always take pleasure in reading a work on the page, admiring the paper and typefaces (admittedly rare), marking a passage, gauging how long to the end of the chapter or book, lending it or giving to a friend, taking it down from the shelf again, remembering exactly what that book meant to you when you first read it and being surrounded by your books, your taste, your history of reading.

Let's go back to oil paint. This is a winter in London of three extraordinary one-man shows by the contemporary artists Gerhard Richter and David Hockney and the late Lucian Freud . In the great majority of work, the artists used oil paint, a technique invented during Gutenberg's lifetime, probably by the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, who is credited with combining mineral pigments with an oil medium that eventually dried.

Photography, film and digitally generated images came along, each apparently certain to make the slow process of painting in oils redundant. But that never happened. In the 21st century, Richter, Hockney and Freud still found they could best express their response to the physical world, or what was inside their heads, by making marks on a canvas with oil paint. The point is that humanity goes on adding to the available means of self-expression and communication, and very few forms or techniques are eliminated in the process, which is one reason to celebrate the possibilities of this extraordinary moment in history. Incidentally, no one demonstrates the open-mindedness and opportunism necessary to our times better than Hockney, who represents the same landscape, using oil, watercolour, an iPad and a battery of video cameras mounted on a van that moves slowly down a lane.

Naturally, few of us read in the way that Dickens's audience did, but that is because of a deficit of time, not necessarily one of attention. We do, however, read and write more every year. The statistics of our hyperactivity are astounding and show, for instance, that the information passing through our minds has risen threefold in the past 30 years and increases by about 6% every year. An office worker processes an average 20,000 emails per year (and this rises by about 14% every year); an American teenager is likely to send and receive about 3,339 texts each month; Facebook gets well over 100 billion hits every day, while Twitter records about 1 billion tweets every week. Imagine the reading and writing involved in all this.

So, the truth is that serious books such as Franzen's Freedom or The Corrections have to compete for our time, whether in print or on a screen. But if a book is good, it will earn the effort and reflection that no doubt Franzen's books deserve. Yet this is not an entitlement and the idea that we are becoming incapable of sustained attention simply doesn't hold up, as the sales of complicated science books attest. Indeed, I have a strong sense that the web has vastly increased our collective intelligence; that we are better informed, shrewder and able to grasp things more quickly than we were 20 years ago.

With this enormous brain at our fingertips, our intelligence is evolving and that means that writers and their writing will also evolve. The ebook is part of this and writers should grasp the opportunity with all the lack of self-consciousness and wonder that Hockney demonstrates in his use of the iPad. For one thing, there is so much fun to be had.

If Dickens were alive today, guess who'd be blogging, offering the occasional tweet, setting up literary websites, digging out some of his old work and repackaging it in ebooks. Dickens loathed many of his publishers, whom he regarded as lazy, thieving parasites, and he would have been thrilled by the opportunities we have of unmediated connection between writer and reader.

Even if we are to concede that people are less capable of devoting the necessary attention to a great work of art than we used to be, which I don't, we should not forget that publishers and the literary priesthood fear the revolution in publishing for as many bad reasons as good. This is as much about a loss of influence and income as it is about the concern for our literary nourishment.

The Congress party of Nehru and Indira Gandhi is accused of sacrificing free speech to make a comeback in India's most populous state

You can find the Islamic Centre of India in the Aishbagh neighbourhood of the north-eastern city of Lucknow, flanked by a Hindu temple and a wedding hall. Most evenings the call to prayer competes – or coexists – with the thumping bass of Bollywood dance tunes that accompany the nuptial celebrations of the city's middle classes. Often it is the centre itself that is the source of music, although the couples that hire its lawns for their wedding parties choose classical melodies that Muslim musicians have played in the city for centuries.

Lucknow, the capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh, has long been an important centre of south Asian Islamic culture. These days the music in the city – whether from films or mystic masters of Sufism – is being drowned out by the discordant tunes blaring from the tinny speakers on the campaign vehicles of political parties.

It is election time in the northern state of more than 200 million people, India's most populous, which if independent would be the world's fifth largest country.

Polling for the legislative assembly begins this week, and will last for three weeks because the state is so vast. Though politics in Uttar Pradesh rarely attracts much attention outside India, last month the battle for votes here hit global headlines.

A key constituency are the state's many Muslims, who account for about 18% of the population. This group could eventually swing some power in the state back to Congress, the party of the Gandhi dynasty, after a gap of more than 20 years. Congress will not win outright, but even a small improvement from its low level of support would be a victory. Critics claim that the Congress-led national government in Delhi was pursuing this Muslim vote when it very publicly failed to intervene to support Salman Rushdie, after ultra-conservative Islamic groups called for him to be stopped from speaking at a recent literary festival in India. According to the organisers of the event, this was a "defeat for free speech" and thus a "tragedy".

Rushdie, born in India, spoke of his disappointment at finding the country no longer committed to secularism and liberty, but a place where "religious extremists can prevent free expression of ideas at a literary festival [and where] the politicians are too … in bed with those groups to wish to oppose them for narrow electoral reasons".

For a few days, the dispute continued. Muslim groups said it was right that the author of The Satanic Verses, the 1988 book considered insulting to the prophet Muhammad, was prevented from talking. Liberals castigated the government for putting votes in Uttar Pradesh before principles. Few bothered to talk to Muslims in the state. For Khalid Rasheed, the cleric and scholar who directs the Islamic Centre in Aishbagh, the Muslim groups that had called for Rushdie to be denied entry to India were speaking for the community. "All Muslims are united. The words used by Salman Rushdie cannot be tolerated by any Muslims," Rasheed said.

Certainly, if Muslims in Lucknow and elsewhere are asked what they think of Rushdie the answer is uniform. "If anyone writes that against any religion, it is not tolerable," said Misba Khan, 31, a social worker. "Of course he should not be allowed to come and talk. He is out to create hatred."

But push a little further and a slightly different picture emerges, particularly in terms of how the state's Muslims might vote and why. Uttar Pradesh has poverty levels worse than most of sub-Saharan Africa. More than half of the children are chronically malnourished and nearly half of women cannot read or write.

About 100 miles north of Lucknow, and 40 miles south of the Nepal border, is the scruffy town of Gonda. It lies in one of the poorest parts of Uttar Pradesh. The roads that exist are so pitted and holed that the short distance from the state capital takes more than three hours.

It is a desolate drive, even in winter, when temperatures are bearable. In summer, crows fall dead from the sky in temperatures of 45C or higher. Most villages are without power; almost none have proper sanitation; many comprise little more than a miserable huddle of mud and straw huts.

About half the population are either Dalits, the caste at the bottom of India's ancient but still tenacious social hierarchy, or Muslims who, repeated surveys have shown, are among the most disadvantaged people in India. Even in the towns, life is little better.

"The government says there is electricity 14 hours every day, but if we get two or three we are lucky," said Dinesh Shukla, a journalist in Gonda. "There are no jobs. There is nothing."

Five years ago, Dalit and Muslim votes carried the firebrand populist Mayawati Kumari to power in Uttar Pradesh. She is hoping that the support of the same communities will, despite the rampant corruption and broad lack of development during her reign, bring her another five-year term. A second caste-based party is her biggest challenger. The Congress party comes a weak third or even fourth behind the Hindu nationalist BJP.

Last week, as Mayawati addressed a rally in Gonda, only a hundred yards away Muslim barbers cut and shaved their customers without even lifting their heads when the chief minister's helicopter circled and landed.

"If Congress had helped Rushdie come, then we would have been angry. No Muslim likes him. But that doesn't mean we are going to vote for them. We will vote for people who make our lives better," said Kaleem. "No one listens to the poor people anyway."

Uttar Pradesh was long the fief of India's foremost political dynasty. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first prime minister, and his daughter Indira Gandhi, perhaps its most controversial leader, both held parliamentary seats in the state. Now it is the turn of Indira Gandhi's grandchildren, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, to campaign in the dusty lanes and villages of the dynastic seats near Lucknow. This adds a personal dimension to the fight for the Muslim vote in the state.

The old city of Lucknow is a labyrinth of alleys choked by cows, motorbikes, chickens and filth. Vast monuments dating from the time when the city was a centre of refined culture, wealth and power rear up above the jumble of rooftops and wires. Old houses with ornate plasterwork that are now home to scores of destitute families disintegrate slowly.

The glorious past of the city, from where the nawabs of Awadh once ruled before being deposed by the British, is evident everywhere.

At a religious school where hundreds of students learn Arabic, English and Persian, the language of the Mughal and Awadhi courts, Farooq Alvi, who runs a perfume business, spoke of how his family had been using the same techniques since "the time of Shah Jahan", the 17th-century emperor who built the Taj Mahal.

The glorious history is now long gone. In a cramped office, Zafaryab Jilani, a Muslim lawyer at the high court, said that little had changed in recent years despite India's economic growth. "Some of India is shining … but not all of India," he said.

Near by, underneath a vast poster advertising a satellite television channel devoted to discussions and recitals of accounts of the prophet's deeds, Mohammed Saeed, 69, served tea for four rupees a cup.

Illiterate and half-blind, Saeed had not heard of the Rushdie affair. He spoke instead of his ill wife and his children, all seven of whom had died of various illnesses, leaving their parents alone in their old age.

"The best time for Uttar Pradesh? That would be in the 1950s, when I was young, and food was cheap and there were less people and the air was good and the water didn't make you sick," he said.

Letter to go on sale revealing how Bloomsbury group duped an admiral – but feared fake beards would give them away

One of the most famous practical jokes in British military history has returned to haunt the Royal Navy – more than a century later.

A previously unknown letter has surfaced, detailing the "shriekingly funny" Dreadnought hoax of 7 February 1910, when members of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists donned beards and costumes to disguise themselves as Abyssinian princes and gained access to the pride of the British naval fleet.

The letter was written by Horace de Vere Cole, who described how he and five friends, including the novelist Virginia Woolf and painter Duncan Grant, duped an admiral and the crew of the battleship HMS Dreadnought, flagship of the home fleet.

Four of them pretended to be Abyssinians and two claimed to be their Foreign Office guides. Even Woolf's cousin, one of the naval officers on board the ship, failed to recognise the author in her fake beard.

Once on board, the visitors were given the full red-carpet treatment: a band played, the crew saluted them and African flags were hoisted to the masthead. When invited to dine with the officers they declined, in their version of Swahili – seemingly translated by Woolf's brother, Adrian Stephen – because the food and drink had not been prepared correctly. The group actually feared that their fake beards would fall off.

Reports of the hoax – three double-sided sheets long – made the newspapers a few days later and provoked questions in parliament that led to a tightening of regulations for ceremonial parties.

The letter was written by Cole to a friend a day after the hoax. Noting that, "the idea was mine, but the carrying out was the work of six," Cole wrote: "The interpreter, the four princes and an officer went over the ship talking gibberish fluently … We departed to the band strains and the company of marines drawn up and the staff at the salute once more.

"It was glorious! Shriekingly funny – I nearly howled when introducing the four princes to the admiral and then to the captain, for I made their names up in the train, but I forgot which was which, and introduced them under various names, but it did not matter!

"They were tremendously polite and nice – couldn't have been nicer: one almost regretted the outrage on their hospitality."

The hospitality extended to a carriage for the group's journey to London from Weymouth.

Cole added: "I was so amused at being just myself in a tall hat – I had no disguise whatever and talked in an ordinary friendly way to everyone – the others talked nonsense. We had all learned some Swahili: I said they were 'jolly savages' but that I didn't understand much of what they said … It began to rain slightly on the ship and we only just got the princes under cover in time, another moment and their complexions would have been running – Are you amused? I am … Yesterday was a day worth the living."

The letter has been brought to light by a descendant of its original recipient and is being offered for sale by Rick Gekoski, a London dealer in rare books and manuscripts, who said: "Just imagine trying to do such a thing now. This is elegant and audacious, very Edwardian."

The letter is accompanied by an original photograph of the friends in "Abyssinian" costume, annotated by Cole with their fake names.

Martyn Downer, the author of Cole's biography, The Sultan of Zanzibar, described the letter as particularly interesting as most of Cole's papers were destroyed or lost. "Although he was born to a great fortune, he lost it all and ended his life in great penury," he said.

The Navy did take revenge on one of the hoaxers. Three sailors abducted Grant and took him to Hampstead Heath, where they were reported to have caned him.

Viggo Mortensen channels the spirit of Sigmund Freud, Southwark says no to Brit grit, and let's hear it (again) for Undefeated

Viggo's Freudian slip

One of the strangest interviews I've ever conducted happened last week when I met Viggo Mortensen in Sigmund Freud's study in London. Viggo, of course, plays Freud in David Cronenberg's crisp new film A Dangerous Method, and the actor immersed himself in Freud for three months before filming. He'd visited the Freud museum in Hampstead before, but for the purposes of our interview we were allowed behind the velvet ropes and into Freud's study, right next to the famous couch. Viggo was clearly unsettled by such close contact with Freud's personal artefacts, and affected some shivers of recognition as he pored over Freud's notebook which sits on his desk, a pair of fold-up pince-nez placed neatly beside it.

"Ah, I did pretty well then," nodded Viggo, who'd trained himself to copy the great man's actual handwriting. As I tried to interview him, Viggo kept jumping up and scanning Freud's books. "Ah, Shakespeare," he'd say. "Freud loved Lady Macbeth. Of course, Stefan Zweig. They met regularly."

The big moment came, however, when Viggo gingerly felt his way towards the couch. As he gently touched it, a PR rushed in: "You can't lie on that, sorry." Viggo was crestfallen. The PR lady continued: "Not even David Cronenberg was allowed on there." That seemed to satisfy Viggo for a moment and he reverted to examining the ancient carved artefacts and sex objects that lie around the study. The room is clearly immaculately recreated in Cronenberg's film, where Viggo's Freud conducts long conversations with Michael Fassbender's Carl Jung.

"Do any of these objects seem familiar from the film?" I asked. "Oh yeah," said Viggo, grinning. "The penises, we had a lot of those on set." You can hear the full interview on my Film Weekly podcast next week.

End of Brit grit

Where can British film-makers go now in search of gritty locations for their urban dramas? The question arises as Southwark residents in south London have followed Hackney in the east by banning film crews for reflecting their areas in a poor light on screen. With the Olympics approaching, I understand Hackney's film officers are refusing requests to any film-makers whose scripts are about hoodies, riots, drugs, council estates and crime. In a report for Radio 4's Front Row last week, my friend John Wilson revealed that the denizens of the Aylesbury and Heygate estates are fed up with film crews, following the grimy representation of their homes in movies such as Attack the Block, Harry Brown and Shank. Although filming has been a lucrative sideline for Southwark council, the residents' associations of the estates — currently undergoing demolition — have rebelled, even despite the recent presence of Brad Pitt, filming sci-fi dystopia movie World War Z in what was once called "muggers' paradise". But where does that leave our poor social-realist film-makers? Will they have to make nice Richard Curtis-like movies from now on?

Admit defeat

I must apologise for a grave error I made in last week's article about the Oscar nominations. I confused a pro-Sarah Palin film called Undefeated with another film, also called Undefeated, about a Memphis high school's American football team, which is the film that has actually been nominated. I hadn't seen either film at the time of writing, but I'm thrilled to say I have now watched the nominated Undefeated— which hasn't yet secured UK distribution — and it's a terrific and inspiring film, with echoes of the great Hoop Dreams. Beautifully directed by Daniel Lindsay and TJ Martin, it follows three underprivileged players of the Manassas Tigers and their extraordinary coach trying to help them on (and off) the pitch. It's an excellent sports doc and must have a very good chance of winning the Oscar, although it doesn't have the wow factor of Pina or the devastating impact of Hell and Back Again.

As part of our series exploring Britain's architectural wonders, the Observer's architecture critic introduces a spectacular interactive 360-degree panoramic view of this classic example of the Jacobean long gallery

• Explore the Chastleton House long gallery panoramic here

The long gallery was the special contribution of Elizabethan and Jacobean society to architecture that deals with the passing of time: it was a place for walking in bad weather, for contemplating and showing off art and ancestral portraits and, therefore, combined the rhythms of exercise, meteorology and genealogy. A smallish but satisfying example is in Chastleton House in the Cotswolds, built by a rich wool merchant (or possibly lawyer), whose family later dissipated his wealth and so were unable to alter the original building. Nikolaus Pevsner called the decoration of Chastleton "blatantly nouveau riche, even barbaric, uninhibited by any consideration of insipid good taste", but it now it looks gentle and charming, softened by wobbles in wood and plaster and the fall of light. It is also more bare than it would have been, in the absence of its original artworks and tapestries. What is particularly pleasurable is the way the stuff of the ceiling – ornamental plaster – descends, while the stuff of the floor – wood – rises in the form of panelling and the two meet at mid-height. It gives a boat-like sense of enclosure and protection.