Brian Aldiss leads tributes to a prolific author – of The Tripods and more than 50 other novels – who 'beat description'

British science fiction author Samuel Youd, who wrote the prescient story of environmental disaster The Death of Grass under one of his pseudonyms, John Christopher, has died.

Youd passed away on 3 February, his agent said on Monday. The author, best known for his young adult trilogy The Tripods and for The Death of Grass, which tells of a family fleeing London after a virus destroys the world's food supplies – "for years now we've treated the land like a piggy bank, to be raided" – was 89.

"He was a terrific guy. So bright, so intelligent, such a nice man – I have the fondest and most respectful memories of Sam Youd," said the acclaimed science fiction writer Brian Aldiss. "He used to work in the diamond trade in Hatton Garden, and would come down by train, travelling first class. He'd have a portable typewriter with him, and on that typewriter he would write novels, for I believe four different publishers, writing a different sort of novel under a different pseudonym for each. It beats description."

Under names including Hilary Ford, William Godfrey, Peter Graaf, Peter Nichols and Anthony Rye, Youd wrote "science fiction, family histories, detective mysteries – he was amazingly prolific," said Aldiss, with more than 50 titles to his name. His prose was "very polished", added the author, comparing The Death of Grass favourably to John Wyndham's science fiction classic The Day of the Triffids. "He would always submit the first draft and would never revise it – he was so clear-minded that he would get it right the first time".

Born in Knowsley, near Liverpool, in 1922, Youd began writing seriously when he left the army in 1946. The Death of Grass was published in 1956, allowing him to give up his day job at the Industrial Diamond Information Bureau, while The White Mountains, the first book in the Tripods trilogy in which humanity is enslaved by alien machines, was published in 1967. The popular children's series was later adapted for television in the 1980s, and his young adult novel The Guardians, about a dystopian future, won him the Guardian prize for children's fiction.

Penguin Classics publisher Adam Freudenheim, who reissued The Death of Grass in 2009, called it a "seminal piece of science fiction". "It was ahead of its time, in terms of concerns about the environment, particularly, which makes it seem prescient and very relevant," said Freudenheim. "It speaks to our time."

Quiz: It's 60 years today since Queen Elizabeth II acceded to the throne. Have you paid due respect to Her Maj's appearances in literature?

We catch up with campaigners working hard to keep their local services going

With National Libraries Day taking place on Saturday 4 February, we invited readers to tell us in their own words, how their campaigns to save their local library have progressed in the 12 months since Save Our Libraries Day, 2011. Several have managed to stay open, but others are still battling. We had many contributions, thank you to everyone who emailed us.

Mar Dixon, started #savelibraries Twitter hashtag

This time last year, I was in my local Bridgnorth Library in Shropshire supporting Save Our Libraries Day. While Shropshire wasn't under threat, I was making a point – if we don't continue to use it, it would be under threat next year. This year, I'll be doing the same.

In January 2011, I went world trending with #savelibraries where I asked people to answer: "Libraries are important because _______."

The response was overwhelming. Many replies had nothing to do with books, but more to do with the library's importance in the community. The single mums who enjoyed the weekly toddler group, or the OAPs enjoying learning IT.

This year, I'm still fighting for libraries. On 13 March I will be lobbying parliament as part of a coalition to have the ministers take responsibility for their duty to assist local authorities in honouring the Library Act of 1964.

Many people ask why I bother when my local library is healthy and vibrant. Isn't that the point? I want to use Shropshire as a model that others should and could use to have a healthy balance of volunteers (along with Friends of Bridgnorth Library) working WITH the libraries, not replacing. This allows us to provide more for our community, creating a library that is central to our community.

Joanna Flint, Cockerton Library

I got a horrible sinking feeling last year when I first heard that our local library was proposed to close the following year due to budget cuts. It was wrong. Cockerton library is one of only two libraries in Darlington, County Durham so we don't have much access to library services as it is. While collecting signatures for our petition outside the library on cold bright January days, I can see who uses it: Everyone, there is no one type of user. Closing libraries affects everyone in society.

The wide community it serves have now formed Friends of Cockerton Library to save our library. Cockerton East & West have the lowest access to internet services in our town, therefore we need the library not just for books, DVDs and CDs but also for internet access.

In times of hardship we need it more than ever. Our small library is popular, attracts nearly 1,000 users per week and costs just over £100k a year to run. A small price for the hub of our community.

Our campaign is gathering momentum. Local businesses and schools have joined us and we have huge community support. The proposal to close the library failed to get backing from scrutiny resources in a council meeting last week, a step in the right direction.

Natalie de Gruchy, Isle of Wight

Natalie contacted us last year to tell us about her Save Our Libraries Day.

Despite best efforts across the Isle of Wight, the Save Our Libraries Day was not as successful in swaying decision-making on the council as campaigners would have hoped. After contesting strongly and even taking the council to court over their decision, plans went ahead and all but two libraries on the IOW are set to close in April this year, leaving Lord Louis and Ryde libraries remaining. Until then, five libraries here are being run by community groups comprising of volunteers, leaving six still governed by the council. They have introduced "self service" machines that perform most library duties, and have radically cut down on staff. My job was terminated shortly after Save Our Libraries Day in April 2011. However, money is still being spent on the service, the standard of new books ordered and renovation work being done on the existing libraries is high. The fate of the buildings after closure, however, still appears uncertain.

Emily Malleson, Stony Stratford Library

I am a friend of Stony Stratford Library. In January 2011, we asked the community to borrow every book (16,000) in our library in protest of its proposed closure. We received worldwide press coverage including the New Yorker, Sunday Times, Private Eye and BBC World Service, we recorded interviews for Newsnight (that were never shown) and two children from our local school went to interview author Philip Pullman at his home, and culture minister Ed Vaizey in London for BBC Newsround. We also were interviewed in the Guardian and took part in the live blog as part of the Read-In day.

Well what can I say, it worked!! The council agreed to fund the library for another year while a proper review was carried out. This is still ongoing but the council has assured us that they will fully fund the library for the next few years. After that they cannot make any promises. We keep the campaign going so that we are always at the ready for any future threat.

Erica Coulehan, Sonning Common

Friends of Sonning Common Library helped to save our local village library from closure after a huge outcry across the county. The council then changed its proposal to a three-tier system, with the top tier keeping all staff and funding, the second tier losing one-third staff funding, and the bottom tier (that's us!) losing 50% funding. That's an improvement from the original plans, and their second offer which was to lose two-thirds funding, but we're still very disappointed.

Oxfordshire County Council's consultation criteria were biased towards urban areas, looking at how many people lived, worked, shopped, commuted in a half-mile radius of the library, which naturally favoured them over the rural libraries that will now suffer the most cuts.

Our library is housed in the old primary school hall. The school pays the utility bills so it doesn't even cost them that much, and is used by four primary schools in the area. We don't feel they have taken these important considerations into account.

We're also angry that the council automatically assumed that the Friends Groups should recruit, manage and organise volunteers to replace the lost staff. No consultation with us. That's a very big job which we don't feel we're able to undertake: the library could need 20 to 40 volunteers. If we don't supply volunteers, we don't yet know how the council will react.

Our village has a large elderly population, who are already heavily involved in voluntary work across the village - we're not short of the "Big Society" believers – but many don't want to take on a role they feel has been forced on them because of cuts with a heavy rural bias.

Margaret Bailey, Cricklewood and Kensal Rise

We are into the second year of our campaign to keep Kensal Rise library open.

As we wait to find out whether or not we will be granted permission to appeal to the supreme court we continue to offer our community a library service from the pop-up library outside our closed library building. Volunteers run this service seven days a week from donations of more than 3,000 books.

On Friday 3 February we will mark National Libraries Day with a fundraiser selling signed prints that have been designed and donated to us by artist Jamie Reid and on the day itself we will have a children's event at the pop up library where we will ask local children to once again cover Kensal Rise Library with their artwork, expressing more eloquently than the adults in the campaign their feelings about the loss of the library.

Our campaign remains strong. At times the level of support and goodwill, locally and beyond, is overwhelming. We are committed to saving our library and we are becoming used to the hard work of campaigning, but this community is unified in its desire to make sure we do not lose our library. It's not over yet.

Juno Baker, Upper Norwood

Our library, the Upper Norwood Joint Library (UNJL) is threatened with closure, not because it's too expensive, it's cheaper than most libraries, but because the two councils who fund it have fallen out after 112 years.

It's complicated. Lambeth and Croydon had an agreement whereby each would have at least two councillors on the management board. Then in the 2010 election, Croydon's local Tory councillors lost their seats. Presumably because they didn't want to appoint Labour councillors, Tory-led Croydon Council appointed two councillors from the opposite end of the borough. With the best will in the world, they were never going to represent local interests that well, and they haven't.

So Lambeth objected and didn't turn up to an AGM which, Croydon said, was breaching the terms of the contract. According to Croydon, this means it doesn't have to stump up for its half anymore, which leaves the library with a shortfall of £200,000 from end of March. Also, by laying the blame with Lambeth, Croydon has absolved itself from giving the library 12 months' notice to find alternative funding.

But we have our suspicions Croydon was planning to close the library all along; a leaked letter, allegedly from Croydon's chief exec to his counterpart in Lambeth, requests half the costs of valuing the library's assets. And Croydon has given Lambeth three options:

• buy Croydon's half-share of assets and take responsibility for the library
• lease Croydon's half-share in the premises and take responsibility for the library
• agree to the library being sold with the profit being equally divided between the two boroughs.

Thea Sherer, Friends of York Gardens Library

York Gardens Library and Community Centre, on a deprived estate in Wandsworth very close to the scene of riots in August, was threatened with closure due to council cuts. A concerted community campaign led to a rethink. A deal was done to allow the library to remain open, primarily as a children's library with shorter opening hours, using volunteers to assist a reduced number of librarians. Volunteers are supporting a homework club and running GCSE tutoring for local teenagers as well as other activities, and giving general help in the library. A local school is using rooms in the building during the week (providing income) and a charitable foundation is running children's activities. The library has been labelled by Wandsworth Council as a "Big Society" library because of the community involvement. We are discovering that there are many challenges to this model of operating – for example, defining the boundaries between council and community responsibilities, volunteers feeling strong-armed into helping out but struggling with long-term commitment, reduced adult provision threatening some community engagement etc. The council is also seeking to outsource the entire library service – including this library – adding further uncertainty. However the biggest challenge is that the community group has been tasked with raising around £70,000 per year, by hiring out community rooms in the building and fundraising, to cover the shortfall in council funding. It remains to be seen whether this will be achievable, and what will happen if it is not, but we are all pleased that the library's doors are still open.

Lynne Coppendale, Doncaster

Save Doncaster Libraries has worked tirelessly throughout 2011 trying to stop the short-sighted destruction of the public library service by Mayor Peter Davies and his cabinet. Protests, petitions, two call-ins of the plans by supportive councillors to the Overview and Scrutiny committee, a new (yet still flawed) consultation process in recognition of the initial inadequate attempt, and much publicity. The mayor and cabinet have not moved, despite being given an alternative budget AND having a nil cost independent consultation report of library improvements from before the whole decimation process began. We are now consulting regarding potential legal action and hoping against hope that the 12 libraries being thrown over to the community with the threat of volunteer-or-lose-it, will survive long enough for the future council members to realise their costly error and resume running this vital social and educational service.

Sadly, it is too late for the libraries of Denaby and Carcroft, which were closed very quietly just before Christmas, and whose residents in the deprived ex-mining communities now have to rely on a sparse mobile service.

Demelza Jones, Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries

In November 2011 Gloucestershire library users won a high court judicial review against Gloucestershire County Council's (GCC's) plans to close 10 static libraries and all mobile libraries, and reduce opening hours and services at many more, with Judge McKenna quashing the council's plans entirely. The court case followed GCC's adoption of these plans despite widespread opposition (16,000-signature petition and overwhelmingly negative consultation feedback) and repeated warnings of potential illegality by retired senior library service staff and opposition councillors.

In January 2012, GCC announced its redrawn plans for the service. Although as a direct result of our campaign and the court challenge, three libraries originally slated for closure will now retain a statutory service (Hesters Way in Cheltenham, and Matson and Tuffley in Gloucester), seven libraries will still be closed (including the library with the highest usage figures per head of population in the county! - Minchinhampton) and the future of the mobile service remains uncertain.

GCC has just embarked on a new consultation process, including a survey which has been described as "needlessly complex". We are continuing our campaign, and continue to lobby for intervention from Ed Vaizey and Jeremy Hunt (who are responsible for superintending library services nationwide) to avoid yet more needless waste of public money and irreparable damage to our library service. After the success of last year's Save Our Libraries Day events where "Flying Authors" visited every library in Gloucestershire, library users have again organised author visits and activities in many local libraries on Saturday. However, they have been told that the events will not be allowed to go ahead if they are "linked to any campaign".

Alan Gibbons, author

I started the campaign in 2009 after speaking at a meeting in Doncaster where major cuts were mooted. Three years on, campaigners have put libraries at the centre of debate about the defence of public services. On Saturday, National Libraries Day takes place and events will be happening all over the UK. I put forward the idea months ago and the programme of events reflecting the importance of school and public libraries in the cultural life of the country will be the culmination of a lot of hard work by many organisations and individuals. I am also involved in planning for a national lobby of parliament on 13 March.

In spite of all our efforts we are still fighting an uphill battle. Libraries are closing. Opening hours are being cut. Book funds are being slashed. Librarians are being made redundant. In my home city of Liverpool over a third of library posts are under threat. The "hollowing out" of the library service is catastrophic at a time when illiteracy costs the country £81bn a year and one child in three does not own a single book. We need the culture secretary to take his responsibilities seriously and ensure that library users have a comprehensive and efficient service in the coming years. Of course libraries could be improved but we will not have the libraries of tomorrow if we allow the libraries of today to close.

Final appeal to supreme court against halving the London borough's libraries provision will not be heard

Book lovers up and down the country celebrated National Libraries Day on Saturday – but in the north London borough of Brent the mood was sombre, after campaigners received another blow in their long-running fight to keep branches open.

Backed by literary names including Zadie Smith, Jacqueline Wilson, Philip Pullman and Alan Bennett, Brent residents have been campaigning for more than a year to save six local libraries – half the borough's branches. In October, their claim that Brent council had taken "a fundamentally flawed and unlawful approach" when closing the libraries was rejected by the high court, a decision that was upheld by the court of appeal in December. After this loss, campaigners applied to the supreme court, but have now been told that no further appeal will be heard.

Brent council leader Ann John said the decision "fully vindicates Brent council's actions and upholds the earlier decisions of both the court of appeal and the high court that the council acted lawfully".

While she expressed the hope that "we can now put the past behind us and focus our attentions fully on improving and developing a better library service for the people of Brent" – the council plans to replace the six branches with one £3m library by Wembley stadium – campaigners vowed that the battle would continue.

"We are definitely fighting on – the question of whether Brent is meeting its obligation to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service isn't a question for the courts – it's a question for Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state, who has so far spent some nine months failing to answer our complaints," said resident Philip Bromberg. "We will now be pressing him to reach a decision on those complaints."

And users of Kensal Rise library – which was opened by Mark Twain 100 years ago – are calling on Brent council to allow them to reopen the locked branch as a community-run service. "We appeal to Brent to work with us to preserve this vital local resource," said Margaret Bailey, a resident and director of Friends of Kensal Rise Library. "With shrinking budgets, we understand that we must be creative and constructive in finding ways to maintain services. Brent now has a choice: to regain the trust of its constituents by responding to our proposals in the spirit of cooperation, or to squander the extraordinary goodwill and commitment that this community has shown."

For Dickens's birthday, a complex but poignant reinvention of Pip and Estella's final meeting in Great Expectations

Charles Dickens was born on February 7 1812, and this week's poem, "I Am Greatly Changed" by Richard Price, appears in a new anthology of 21st century poets' tributes, A Mutual Friend: Poems for Charles Dickens.

Published by Two Rivers Press with the English Association, the volume is edited by the poet Peter Robinson, whose own new collection, The Returning Sky (Shearsman), is a PBS Recommendation for this quarter.

Despite being a contributor, I can say without bias that the response to Dickens is a vigorous and varied one. Skilfully organised in its themes and variations, the anthology is more than commentary, more than celebration. Most of the poems feel emotionally compelled rather than commissioned, suggesting Dickens, the "mutual friend", may be an oddly liberating "mutual muse".

The fractured collage of quotations in "I Am Greatly Changed" is garnered primarily from the final encounter, in chapter 59 of Great Expectations, between Pip and Estella. Both are mature and both, presumably, (although the words of the title are Estella's) "greatly changed" by their ordeals.

Dickens wrote two versions of this last chapter. After his friend Bulwer-Lytton criticised the first, he produced a fuller, cheerier resolution. This one is favoured in most editions, though some critics dispute its superiority.

The poem draws primarily on the revised version, except in one important respect. The formal handshake belongs to the first. In the second, Pip takes Estella's hand, but the mood is very different and the gesture hints at erotic possibility. Price's poem seems to open a third alternative, not romantic but more than merely civil, when the solitary last line declares, in inverted commas, "We are friends".

The encounter in the poem occurs, as in the novel, in the ruined gardens of Satis House, but the setting is revealed only in the seventh and ninth stanzas. The work's focus is the dialogue, cut up and expanded by silence to register maximum intensity and difficulty. In the novel, the dialogue flows smoothly. This, of course, is typical of 19th-century realist fiction: speech appears lifelike, but it's life with the pauses and repetitions edited out. Price has translated the conversation into its imaginary original.

The poem's technical skill may be better appreciated if we know the two endings, but its effect does not depend on that knowledge. If you had never read a word of the novel you would still feel you were in the presence of a living poem, spoken by characters with a shared past, at a tense and transformative moment.

The speaker at first is Pip. In the novel he tells Biddy that he has given up "that poor dream" (of Estella), and the impression of her "softened" beauty is his. Then we have Estella's words, beginning "I have very often –". In the arenthetical sixth stanza, Pip utters Dickens's inspired line, "a heart to understand/ what my heart used to be." And in the last quatrain it's clearly Pip who says, in moving understatement, "She gave me her assurance". And yet the poem is surely meant to be read more openly than this, as a counterpoint that shifts between two voices and identities. Both speakers share a moving simplicity of diction. Pip seems a little more fluent, whereas Estella, at first, is more hesitant, the punctuation of some of her lines, a dash followed by a comma, eloquently expressing her internal struggle.

At the end of the novel, it's Estella who asks forgiveness (a second helping). In the poem, there's a suggestion in stanza five that Pip, in turn, may have caused Estella suffering: she seems to ask God to forgive him. This suffering would belong to the unwritten story of her marriage to Bentley Drummle.

The poem reminds me of Emily Dickenson's "After great pain, a formal feeling comes". Estella expresses her retrospective "great pain": the poem's whole structure confirms the extent to which she has been "bent and broken". But the fragments and falterings are assembled bit by bit into a coherent, truthful and dignified shape.

"The ground belongs to me," Estella says in Dickens's text, perhaps with a hint of her old pride. Price, by reducing it simply to "the ground belongs", introduces something stranger and less egotistical. The ground belongs only to the place, or to itself. Unlike Estella, schooled with dreadful consequences by Miss Havisham to abhor "the friendly touch", or Pip, once entranced by worldly status and obsessive love, the ground cannot be false to itself. Estella's "Poor, poor old place" echoes Pip's opening "That poor dream". The echo is in the novel, too, but the poem's technique emphasises this and other linguistic patterns. And does the poem change our concept of the characters? I think we may sympathise with this Estella more than the new improved Estella at the end of the novel – because we have heard her nervous breaths and hesitations in the poem's rhythm. We may also find the characters fundamentally closer; in some ways, interchangeable.

After the wavering, wincing delicacy of Estella's recollections, the poem's last line is indeed like solid ground: "We are friends". The handshake Estella could hardly bring herself to mention earlier ("I thought – . I thought you would like – .") is accomplished and consolidated.

The novel concludes, "I saw no shadow of another parting from her". It is not certain, of course, that Pip's prophecy will be fulfilled. The poem, highlighting the present-tense declaration, implies a relationship that's firmly established. The inverted commas may hint irony, but to me (and I'm not entirely sure why) they suggest a couple for the first time speaking in unison.

It's as much what is unsaid as what is said that lends the poem its haunting power. Price's post-modern techniques are never emptily playful. Here, they become dissection-tools to reveal psychological and moral nuances which, combined with the concept of redemption, are wholly in the spirit of Dickens.

"I Am Greatly Changed" will appear in Price's forthcoming collection, Small World, which will be published by Carcanet in November.

I Am Greatly Changed
Great Expectations

That poor dream, as I once used to call it,
has all gone by. (The freshness of beauty
is the saddened softened light
of once proud eyes.) I have very often - .

I intended to come back. Tracing, proving.
I thought - . I thought you would like - .
'God bless you, God forgive you!'
you said to me.

I am greatly changed.
I thought you would like to shake hands.
What I had never felt before
was the friendly touch.

I very often hoped - .
I have often
thought of you.
An imaginary case.

I have been considerate and good,
I have been bent and broken,
suffering, God forgive you.
Suffering, God bless you.

(Suffering has been stronger
than all other teaching,
a heart to understand
what my heart used to be.)

The ground belongs!
Everything else,
little by little, has gone.
I wonder you know me.

If you could say to me then
'God bless you! God forgive you!'
you will not hesitate now.
('God bless you,' you said to me).

Poor, poor old place!
Ruined place.
Would I step back?
Ignorant, held?

She gave me her assurance
(her voice, her touch).
I took her hand,
evening mists rising now, tranquil.

'We are friends.'

'Victimhood is something that happens but when you turn it into an identity you're psychically and politically finished'

One day, Jacqueline Rose came across a troubling passage in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. The narrator, Marcel, lies beside his sleeping lover Albertine and masturbates against her. "It seemed to me at those moments," writes Proust in Carol Clark's recent Penguin translation, "that I possessed her more completely, like an unconscious part of dumb nature." Professor Rose, feminist and psychoanalytic critic, bristled. "I thought 'This is ridiculous – she'd have woken up by now!' I had my feminist reaction – which is not my most obvious default position – which is just let the woman speak."

So Rose decided to awaken Proust's lover from her implausible slumber. In her 2001 novel, Albertine, the protagonist was not, or not merely, a wronged woman needing feminist liberation from a suffocating male neurotic's dismal sex act. Rose says: "The postcard version is: 'Poor girl falls in love with rich, sick aesthete. He traps her in his apartment. She dies.' There's a real feminist gothic narrative here – a horror story in a way."

She didn't want to tell that story. Rose's aim, as Alex Clark put it in her Guardian review, was to "return to Albertine her intelligence". "It's not that I wanted her to be innocent," says Rose. "I wanted to unravel her from the inside." But there was a limit to how much Rose could unravel. "People have been very cross with me for not representing her as an antisemite. But I couldn't do that. I couldn't enter into the skin in that way."

That compunction is both understandable – what Jew wants to ventriloquise an antisemite? – and mystifying since Rose's vocation is that of fearless critic, ready to fight with Ted Hughes over her interpretation of Sylvia Plath's poetry and to battle against those who hate her for daring to psychoanalyse Israel. In Proust, to whom she returns repeatedly in her work, Rose found a Jewish writer of greater imaginative ruthlessness. It is Proust who goes right into the psychic space of his enemy. For instance, Proust writes about the Baron de Charlus who, in one incendiary passage of antisemitic sex fantasy, imagines a Jewish acquaintance's mother being beaten. "It would make an excellent show," salivates Charlus, "the sort of thing we like, eh, my young friend … to thrash that non-European bitch would be giving a well-earned punishment to that old cow."

Rose quotes this passage in her new book, Proust Among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East, as an example of "the logic of projection". It's the European baron, not hated, exoticised, Jewish (m)other, who, Rose writes, "truly deserves, longs for, a thrashing".

"This is Melanie Klein stuff," she says. "You project on to the other the bits of yourself that you can't stand, but the function is to utterly purify yourself of the feeling. So your innocence is a form of violence against others." Proust got to this thought before Freud and his successors; indeed, Rose teaches an MA seminar at Queen Mary's College, London, to test her idea that there is no thought Freud had that Proust didn't have with greater complexity.

What will scandalise some about Rose's new book is that she uses psychoanalysis on Israel. But isn't putting the Jewish state on the couch shaming? Rose retorts: "I think it's Nietzsche who says somewhere that it's the people who are walking around happy, as if everything's perfect, who have something to be ashamed of. For psychoanalysis, psychic difficulty is your birthright and it's our attempt to repudiate it that makes it worse. So the point for me in using psychoanalysis to understand why a traumatised people might find locking themselves into a traumatised identity is to treat them with the greatest respect."

Not all Zionist positions warrant psychoanalytical critique. "The strand of Zionism I'm interested in is the one that seems unable to see the Palestinians and seems unable to recognise the darkness of its own history." It is the strand that won't recognise what Jews did to Palestinians in 1948 and Israel's role in facilitating the Sabra and Chatila massacres in 1982.

Rose denies she's anti-Zionist. "It more than makes sense as a nationalist movement. A wonderful Russian formalist thinker called Victor Shklovsky, talking about the aesthetic choices facing the avant garde under Stalinism, said: 'There is no third way and that is the one we're going to take'. I don't see myself as an anti-Zionist or a Zionist: I see myself as a reader of Zionism trying to understand why it's so powerful and why it does seem to find it very hard to look at its own past."

Critics, especially those who oppose the Independent Jewish Voices group she helped establish in 2007, doubt Rose's third way. Mail columnist Melanie Phillips charged Rose with being a Jewish persecutor of Israel who implicitly suggested that "the Jews are responsible for their own destruction", while a Jerusalem Post review of books about Zionism, which included Rose's 2005 The Question of Zion, suggested that "Iran's president is not alone in wanting to wipe Israel off the map."

Unabashed, Rose writes in her new book that the history of the Jewish people "makes it perhaps uniquely hard for Israel as a nation to see itself ever as the agent of the violence of its own history". Rose provides me with the gloss: "Victimhood is something that happens but when you turn it into an identity you're psychically and politically finished."

An essential part of Jewish history she considers in the new book is the Dreyfus affair, about which Proust wrote and agitated. The wrongful conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew in the French army accused of spying for the Germans in 1894, and its aftermath convinced Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, there was no future for Jews in Europe. "When I discovered that it's not just 'The Holocaust therefore Israel' but 'Because of Dreyfus therefore Israel', my ears pricked up," says Rose. She recognises that either justification of Israel is contentious, and that for many Zionists the state's existence is justified not by the Holocaust but by ancestral rights to Palestine.

Rose was born in London in 1949 into a Holocaust-traumatised family. Her grandmother's family perished in Chelmno concentration camp. Hers was, as she puts, "one type of North London Jewish survivor family who, to survive, internally entrenched itself in Jewish ritual".

"It was observant and desperate that we continue the faith. There was no mixing of meat and milk, there were two sinks in the kitchen and if anything got mixed up it had to buried in the mud outside. It was very powerful but it also went with a set of prohibitions about what we could talk about." The Holocaust, in particular, was never discussed. Non-Jewish boyfriends were intolerable.

As Rose tells me this, in the living room of her West Hampstead flat, I think of what she writes in her new book about Proust's father, the epidemiologist who devised the notion of the cordon sanitaire. Her family similarly erected a post-Holocaust cordon sanitaire, what Rose calls a "defensive form of Jewishness closed in on itself, with no sense of Jewishness as culture, knowledge or history". No wonder she finds Proust so important: it was he who, more than any other writer, thought about, she says, "the uncertainties of hearts and minds and the porousness of boundaries between self and other, both as pleasure and as danger".

But her family's history is more nuanced: yes, her grandparents entrenched the family in Jewish ritual, but Rose's own parents felt thwarted by it. "My mother was very hostile to being Jewish because it had been such a restrictive life for her. It had stopped her taking up a place as a medical student; she was married at 20 – because that was what you did."

The next generation found a Shklovskyan third way of being Jewish between entrenchment and rejection. Rose notes that around the same time as elder sister Gillian was working on Emil Fackenheim's Holocaust theology, cousin Braham Murray (artistic director of Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre) was producing a Holocaust interpretation of Macbeth, and she was working on the Holocaust in her interpretation of Sylvia's Plath's poem "Daddy". "We all three turned to this at about the same time in our lives, and it was an attempt to retrieve those parts of Jewishness and Judaism and Jewish history which, because of the weight of what it meant to be Jewish in that generation, we felt we hadn't been able really to explore."

The brilliant Rose sisters crossed their family's cordon sanitaire. Both went to St Hilda's College, Oxford – Gillian to study philosophy, Jacqueline English. But Gillian was quickly lured across the border from anglophone philosophy to study German idealist philosophy. Wasn't Gillian's embrace of German thought a family scandal? "She would say, rather as I'm using Proust and Freud, that she's working with the tools to predict, dismantle and forestall what happened in Nazi Germany."

After graduating, Jacqueline was lured to Paris. There she did a maitrise in comparative literature and started a doctorate about children's literature inflected with her new passion, Freud. "I loved Paris so much. I loved living in a foreign language." And more than that. The feminist critic Julia Kristeva became, as she puts it, her ego-ideal. "I just thought: 'Oh goodness, you can wear nice clothes and get your hair done and still be a feminist and a serious intellectual.'" When she returned to England aged 23, she passed off the initials on her Yves Saint Laurent scarf to leftwing friends as standing for Young Socialist League. She doesn't say whether anyone believed her.

Why return? "I just thought wouldn't it be interesting to go back and become involved in a dialogue between French theory and English culture and the differences between them. It was like making myself a stranger in my own land. If you're Jewish, you always feel a bit of a stranger in your own land."

Back home she met Juliet Mitchell whose 1973 Feminism and Psychoanalysis enthralled her. "I remember thinking 'Thank heaven for this book. I can be a feminist and interested in psychoanalysis.'" She and Mitchell later translated some of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's texts into English, and his ideas percolated into the PhD she wrote on JM Barrie's Peter Pan under supervisor Frank Kermode. "I think Peter Pan is about adult desire. It's about the fantasy of a child, of a moment that he will never have to relinquish. But if you think of it as an injunction on the child, Lacan would say you are refusing to allow the child to be released into their desire, which is that they must become this asexual screen of utter purity which is what Peter Pan is. It's a collective passion [Barrie's] tapped into."

Does your treatment of Peter Pan connect with your later work? "I think it does because so much of my writing is about the myth of innocence in relationship to feminism, Sylvia Plath, and Zionism." Rose fell for Plath while teaching a women's writing course at the University of Sussex in the 1980s. She put Plath on the syllabus. "I read the criticism and it was so misogynist, pathologising, overconfident, disgusting. And then I read the feminist response and I thought it was over-idealising her in a way, so I knew there was something going on that was explosive around her."

Plath was a perfect subject for Rose, in that the poet confirmed the critic's conviction that feminism needed to take on board the psychoanalytical project and, in particular, that women's fight for redress of historic injustices must "be backed by an understanding of our own psychic investment as women in everything we engage in, including our own oppression". In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), Rose wrote: "One does not become pure as the other falls into the dirt."

Plath, she says, "had so much to be angry about and she produces the most devastating indictment of a certain kind of patriarchal mindset in her writing. But it never stops her thinking about her own implication in those structures and the complexity of female psychic life. That's why 'The Rabbit Catcher' for me was such an important poem because the trap everybody identifies with patriarchy, with Hughes described as a piece of female anatomy, almost." But that interpretation angered Hughes when he saw the manuscript. He thought Rose was calling his dead wife a lesbian. "Hughes said: 'In some countries it was grounds for homicide to speculate on a mother's sexual identity.' Would I please remove my interpretation of 'The Rabbit Catcher'? And I wrote back saying: 'Look, I'm thinking about Freud here and his critique of civilised normatised identity,' which I thought would appeal to Hughes."

It didn't, but Rose didn't back down. Later she felt more sympathetic: "I think it's impossible for him. If you've had the tragedy that he has had, how can you not read the poetry biographically and how can you not read interpretation biographically? I must say I came to understand the situation better on the publication of my sister's book Love's Work" – Gillian's memoir written as she was dying – "because you can see how difficult it is for a family to deal with a book that touches upon things that are so private."

Gillian's early death from cancer in 1995, aged 48, cast Jacqueline into a mourning that, she says "will never be complete, nor would I want it to be". The first book she wrote after her sister's death was the novel Albertine. "I didn't feel I could write in an academic way. It's exhilarating and frightening letting the floodgates open."

Around the same time as her sister's death, Jacqueline and her then partner, psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips, adopted a baby girl from China. Intially, she thought of writing a book about Mia. "In five minutes I thought this is wrong, it's her story, even though she was a baby at the time. So then I took off with the Albertine project." Mia is now 17 and hoping to study photography at university. Rose's current partner is Jonathan Sklar, the psychoanalyst.

In her living room is something unexpected – a box of Marilyn Monroe DVDs. Rose has been boning up on Monroe for a lecture, which will eventually form part of a book provisionally entitled Women in Dark Times: From Rosa Luxembourg to Marilyn Monroe. It will be her return to feminist theorising. How do Rosa and Marilyn connect? "They both straddle the divide between political and inner life. I read Rosa's letters and the relationship between her political concept of spontaneity and the unknownness of revolutionary life and the unknownness and intimacy of personal life. It seemed her notion of revolutionary and personal lives were inextricably linked."

Why is Monroe interesting? "There's been so much written about her as a screen on to which everybody projects their fantasies. I think that's complicit with her victimisation. I think she knew exactly what was happening to her. I think she was casting herself as a sort of lead in the detritus of postwar American culture. Everything from the commodity to the sexualisation of women to the crass materialism to McCarthyism." Classic Jacqueline Rose feminism: woman as more than victim, implicated in and maybe even conniving at her own oppression.

Enough about feminism. After the interview Rose emails me, hoping I can stress that she isn't done with the Middle East conflict. She's written four books dealing with that conflict and, if she has her way, there will be more. "As Edward Said wrote about getting involved in the Palestine-Israel conflict – once you're in you're you're there for life. I spent five years with Plath and then said goodbye. You don't say goodbye to this."

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.

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.

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.

Geoff Dyer's irreverent commentary on one of cinema's most 'difficult' offerings is a free-wheeling delight

The films of Andrei Tarkovsky, and in particular his 1979 classic Stalker, have a reputation for being among the most difficult in cinema. Difficult, not just in the sense of intellectually demanding, but difficult as in hard to sit through, long and slow-moving and potentially very boring. Perhaps only the work of the Hungarian director Béla Tarr is viewed (or not, in most cases) with greater trepidation. Cinema buffs wear their familiarity with films such as Stalker and Tarr's seven-hour Sátántangó like a badge of honour and speak of them in reverential tones. Most other people regard them like non-mountaineers regard Everest: "I'm sure it's a great mountain, but damned if I'm climbing it."

In his new book, Geoff Dyer sets out to address this problem by articulating what he loves so much about Stalker in terms that won't alienate the casual viewer. Zona is an intriguing proposition: Dyer writes about the film in something approaching real time, describing each scene as it happens – almost like a DVD commentary – and pausing at regular intervals to reflect on the making of Stalker, on other films and other works of art, on being Geoff Dyer, and on being Geoff Dyer writing this book about Stalker. Despite operating on many layers, it's not a long book. A fast reader could polish it off in less time than it would take to watch the film itself (163 minutes).

Dyer first saw Stalker in his 20s and, though "slightly bored and unmoved" by it on that first viewing, he has returned to the film obsessively ever since. It may be a great monument looming formidably over 20th-century cinema, but to Dyer it is also a compelling human story that has proved inexhaustibly relevant to his own life and has informed (sometimes in a spookily prophetic way) how we view the world around us.

Tarkovsky's film tells the story of three men breaking into a mysterious sealed-off Zone in an unnamed country (presumably the USSR) and journeying to the even-more-mysterious Room at its heart – a place where, it is said, one's innermost wishes will be granted. Stalker is the name of the guide who leads the group.

It's billed as science-fiction, but if you watched the film with the sound off you'd think it was just three guys wandering around a debris-ridden area of countryside, grumbling at one another. And that may actually be the case: we're never sure if the Zone really does have magical powers, or whether Stalker's tales are merely the kind of superstitions that grow up around areas fenced off by the government. This uncertainty opens up a space for the Russian director to explore some of his favourite themes: the hopelessness of life; the generative power of belief; the plight of the visionary misunderstood by all.

In many ways, Dyer is the perfect man for the job of unpicking the complex mysteries of Tarkovsky's Zone. He has a rare talent for writing about high-minded concerns with disarming simplicity, and he is unafraid to mix in a bit of low culture so that on one page he'll be reflecting on Top Gear or regretting that he's never had a threesome, while on the next he's going on in the same breezy fashion about Brueghel or William James. What makes him a pleasure to read, particularly here in the inner sanctum of high cinema, is that he isn't oppressed by the need to be reverential. On the contrary, he'll crack as many bad jokes as he can about Stalker's nagging wife, or the granting of innermost wishes, en route to the transcendent truth. As the Camus quote at the front of the book says: "The best way of talking about what you love is to speak of it lightly."

By treating the characters in Stalker as tragicomic everymen, rather than figures in a great text, Dyer brings out the humour and humanity in Tarkovsky's work. It would be a mistake, though, to suppose that he is doing this – beating an accessible path into the Zone – for our benefit alone. He tells us: "There are writers for whom commentary is absolutely central to their own creative project, who insist that at some level commentary can turn out to be every bit as original as the primary work of the novelist." This is a reasonable definition of what Dyer has been doing for most of his career – in his radically digressive study of DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, for instance – and it's what he pulls off again with considerable flair here.

This, in other words, is much more than a useful guide to a classic film. It is also, in small doses, a memoir, a rumination on art and a philosophy of how to live well. Moreover, it is a running commentary on itself, and as such it poses a problem for the reviewer. Dyer is forever pre-empting criticism by flagging up the potential shortcomings of his project: wouldn't he have been better off writing a book about tennis? Now and then, he draws attention to the patchiness of his own research: he only "skimmed" the Stanislaw Lem novel that Tarkovsky's Solaris is based on and decided to avoid his final film The Sacrifice; an explanation he gives about a patricide in a recent film indebted to Tarkovsky is, he confesses, "one part Harold Bloom and one part ill-digested psychoanalysis".

This, of course, is part of the raffish, easy-going charm of his writing and a source of its comic effect. No other writer cops out quite as elegantly as Geoff Dyer. However, there are passages in the book – especially towards the end when he seems to tire of summarising the onscreen action – that feel merely dashed-off, rather than strategically lazy. The segues begin to feel forced and jokes fall flat. A dog laps at milk "like there's no tomorrow", offending against Dyer's earlier observation that the Zone is a sanctuary against cliche. It was an inspired decision to write a book about one of cinema's most austere works in a relaxed, throwaway style, but that's no justification for slapdash writing.

That said, I'm glad he undertook the journey. Even if you have zero desire to experience Tarkovsky's film first-hand, it's worth keeping company with Dyer for the tangents it sends him off on: an explanation of why the horror film Antichrist, which Lars von Trier dedicated to Tarkovsky, is "nonsense"; or the funny and poignant footnote about how Natascha McElhone in the remake of Solaris looked uncannily, at the time of its release, like Dyer's wife.

But if you've never seen Stalker, I'd urge you to watch it for the final scene alone. I agree with Dyer that it brings us to "a realm of loveliness unmatched anywhere else in cinema". It casts a miraculous light back across the rest of the film and makes the effort of scaling this great rock of cinematic art utterly worthwhile.

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.

This fascinating biography of a 1950s Persian nobleman and politician explains much of Iran's antipathy towards Britain

Iran is the only country in the world where people think that secretly, behind the charade, America is Britain's poodle. The eponymous hero of the 1970s comic novel My Uncle Napoleon – which was turned into one of the most popular TV series ever shown on Iranian television – is affectionately parodied for this: whatever went wrong, Uncle Napoleon blamed the British. The reason lies in a historical period imprinted on the minds of generations of Iranians but long forgotten in the UK. Christopher de Bellaigue's elegantly written account of the life of the nationalist Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, and the MI6/ CIA-led coup against him, not only tells the full story of what happened, but highlights the dangers of a foreign policy that ignores the perceptions of those with memories longer than our own.

There have been several previous biographies of Mossadegh, but De Bellaigue – a Persian-speaking British journalist who lived in Iran and married an Iranian – has written a book that feels both fresh and relevant, and has a foot in both the British and Iranian camps. Muhammad Mossadegh was a Persian nobleman, born towards the end of the 19th century, who, as prime minister of Iran in the early 1950s, nationalised the country's oil. This brought him into conflict with the British government, led by Winston Churchill, which, just before the outbreak of the first world war, had bought a majority stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, with its concession in Iran. Churchill thought that if Mossadegh's move was allowed to set a precedent, British imperial power would be under threat across the globe. At first the Americans were neutral, even inclining towards Mossadegh, but – in the Iranian version of events – the perfidious British persuaded them otherwise. Dwight Eisenhower, elected in 1953, feared that Mossadegh's liberalism would lead to communism. The coup involved the dark arts in which the British and American secret services excelled: disinformation, unleashing agents provocateurs, paying thugs and politicians and forging documents. The tragedy is that it worked. The most enlightened Middle Eastern government of the age was overthrown, ushering in first the dictatorial regime of the Shah and then Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution.

De Bellaigue sees racism in the British attitude to the man Churchill nicknamed "Mussy Duck". Statesmen like Thomas Babington Macaulay saw "a single shelf of a good European library" as superior to "the whole native literature of India and Arabia". Such an attitude did not go down well in the land of the poets Rumi and Hafez, which had an empire when Britain was still inhabited by iron age tribes. Every now and then, an orientalist diplomat would reveal a romantic enthusiasm for things Persian, but De Bellaigue believes that "a profound contempt for Persia and its people" lay at the heart of British policy.

Yet he is not blind to the faults of his subject, whom he describes as "a peculiar man", a "mixture of visionary and fusspot" and a "shameless hypochondriac" who "fainted and howled in public". De Bellaigue writes with humour and attention to revealing detail, painting a picture of Mossadegh as a man of principle, who acted out of patriotism and a sense of justice, but who rarely hesitated to take to his bed with a fit of the vapours if he thought it politically expedient, and who, by the end of his time in office, acted against his own democratic values. He missed opportunities to compromise with the hated British which would not only have benefited Iran, but might have prolonged his government. Mossadegh failed in part because of his own complex, flawed character, and in part because he was ahead of history. Anglo-Persian went on to become British Petroleum. Twenty years later, when Middle Eastern oil producers, spearheaded by Colonel Gaddafi, nationalised oil assets and withheld supply to push up the oil price, BP might have recollected Mossadegh's terms with nostalgia.

For Iranians, Mossadegh's legacy is a pride in Iranian-ness which the current regime's trumpeting of Islamic over national identity cannot extinguish. Similarly, his treatment by the British has come to symbolise the effrontery of meddling foreign powers. De Bellaigue is careful not to make crass comparisons, but this is nonetheless a timely book. Whenever a British or American politician chastises President Ahmadinejad for his nuclear programme, and talks of "carrot and stick", even Iranians who loathe the current government, and disagree with its nuclear policy, recall Mossadegh and Churchill. It raises a disturbing question: will our current objection to Iran having a nuclear weapon one day look like Britain's 1950s horror at the idea that Iranian oil might belong to the Iranians and not to us? There are many reasons why not – but if you don't ask the question, you cannot understand the current Iranian government's negotiating strategy and rhetoric.

Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News. Her book Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution will be published by Faber on 5 April

A new life of Les Dawson celebrates a great British comic talent too often overlooked

It's May 1967, in the days when Britain really had talent. Hughie Green is hosting yet another of his Opportunity Knocks. And here, at last, comes fame, banging on the door of a tubby, pudding-faced Manchester comedian. What – first gag – would he pick for his Desert Island Disc? "I toyed with the idea of playing Ravel's 'Pavane pour une infante defunte' but I couldn't remember if it's a tune or Latin prescription for piles. Mind you, I've always been musical… Mother used to sit me on her knee and I'd whisper, 'Mummy, Mummy, sing me a lullaby do,' and she'd say: 'Certainly my angel, my wee bundle of happiness, hold my beer while I fetch me banjo.'" Collapse of stout national TV audience. Les Dawson is on his way.

That single big break matters hugely. Dawson was already 36 when it came, a battered veteran on the northern clubland circuit. Of course, Hughie Green couldn't offer him some smooth, untroubled trip to the top. The unfunny fact of life for comedians is that comedy is a cruelly fashionable business. You're either up or you're down. The London Palladium is either full or the Blackpool Opera House is half empty. Television either wants you or you're Ken Dodd on the circuit of the digitally excluded (heading for Clacton and Southend on Sea later this year). Introspection and self-doubt are your natural bedfellows.

Still, once Les Dawson broke through, he never really slid back. From 11 series of Sez Les to the wilder lunacies of Blankety Blank, he was always around and always hilarious: mordant, a misogynist about wives, mothers-in-law and sundry blights of existence, a master of bathos with an infinitely flexible fizz and wonderful timing. Who else is there to sit alongside him in any 20th-century collection of great British comedians? Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper, Hancock, the eternal Doddy… but then the list grows shorter and more contentious.

Perhaps time has treated Les Dawson a little less kindly than Cooper or Morecambe with Wise. His workaholic TV output isn't there much on Gold or the other TV nostalgia channels. His novels are out of print, his straight acting experiments forgotten. Maybe his standup was better than his sketches. Maybe his old joke book sometimes needed a spring clean. But Dawson was a giant, and half an hour of rediscovered video can still set you rolling today. The bronze statue of him a few yards from St Annes pier is more than an adopted home town paying respects. It signals something permanent: the remembrance, a million times over, of great good times.

And yet, in its detailed and always lucid way, Louis Barfe's biography is at its most fascinating when it tackles the early Dawson, young Les in search of a break and not, for a second, knowing where to find it. Born: 1931, in the teeth of the great depression. Father, an often unemployed bricklayer. Home, a two-up, two-down in Collyhurst, the most benighted chunk of north Manchester, grandpa and granny's house which his dad and mother, his dad's brother and young Leslie were forced, in penury, to share. Education: Moston Lane elementary. Qualifications: nil. First jobs: helping out in a draper's, then stacking shelves in the local Co-op grocery.

Nothing in this recital of deprivation hints at any sort of opportunity knocking. Nothing prepares you for the way Dawson wrote his own scripts, memorised them in a trice, constantly displayed a breadth of vocabulary that left Collyhurst far behind. He was bright, bright, bright. Educational opportunity today would have sent him to university. There might then have been no comic talent, hewn from adversity and the rich tradition of Robb Wilton, Norman Evans and Frank Randle, left to mine. What, be an intern at the Co-op? No fear. What, travel the region night after night doing pub and club gigs, when I have to be out on the doorstep every morning trying to sell vacuum cleaners? It was a long, rugged, relentless road to travel.

He started as a singer, and failed. He played the piano, but not well enough. His comedy only found its voice one night at the Empress Club in Hull when, after too many drinks to settle his nerves, he lurched into this "superbly decorated kipper factory, this renovated fish crate", and explained that "I don't do this for a living, oh no, just for the luxuries in life… like bread and shoes". He was, finally, a durable stage version of his own sweet, savage self.

The last of a dying breed, then, buried by the very lack of new learning paths to glory, deprived of old-fashioned music halls, variety bills, even end-of-the-pier shows (as Bognor heads for Benidorm)? Perhaps. Standup these days is more clubs plus single nights on the road – with an exhausting schedule but without the space to linger and look for laughter. You're the guy who fills in the pauses on Graham Norton's TV sofa. You are part of an ensemble, not a star.

Les Dawson was versatile almost to a fault. He could riff with John Cleese and bring Alan Plater scripts to life. He was more, far more, than a product of his time. But, even so, we shall probably never see his like again, for the roots of the north are in MediaCity not Blackley now. All praise to Louis Barfe. He's got the context as well as the jokes right here. He gives you more than the booze and the fags and the sometimes tortured hero of standard showbiz biographies. He makes us realise what we lost when Les Dawson died, and reminds us to tip our flat caps the next time we hit St Annes.

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: Stpauli 'Trigell builds his dystopia with careful detail and rich description that gives you a real sense of being part of this urban hell of poverty, lawlessness and neglect'

Anne Enright discusses The Forgotten Waltz and Robert Harris revisits his first novel Fatherland

This March the Guardian Book Club will host not one but two exciting author events:

Anne Enright: The Forgotten Waltz
Date: Monday 12 March
Time: 7.00pm
Venue: The Scott Room, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU

Anne Enright talks to John Mullan about her latest novel. In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, in the winter of 2009, it has snowed. Gina Moynihan, girl about town, recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life", Seán Vallely. As the city outside comes to a halt, Gina remembers the days of their affair in one hotel room or another: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and the stillness and vertigo of the falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, Gina awaits the arrival on her doorstep of Seán's fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie.

Book tickets

Robert Harris: Fatherland
Date: Saturday 24 March
Time: 3pm
Venue: Hall One, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG

At the Guardian's inaugural Open Weekend festival, we host a special event with Robert Harris, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his first novel, Fatherland. The novel is set in an alternative world in which Hitler has won the Second World War, the anti-Semitic Joseph P Kennedy is president of the United States and Winston Churchill is in exile. It is April 1964 and one week before Hitler's 75th birthday. Xavier March, a homicide detective in Berlin, is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body floating in a river on the outskirts of the city. With the help of an American journalist, and with the Gestapo just one step behind, he uncovers signs of a conspiracy that could go to the very top of the German Reich.

The Guardian Open Weekend is a two day festival of events with leading
figures from culture, politics and across the world. Speakers include
Ian McEwan, Steve McQueen, Grayson Perry and David Miliband. Click here to find out more and to book tickets.

Anne Enright will be in conversation with John Mullan at the Guardian on 12 March

Date: Monday 12 March
Time: 7pm
Venue: The Scott Room, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU
Price: £8

Anne Enright will discuss The Forgotten Waltz, her 2011 novel of love and betrayal set in Ireland's boom years. In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, in the winter of 2009, it has snowed. Gina Moynihan, girl about town, recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life", Seán Vallely. As the city outside comes to a halt, Gina remembers the days of their affair in one hotel room or another: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and the stillness and vertigo of the falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, Gina awaits the arrival on her doorstep of Seán's fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie.

Anne Enright is the author of three collections of short stories and five novels, including The Gathering, which won the Irish Fiction Award and the 2007 Man Booker Prize.

With The Tripods, The Death of Grass and many others, he created enduring worlds for his readers

Whether you knew John Christopher by his given name Samuel Youd, or any of the many pseudonyms he wrote under during his seven-decade-long writing career, his novels created impressive worlds of the imagination that have stayed with their many readers through out their lives.

Readers of my 30-something generation are most likely to remember John Christopher for his young adult novels The Tripods and its adaptation for the small screen in the 1980s. The Tripods describes a future Britain where humanity has been enslaved to a race of alien invaders who travel in giant, three-legged walking machines. Fragments of The Tripods are lodged very deeply in my imagination, in particular the horrifying sense of immense and all-powerful authorities looming over life, beyond our control and understanding.

More recently, Christopher's work has caught our attention again with the publication of the Penguin modern classic edition of The Death of Grass, an adult science fiction novel that nonetheless continued his interest in post-apocalyptic descriptions of Britain. The Death of Grass is a remarkably brutal and unforgiving book, qualities belied by the calm, distanced quality of its telling. Charting a journey across the country made in the wake of an apocalyptic virus outbreak, the novel places its characters in a series of moral quandaries where, when push comes to shove, they choose their own survival over any idea of moral duty to others.

Christopher was one of a generation of British writers who exploited the mass popularity of science fiction as a way of holding the mirror of art up to a wide spectrum of British society. The Tripods owes a debt to the martian invaders of HG Wells's The War of the Worlds, and both stories in different ways comment on the authoritarian culture of British society. The influence of John Wyndham's "cosy catastrophe" novels such as The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids is clear in Christopher's very British depictions of apocalyptic settings and, like Wyndham, Christopher fills his stories with oblique character studies drawn from everyday life in Britain. And while they shared little stylistically, both John Christopher and his near contemporary JG Ballard shared a healthy cynicism about just how long Britain's polite society would last without the comforts afforded by wealth.

With the sad news of John Christopher's death this week, it seems that the generation of British authors who created science fiction with such humour and subtlety and willingness to be critical of authority is being lost. I for one hope these are qualities that will return to the genre. They are needed now as much as ever.

'Anya's Ghost is not only a spooky horror tale, but is a really heart-warming and hilarious novel. It is easy to relate to, and really, really clever

Anya's Ghost. The title means it already appeals to a certain type of person. If you like scaring yourself to sleep at night with a creepy horror story, of course, you will not regret picking up this book.

However, I'm not a horror person. If I'm choosing a new book, I don't reach for a book with the words 'ghost', 'horror', or 'disgusting terror' in the title. But fortunately, someone realised I'm awful at choosing books, for that reason exactly. Several people could fall asleep looking at my bookcase. Family problems, teenage dramas, and (the occasional) fairy story. Anyway, enough of the rambling, long story short, someone bought it for me, as a Christmas present. Honestly, I appreciated it, but I was on quickly enough to the mysterious box that smelt like chocolate (it was chocolate, but that's not that important).

About a week later I was tidying my table, and I came across it again. I did go through the 'I must read that' thought process, but I shoved it on the book shelf with all the other books all the same. In the same week, my mother started a graphic novel for adults, named 'drinking at the movies.' Which she loved. This brought her to ask me if she could read my new book, 'Anya's Ghost.' I said yes, and in another week she had finished it. Her words, quoted correctly "This is a really good book Grace, you would enjoy it." So, I read it, and I'm really glad I did.

Anya's Ghost is not only a spooky horror tale, but is a really heart-warming and hilarious novel. It is easy to relate to, and really, really clever. Not forgetting, it is over 200 pages long, but can be enjoyed even if you do not feel like a confident reader, and generally go for the shorter book. But the truth is, this book is worth the challenge. Me and my mother are still quoting little parts and laughing about them together.

A quick overview of the story:

Anya is a completely normal teenage girl, she's sure she looks fat in her shirt, she never says her surname because she's sure it's more embarrassing than everyone else's, and she envies that pretty girl, and her perfect boyfriend, who she quite fancies for herself....

But when she falls down a little hole in the forest, she finds a young ghost named Emily, who cannot leave her skeleton. Anya takes pity on her, and Emily ends up staying at her house. At first it seems like a great idea, she can help her with her homework, and she knows all about boys from her ninety years observation. But when Emily begins to change, Anya decides she needs to find out more about her mysterious past....

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He used to be a mere entertainer – now at his bicentenary he is 'the greatest'. Why should we elevate him above all others?

Dickens here, Dickens there, Dickens everybloodywhere. And here am I (and, after me, a chorus of you) adding to the pile. Set your spam filters now. There's more to come.

Tomorrow at 11.15, a wreath commemorating the 200th year of Charles Dickens's birth will be laid at Westminster Abbey – where his bones lie – and, one half expects, the nation will observe two minutes' silence for "the Great Inimitable". Every day, for the last few months, there has been a tsunami of Dickens stories. Today's Guardian, for example, informs us that Ebenezeer Scrooge is our favourite Dickensian character. While in the Telegraph, Simon Callow declares that Dickens is "our first and favourite literary superstar". (Chew on that, Shakespeare.)

The Times reports Claire Tomalin's anxieties that all the recycled Dickens we're being bombarded with on small and large screens is eroding children's ability to read Dickens intelligently. The article is accompanied by a picture of Gillian Anderson, from the recent Great Expectations BBC adaptation, looking as much like Miss Havisham as Katie Price resembles Sairey Gamp (the homicidal nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit, if that's one of the books you haven't got round to yet).

Never one to trail the bandwagon, the Daily Mail did its "Dickens was a Love Rat" story a few weeks ago, penned by "Simon Heffer PhD", under the eyecatching title: "The dark heart of Dickens: How writer was an abusive husband who seduced a woman 26 years his junior".

Is Dickens really that good (as a writer, not a husband I hasten to say)? What about the other Vict-lit greats. It was William Makepeace Thackeray's bicentennial last year. Who noticed? Even though, for my money, Vanity Fair is a greater novel than anything Dickens penned. In December this year the BBC is doing a three-part adaptation of Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone. TS Eliot (no less) acclaimed it the "first and best of detective novels". He was right. It beats that other contender for the title, Bleak House, into a cocked hat.

But Dickens is now, incontrovertibly, the "greatest". It was not always so. The Times observed, in a snide obituary notice on his death, that Dickens "was often vulgar in manners and dress … ill at ease with gentlemen". Real gents, that is. The smart money was on classy novelists like Bulwer Lytton and George Meredith. (If you're interested, and no one is, their bicentennials are 2003 and 2028).

All through the first half of the 20th century Dickens was regarded as a great entertainer and nothing more. There was no place for him on the university syllabus. Leave him to the film-makers and Classic Comics. Oh, and the Americans who for some reason thought highly of him. The first, heroic, generation of British Dickensians (Philip Collins, KJ Fielding, Kathleen Tillotson) were shut out from posts at Oxbridge, and laboured in provincial universities. Gradually the tide turned and crested in the centennial of his death, 1970. Suddenly Boz was "canonical". The Dickens industry cranked up, spewing monographs, PhDs and owlishly over-annotated editions. Dickens even appeared on a £10 note, the only novelist ever to have done so.

I write as someone who has devoted my professional life mainly to other 19th novelists than Dickens. I wouldn't deny him a place at the top table but there is, I believe, something wrong about elevating him above all the others as "the champ".

We are currently infected by an ethos of competition. What's the best novel of 2011? We had a gladiatorial competition to decide which was the "one": Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending. In fact, there were many superb novels published last year – all now certified losers by virtue of Barnes's superb novel winning. It reflects a lack of balance in how we approach our literature.

So, yes, give Dickens a round of applause on his 200th birthday. But let's not forget the others. They're just as good – or better.

My 10 Victorian novels that are as good as, or better than, anything Dickens wrote:

Middlemarch, George Eliot
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell

• John Sutherland's The Dickens Dictionary (Icon, £9.99) is published tomorrow at 11.15am

In honour of National Libraries Day at the weekend, we asked you to tell us about your library heroes. You sent in loads of suggestions from all over the country...

Julia Donaldson's Library Poem got lots of our readers thinking about the unsung heroes of their book world. From Dorset to Dudley, here are some of the librarians who have inspired them. To tell us about your library heroes, send us an email at childrens.books@guardian.co.uk

Clare:
Our librarian Mrs Lyons is brilliant! She always knows which new books to buy in and organises brilliant trips like our year 7 cinema trip to see War Horse next week. She also takes secondary school students down to read with pupils at our local primary schools.

Jen:
Hazel Birt Principal Librarian for Children and Young People at Dudley Libraries has dedicated her career to promoting books and library services for children. She is so enthusiastic and passionate about all she does and we had the best ever Summer Reading Challenge this year.

Luke:
Our library is really good and we don't want you to close it because it's our favourite place. It's very good because every time we go to it it is our favourite so we don't want it to close down. Ps, it's Wyke Library in Bradford. It's very important. You should never shut people's libraries. Libraries are good. We go to the library on Thursdays after school. Kate is our librarian and we like her because she is always getting us new things that we ask her for. We like reading different books.

Clare:
You never stop needing librarians and libraries. Helen Westwood is a subject librarian at Cass Business School. It's never too young to
start either! She used to have her own index cards for her videos as a
child but shhhhh.... I didn't tell you that...

Graham:
The Librarian at Lytchett Matravers Library is Susan Thomas and she is assisted by Natasha and Claire, they make a superb team helping children enjoy visiting the library and reading a wide range of children's books. They also organise other courses and projects for the children of the villages in the area and last year the library was chosen to launch the Summer Reading Programme for children. All the activities organised by this team are usually over subscribed.This year the library which is located in a village of 3500 people will issue over 50,000 books.

Actor set to reprise role as Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's forthcoming follow-up to his 1982 sci-fi classic, reports say

Harrison Ford is lining up to make a surprise return to the role of Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner sequel, Twitchfilm reports. Ford is apparently in early talks to return as the replicant nemesis in Scott's forthcoming followup to his 1982 sci-fi classic. If the prediction turns out to be true, it would be even more of a shock than the news in March last year that the veteran British film-maker was to shoot a new Blade Runner film. Scott had dismissed rumours of another Blade Runner film for nearly three decades, and his producer Andrew Kosove denied suggestions Ford might be involved in the new film as recently as last August.

"Twitch has learned that Harrison Ford has entered into early talks to join the new Blade Runner," reports the US site. "While this is still very early stages and it is quite possible that things won't work out the obvious implication is that what we are looking at is not a reboot but a direct sequel to the original."

Based on the 1968 Philip K Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner was not a hit at the time but has gathered plaudits over the years. Set in an overpopulated future Los Angeles that never sees the sunlight, Scott's movie is about a "blade runner", played by Ford, who is tasked with hunting down a gang of replicants (android outlaws) who have escaped to Earth from an off-world colony. The film-maker left the audience to decide whether Deckard himself is a replicant.

Negative criticism of the film was largely reversed with the arrival in 1992 of Scott's director's cut, which excised the original's voiceover and a pegged-on "happy ending". Dick never wrote a sequel to the book, so Scott will probably be aiming to produce an original story. Three follow-up novels by Dick's friend, KW Jeter, were written between 1995 and 2000 to try to resolve some of the differences between Blade Runner and its source novel, but they were poorly received.

Prior to working on Blade Runner 2, which may or may not be his next film, Scott will make his long-awaited return to science fiction with Prometheus, a film "set in the same universe" as Alien, his cult 1979 slasher in space. The film, which stars Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace, Guy Pearce and Idris Elba, opens in the UK on 1 June.

Science-fiction author who created the Tripods trilogy and also published under the name Samuel Youd

The science-fiction author John Christopher, who has died aged 89, was perhaps best known for the Tripods trilogy for young adults. The books (published in 1968-69) depict a world suffering under the control of aliens from a far star, who can survive in the Earth's inimical atmosphere only by moving around in deadly tripodal machines inside which their own atmosphere can be replicated. As a result, our world has reverted to a low-technology state, almost medieval in nature. A group of adolescents, not yet fitted with a mentally controlling "cap", bravely confront the menace of the Tripods. In the end, the results they achieve are not entirely what they expected.

The success of these books created a new career for the author, who for several years afterwards was recognised as a leading writer for older children. This was especially true in the US, where his books became perennial library favourites, and are still standard reading in many schools. In the mid-80s, the Tripods books inspired a popular TV series screened on the BBC.

He was born Christopher Samuel Youd in the village of Knowsley, close to Liverpool. After his family moved to Hampshire, he attended the Peter Symonds school in Winchester; the area was often described in his novels. The second world war started at almost the same time as he left school, interrupting his writing career. In his five years in the Royal Corps of Signals, he saw action in Gibraltar, North Africa and Italy. He began writing as soon as he was out of uniform.

A postwar scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation gave him two years of financial independence, during which he wrote The Winter Swan (1949), the first of his three novels as Samuel Youd. He had previously published a few short pieces in American science-fiction magazines. Always hard-working and prolific, he then began writing in earnest for the science-fiction market and adopted the pseudonym "John Christopher".

He published many well-received short stories, most of which were anthologised or collected into volumes. His mainstream literary career continued in parallel: he averaged four novels a year, and was soon using a number of other pseudonyms. One of these was "Peter Nichols" and he belatedly offered a good-humoured apology to the playwright, even though Nichols's plays appeared long after.

It was as John Christopher that he wrote the novel The Death of Grass (1956), his first real success as a writer and the one that enabled him to give up his day job. At the time, he was working in London for the South Africa-based Industrial Diamond Information Bureau, sometimes writing on a portable typewriter during his daily commute. The Death of Grass was published by Michael Joseph, the house that had made a success of John Wyndham's celebrated series of postwar science fictional "disaster" novels. He quickly found himself being compared with the somewhat older Wyndham, sometimes to his detriment, but more often than not to his advantage. The two men knew each other and had an amiable relationship, but they were never close friends.

In this period of the 1950s, both authors were writing novels that depicted a variety of global catastrophes, but these superficial similarities hid genuine differences. Youd repudiated, rightly, the tag of "cosy catastrophe", a phrase coined by Brian Aldiss. In The Death of Grass, and several other similar novels that followed, there is a pleasing ruthlessness behind many of the actions. The Death of Grass tells the story of a world where all the graminaceous crops have failed. David Custance has a potato farm in Westmorland; his younger brother John wants his family to join him. After a few murders of innocent people encountered on the way up the Great North Road, the two brothers confront each other with automatic weapons. It ends badly – there is nothing like that in The Day of the Triffids!

The American actor Cornel Wilde filmed the book in 1970 under the title No Blade of Grass. Youd made no effort to see it until one day it was shown on British television. He said later that he settled down with a glass of whisky to watch it, but was upstairs in bed by the end of the first commercial break.

Of the later John Christopher adult novels, The World in Winter (1962) and A Wrinkle in the Skin (1965) are notable. The former's opening sequence, in the icy reading room at the British Museum, is for economy of images and character motivation an almost textbook example of how to write that sort of thing.

Youd had an unusual way of working. He did a quick first draft of the opening chapter, but for the remainder typed a "final" version, with several carbon copies. When he had completed the book he would go back and redraft the first chapter, this time with carbon copies. He used the method when he wrote his first Tripods book, The White Mountains (1967). Almost at once he came into the charge of an American publisher's editor called Susan Hirschman. She ordered a rewrite before she would accept it, so he gamely redrafted the first chapter. Then Hirschman said the middle sequence was no good, so he reworked that. More followed. Afterwards, he reflected ruefully that she had made the novel much better than it might have been, as she did for the novels that followed.

He lived for many years in Guernsey, but later returned to England, where he moved to Rye, East Sussex, and lived in the house once owned by the artist Paul Nash. I met him several times, as we were near-neighbours in Sussex. He held strong opinions, but was a congenial and pleasant man.

In 1946 he married Joyce Fairbairn, with whom he had five children, Nick, Rose, Liz, Sheila and Margret. After he and Joyce divorced in 1978, he married Jessica Ball. She died in 2001. His children survive him.

• John Christopher (Christopher Samuel Youd), science-fiction writer and children's novelist, born 16 April 1922; died 3 February 2012

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Nerys Parry, author of the novel, "Man & Other Natural Disasters", tours with Nurture Virtual Book Tourz in January and February.

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Bill Miller, author of the beautifully-illustrated Young Adult book, "Heroes & Hounds", tours with Nurture Virtual Book Tourz in February.

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Everything we thought we knew about aging is changing. Part of the Growing Bolder self-improvement series, "Rock Stars of Aging: 50 Ways to Live to 100" reveals the simple lifestyle changes...

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