Discworld's creator on his new novel, living with Alzheimer's – and why he should be allowed to decide when to end it all

When, not very long ago, Terry Pratchett's father was given a year to live, Pratchett père took it, on the whole, philosophically. Father and son had plenty of time to "have those conversations that you have with a dying parent", and to reminisce about his father's time in India during the war. At one point, said Pratchett, in last year's Dimbleby lecture, his father suddenly said, "'I can feel the sun of India on my face,' and his face did light up rather magically, brighter and happier than I had seen it at any time in the previous year. If there had been any justice or even narrative sensibility in the universe, he would have died there and then, shading his eyes from the sun of Karachi."

If the universe refused to display narrative sensibility, then Pratchett Jr would: that moment returns early in his new novel, I Shall Wear Midnight, in which a gruff, essentially kindly old man is vouchsafed a vision of youth and sunlight (though, instead of Karachi, the sunbeams glint off a leaping hare) and expires as he describes it. Even Pratchett knows this is a tad too neat, however, so, this being Discworld, his fantasy kingdom on a flat planet sailing through space on the backs of four elephants who in turn stand on a giant turtle, Death makes a lugubrious wisecrack about it: "WASN'T THAT APPROPRIATE?"

Pratchett, when he arrives at his idyllic local pub in Wiltshire, turns out to be full of this type of humour – deliberate, slightly coercive, very self-aware. He seems a man used to being listened to: his sentences unspool evenly, sometimes a shade irascibly, from beginning to end, often as anecdotes topped and tailed and full of random facts, gloried in for their own sake – annual expenditure on farmers' boots in the 19th century; the ubiquity then of shoe trees; did you know that in Victorian England, most of the women read and most of the men didn't?

Partly, though, this is because he's been writing all morning: I Shall Wear Midnight, a young adult novel, was launched in central London at midnight on Tuesday, but, as has been the way throughout a career that has so far produced 50 novels (38 of them set on Discworld) and generated more than 65m book sales – Pratchett is already 60,000 words into the next book.

And for the last two and a half years, ever since he was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer's, and lost the physical ability to write, he has dictated those words into voice-recognition software. At first, in fact, he talks to me about the machine as if I am a machine (which is not entirely unwarranted: there is a tape recorder sitting on the table between us). ". . . And the nice thing is, contrary to what you might initially expect, comma" – we both burst out laughing – "yes, sorry about this, full stop."

Pratchett has announced that his new book will be the last in his Tiffany Aching series (Aching is a young witch), and the novel, a bridge between childhood and the adult world, is full of worldly darkness – death, domestic abuse, old women's corpses being eaten by their pets, depression. "I'm a fantasy writer," he says. "Called a fantasy writer. But there's very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in I Shall Wear Midnight, which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they're practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don't fall off. And you try not to use them too often."

Aching is, in effect, a young social worker, and much of her supposedly witchy wisdom comes simply from being near to people in the moments when others are not, or from making mistakes. At one point, in exasperation, she gets her familiars, the Nac Mac Feegles, to whizz around a depressed woman's very messy kitchen and clean it up – succeeding only in terrifying her.

"Tiffany's parents got it right," says Pratchett, sounding for all the world like a promoter of Cameron's Big Society: "mobilise the village to deal with [somebody like that]." Aching has First Sight and Second Sight (and occasionally third and fourth) – but they are, respectively, "seeing what's really there, rather than what you want to see," and "thinking about what you are thinking": self-awareness by other names.

Pratchett knows there are strict rules about making things so dark when you are writing for children – "a child's instinctive grasp of narrativium [sic] is that this has got to end well" – but he is also very clear that, while his witch can take away physical pain (she draws it out into a ball, then dumps it), she cannot, and will not, take loss, sadness, or grief.

"I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff," says Pratchett. "That's the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?"

He doesn't say it in so many words, but that must also be combined with grief for the loss of his ability to write longhand, or type with anything other than one finger at a time (although, weirdly, he is still perfectly able to sign his name — "the bit that knows how to sign my name is an entirely different bit of the brain"); the grief of knowing that while he may have years yet, most of his other mental faculties will go the same way. But probably not suddenly.

"Every day must be a tiny, incrementally . . . incremental . . . incremental . . . – he stumbled over a word; you must write that one down," Pratchett says with a dark, almost-laugh. (Having been a journalist himself, before becoming a PR in the nuclear industry and thence a novelist, he rarely passes up a chance to remind you that he knows how journalists work) ". . . incremental . . . change on the day before. So what is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you're hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

"The last test I did was the first where I wasn't as good as the previous time. I actually forgot David Cameron. I just blanked on him" – this time the laugh contains, what – a kind of ironic approval? "What happens is, I call it the ball bearing. It's there, it just hasn't gone into the slot." He cannot begin to do tests that require him to scribble shapes, but asked to list names of animals, "I industriously say more than you can possibly imagine" – you can just see the pleasure of the earnest nerd in school – "and we go on for a little while until she smiles and says, 'Yes, we know, we know.'

"And then there was the time with dear Claudia with the Germanic accent – which is always good if someone's interrogating you – and she said, 'What would you do with a hammer? And I said, 'If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning. I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land.' And by the end I was dancing around the room, with her laughing. The laugh will be on the other foot, eventually, and I'm aware of that. But it shows how different things can be: I can still handle the language well, I can play tricks with it and all the other stuff – but I have to think twice when I put my pants on in the morning."

How does it change his sense of self? "Well – no one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes. I think – this is going to follow me for ages – I'm open to moments of joy: the other day, it was just a piece of rusty barbed wire in the hedge. Something had grown over it, and the whole pattern, the different shades of brown, the red – everything made a superb construction. And I was just happy that I'd seen it. But then I think – and it may just be because I'm 62 – it's also made me more . . . cynical? About government. And more sure, which is why I'm doing the Dignity in Dying."

For nearly as long as he has been public about his illness, Pratchett has been public about his wish to choose when he goes, and his puzzlement that British law does not see the sense of his position. "I feel embarrassed that people from this country have to go, cap in hand, to die in Switzerland. Apart from anything else, it makes it a rich man's – or a soon to be much poorer man's – possibility." And people have to go earlier than they intended. "Exactly."

He has a lot of time for the law in Oregon, where doctors can give a terminally ill patient a "potion to take when life gets too bad. I believe something like 40% or more of the patients die without taking it. Which means that every day they're thinking, 'Hmmmm – today's worth living.' And then one day they don't, and they die. That seems to me a very human thing, and a very good thing, because they can think, 'OK, that's sorted, I've got the potion, now I can get on and try and get the most out of life.'"

Ideally, Pratchett would like things to be even more official than that: there should be tribunals – here he leans forward, looking intently at me over his glasses – of mental health professionals, lawyers etc, all over the age of 45, who would question the patient and try to ascertain that no one was coercing them, and that the choice was not "a passing fixation".

But that's incredibly difficult; in illness you're often dealing with depression. "Yes. Yes, I know. I know," he says impatiently. Of course he knows. "Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect. But anything is better than some poor half of a couple in some house, devising something with ropes and pulleys, saying, 'If he pulls this and we use that . . .' – that's obscene."

Currently, that half of the couple can, in theory, be prosecuted for murder. At least with a tribunal, "it would mean that whoever is left behind is at somewhat less risk – they're probably still at some risk, but at least there would be some proof that the situation was there."

Part of me wonders if the publicness of Pratchett's discussions might, on some level, be trying to achieve this too – getting us to act as an unwitting tribunal and witnesses, if or when the need arises. What does Lyn, his wife of more than 40 years, think of all this? "I think my wife takes the view that . . . Actually, I think in her heart of hearts she takes the view that a hand will come out of the sky with a big flask, saying, 'Just the stuff you were after.' I think she takes the view that, um . . . that she would look after me. And I have not said to her – I have absolutely not said to her – 'I want you to do this, or I want you to do that.'" What about his daughter (Rhianna, 33, a successful games scriptwriter and, as she describes herself on her website, "general narrative paramedic")? "My daughter thinks, 'If Dad wants it, that's OK.' I don't think she has any particular interest in seeing me lying there like a baby."

That was certainly the way he felt about his own father. It was even, it seems, something his father wanted. Had it been legal, Pratchett says, and "if he could have sat up in bed and said goodbye, I'd have pressed the button. I wouldn't have been able to see for crying, but I would have considered that a duty."

• I Shall Wear Midnight is published by Doubleday at £18.99. To order a copy for £14.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

• This article was amended on 2 September 2010. The original referred to Nac Nac Feegles. This has been corrected.

In the fourth in our series of interviews with authors longlisted for the Guardian children's fiction prize, Michelle Pauli talks Theresa Breslin about writing historical fiction for a modern audience

Historical fiction for teens may not be as in vogue as vampires right now, but for Theresa Breslin, the stories the past inspires can seem just as fantastical. The Carnegie-winning Scottish author has written more than 30 children's books, many of them tackling serious contemporary subjects such as bullying – but, recently it has been characters from centuries gone that have caught her imagination.

Her latest novel, Prisoner of the Inquisition, which has been longlisted for the Guardian children's fiction prize, is set in 15th-century Spain. It was a time of tumult for the country: the throne was divided between two monarchs, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon; Tomás de Torquemada, the architect of the Spanish Inquisition, was at the height of his powers; and Christopher Columbus was about to set sail across the Atlantic.

"It was almost too good to be true," says Breslin, laughing down the phone from her home in Scotland. "If you had orchestrated this as a fiction story and gone to an editor saying, I've got a magnificent queen who was intent on reunifying the country, endless religious upheaval and an explorer, they would have said it was a bit much. But, of course, it's all fact."

Prisoner of the Inquisition is narrated alternately by two teenagers, Zarita and Saulo, whose lives first connect when privileged, naive Zarita, daughter of a wealthy town magistrate, accuses Saulo's father, a beggar, of touching her in a church. He is killed and Saulo escapes, secretly pledging to take his revenge on Zarita and her family. His side of the story encompasses slavery at sea, an encounter with pirates and a burgeoning friendship with Christopher Columbus. Meanwhile, Zarita sees her life change completely as a result of shifts within her family and the impact of a much wider political force: the Inquisition. The two finally meet again at the court of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand in the Moorish city of Granada, in a nail-biting showdown.

In synopsis, it may indeed sound "a bit much". But, as in Breslin's other historical novels, which cover the first world war, Catherine de Medici, Leonardo da Vinci and the Borgia dynasty, the story is firmly grounded by her extensive research into the way people lived and loved during the period.

Readers can safely lose themselves in Breslin's stories with full confidence that, while she may be weaving a fictional tale with fictional characters around real people who lived hundreds of years ago, the underlying historical base is sound. Her dedication to the period is borne out by the passion with which she talks about her lengthy research process.

"What I try to do – and I think this is the former librarian in me – is to get primary source material," she explains. "For instance, with Remembrance [Breslin's novel about the first world war, seen from a teenage perspective], I looked at an original journal reporting the Battle of the Somme that says 'we're winning and it's a glorious battle'. I also studied a military record of the men that were killed and what happened to the battalions. It all helps to let you know what people are thinking."

But it's the smaller, personal touches that bring Breslin's historical worlds back to life. For these, she researches how people dressed, played, ate – and drank. "In the middle ages they must have been half-cut half the time," she laughs. "They couldn't really drink the water. It was too dangerous, so they would drink mead instead."

She also touches on the importance of clothes as a marker of how people are feeling. In Remembrance, a moment of light relief amid the misery of the trenches is provided by a discussion on hem lengths.

In Prisoner, meanwhile, Zarita puts on her nun's garb when she reaches her lowest ebb. She feels a sense of freedom as she pulls the hood down, puts her hands into the sleeves and sinks back into herself without distraction. The habit might be made of rough grey wool, but the character observes: "It comforted me more than if I were wearing lace and brocade … I was cocooned from the outside world."

Yet, winnowing through libraries can only take a writer so far. "Ultimately, I really have to go there," she says. "Really, truly, it's not just an indulgence to get away from a Scottish winter. You need to go there and see the flowers in Andalucia, smell the sea, feel the sun on your feet when you walk through the palace of Alhambra."

Travelling on location also led her to discover snippets of history she would never otherwise have come across. Isabella's tomb in Granada revealed a clue about the queen's (accurate) estimation of her intelligence, compared with her consort's.

A helpful guide in the Hall of the Sultans, meanwhile, pointed out a secret gallery where the Sultan's female relatives would have been able to peer to keep an eye on proceedings. This discovery inspired a crucial scene in the story.

Visiting the location where the book would be set also led Breslin to question how to tackle more gruesome events of the period (specifically the acts of the Inquisition) in a book for teens. The depictions of the techniques employed by the inquisitors horrified her. "There was one museum I had to walk out of," she says. "It was horrific."

Consequently, while there are torture scenes in the book, with enough detail to make a weak-stomached reader wince, they avoid gratuitousness. For Breslin, though, it remained important to retain some details of the practices of the time in order to maintain what she calls "truth".

"At the end Zarita is crying not just for Spain and for humanity, but also for herself, because she is going to be racked," she says. "I think if I hadn't shown a bit of the factual thing, that wouldn't be convincing. In order to deliver the emotional truth in the story, you have to include some of the literal truth."

Bresling adds: "Remembrance was the same. It was barbaric, but if you sanitise it, it's not true. Equally if you gloss over it, it's not true. How do you handle it? It was very difficult to show what was happening and the effects it would have on someone's spirit – not just their body – and deliver that truth."

Remembrance kicked off Breslin's move to historical fiction when she told her editor she wanted to write "something about world war one from a teenager's point of view, because it's going to be the war of the previous century". Her editor was doubtful.

Following that success, Breslin said the historical figure she really wanted to write about was da Vinci. Again there were doubts. "It was in the days before Dan Brown and my editor said 'do you really think people would be interested in da Vinci?'" says Breslin, chuckling.

She won't drop too many clues about her next book, except to say that "it's another historical queen" (and no, it's not Elizabeth). It's safe to say that Breslin's editor is unlikely to be doubtful this time.

From total believers to complete sceptics, the author of Mirage Men selects books that are 'informative, entertaining, puzzling or all three at once'

Mark Pilkington is a writer with a fascination for the further shores of culture, science and belief. He also publishes books as Strange Attractor Press. In Mirage Men Pilkington travels across America looking to explain his own UFO sighting. After scouring the subject's history and meeting former air force and intelligence insiders, Pilkington concludes that instead of covering up tales of UFO crashes and alien visitors, the US military and intelligence services have been promoting them all along as part of their cold war counter-intelligence operations.

Buy Mark Pilkington books at the Guardian bookshop

"The UFO arena acts as a kind of vivarium for a range of psychological, sociological and anthropological experiences, beliefs, conditions and behaviours. They remind us that the Unknown and the Other are still very much at large in our modern world, and provide us with a fascinating glimpse of folklore in action. A tiny few UFO reports also still present us with genuine mysteries.

"The first book about UFOs as we know them was The Flying Saucer, a 1948 novel by British former spy Bernard Newman. I'm not sure how many UFO books have been written since then, but I'd guess that it's well over 1000. Here, in chronological order, are 10 that I can recommend as either informative, entertaining, puzzling or all three at once."

1. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward J Ruppelt

An insider's account of the crucial, early days of the UFO story, by the man who headed the US Air Force's official UFO investigation from 1951 to 1953. Ruppelt documents shifting Air Force attitudes to the phenomenon, which ranged from aggressive denial to apparent endorsement of alien visitation in an infamous 1952 Life magazine article. In a revised edition, published in 1960, Ruppelt was more dismissive of the subject. He died the same year, aged 37.

2. Flying Saucer Pilgrimage by Bryant and Helen Reeve

A charming glimpse into the early days of the UFO culture, when the lines between spiritualism, occultism and ufology were largely indistinguishable. The Reeves travelled the US in search of "the Saucerers", meeting many key figures of the time before making contact with real Space People via the wonders of Outer Space Communication (OSC) and a portable tape recorder. Many important questions are answered: How do we look to the space people? Do they believe in Jesus Christ? Is this civilisation ending?

3. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky by Carl Jung

It was only natural that the Swiss mystic and philosopher-shrink, fascinated by anomalous experiences, should turn his attention to the UFO mystery. Considering UFOs as a "visionary rumour" and a manifestation of the mythic unconscious, Jung compares the perfect circle of the flying disc to the mandala, notes the dreamlike impossibility of many reports and presciently recognises the deep spiritual pull that the UFO would exert over the next half century.

4. The UFO Experience By J Allen Hynek

Astronomer Hynek was an air force consultant on UFOs for much of his life, and over time transformed from something of a Doubting Thomas to a St Paul. He's regarded as a saint in UFO circles, largely for this book, a sober yet sympathetic overview of the UFO problem that excoriates the US Air Force for their failure to treat the phenomenon seriously. Hynek devised the "Close Encounters" system for categorising UFO sightings, and has a cameo during the cosmic disco climax of Spielberg's blockbusting film (that's him with the pipe looking like Colonel Sanders).

5. The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel

Merging unconscious deceptions with deliberate fictions, many of the wilder UFO books would have even the most intrepid postmodernists cowering behind the sofa. Keel, however, was a two-fisted trickster who knew exactly what he was doing and this reads like Thomas Pynchon crossed with Philip K Dick channelling HP Lovecraft. In the late 1960s Point Pleasant, West Virginia was plagued by bizarre entities, UFO sightings and robotic, jelly-fixated Men in Black; Keel investigated only to find himself in too deep and the town doomed to real-life disaster.

6. Messengers of Deception by Jacques Vallée

An intriguing, disconcerting book from one of the field's most progressive thinkers. Vallée, a French astronomer and computer scientist who worked with J Allen Hynek, became entangled in bizarre mind games while investigating UFO cults in the 1970s. Amongst others, Vallée encountered HIM (Human Individual Metamorphosis), led by "Bo and Peep" who would steer the Heaven's Gate group to their collective death two decades later.

7. Report on Communion by Ed Conroy

Whitley Strieber's Communion is one of the 20th century's great literary mysteries and Conroy's spinoff is just as curious. A hard-nosed investigative journalist, Conroy examined Strieber's alleged alien abduction experiences and odd life story while also researching the history of UFOs and its parallels in folkloric encounter narratives. In a testament to the power of UFOria and the allure of the Other, by the end of the book he's being buzzed by shape-shifting helicopters and wondering whether he too has had contact with the Visitors.

8. Remarkable Luminous Phenomena in Nature by William Corliss

One of at least 18 hardback volumes of anomalies collected by this modern-day Charles Fort. Ball lightning (miniature, giant, black, object-penetrating and ordinary), bead lightning, lightning from clear skies, pillars of light, glowing owls, luminous bubbles, oceanic light wheels, earthquake lights, marsh gas, unusual auroras, glowing fogs. And that's just for starters. I love this book.

9. The Trickster and the Paranormal by George Hansen

Hansen, a former professional laboratory parapsychologist, provides illumination, insight and perspective on the wider paranormal research field, UFOs included. Drawing on folklore, anthropology, literary theory and sociology, Hansen points out the integral, destabilising role of Trickster archetypes in human society. While dwelling predominantly amongst its esoteric fringes, the Trickster can also be seen lurking in the corridors of political, military and corporate power.

10. Out of the Shadows by David Clarke and Andy Roberts

A rock-solid history of the UFO phenomenon in Britain by two of our most reliable and indefatigable researchers. Clarke and Roberts work from interviews and official documentation detailing everything from genuine aerial mysteries during the second world war (investigated for the RAF by the Goon Show's Michael Bentine) to the cold war follies of 1980's Rendlesham Forest incident. Serious UFO research as it should be done.

Tony Blair's biography is flying off the shelves, but how have his political friends and rivals fared in the literary bear pit? Test your knowledge of political memoirs, from Margaret Thatcher to Mo Mowlam

Fast becoming a pivotal event in the literary calendar, this is the coveted honour decided by readers of the Guardian books blog. It's time to do your jury service

This year, the fun of complaining about the Man Booker prize has been rather spoiled by the fact that the judging panel appears to have compiled a pretty strong longlist. Disappointingly, nearly all the books appear to be interesting – and at least two on the list – The Slap and Room – are even proving excitingly divisive and controversial.

The talk hasn't been so much about dull worthiness and yet more Irish dolour and north London angst as about abuse, tangled race issues and outrage. Oh, yes – and pleasure that some fine authors are getting recognition. As ever, there's been plenty of comment about notable omissions – but this year, most of it has related to Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, and few are claiming that the current novels from the web's favourite whipping boys have suffered an injustice.

At least, that's the consensus as I see it from inside my near-impermeable media bubble. But there's every chance that the refractions and distortions that come from my proximity to other book reviewers, publishers and writers – and particularly their self-aggrandising Twitter feeds – may have given me the wrong impression. The same is true, of course, of the rest of the Guardian's books desk. Which is why, once again, we want to open things up to you, the untainted reader, and ask you which books really deserved to be in contention. Yes, it's Not the Booker prize time again.

Does the current longlist really stand up to scrutiny? Have the best books got through? What are we missing? We again want to find out if the blogging crowd will show more wisdom than the Booker's panel of judges. Can you come up with a more interesting shortlist? Can you pick a better winner? Or will you, indeed, choose the same one? Let's find out.

The format will be very nearly the same as last year – which makes things easier for me as I can just cut and paste from 2009's opening blog:

"Over the next few weeks nominations will be gathered here, books will be shortlisted and discussed and – provided things go smoothly – a winner will be selected."

For the sake of convenience we're also going to use roughly the same entry criteria as the Booker panel. That's to say, you can nominate:

* Any full length novel (or at least, a long novella) written by a citizen of the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland or Zimbabwe.

* No English translation of a book written originally in any other language.

* No self-published books where the author is the publisher or where a company has been specifically setup to publish that book.

* The books have to have a scheduled publication date between 1 October 2009 and 30 September 2010.

Unlike the Booker panel, however, we aren't going to limit the number of entries per publisher.

The full terms and conditions are available here. The two most important changes to note from last year are:

1) Instead of the conventional six-book shortlist, we'll be going for a shorter list of five, in order to enable as many people as possible to have a chance to read along with us.

2) In the final round, in order to avoid the kind of late-breaking tsunami of votes that so discombobulated us last time, votes will only be counted from those who have participated in the earlier discussion stages. That's to say, when we get to the voting stage, you need to include a link to a comment you've made on one of the earlier threads, so we can see that you mean it.

This first round is for nominations. All you have to do is name one book – and only one book – you'd like to see considered for the prize, in the comments section below. This time next week I'll put up a full list of all nominations and round two will begin. In round two, you vote for the book on the list that you'd most like to see go through. The five books with the most votes will go into the next stage as our shorter shortlist. Easy!

I'll then read each book in turn and post blogs inviting further discussion. After that, there'll be the excitement and terror of voting. As per last year, we'll try and time it so that the results of the Not the Booker come out just before the Booker-proper. Partly to steal the prize's thunder, but mainly so that we don't get all tangled up.

And that's it. The prize will once again be a Guardian mug, an item so rare and precious that last time I checked it wasn't even available on ebay. Its destination is once again in your hands. Over to you.

Artist Catherine Anyango tells how her richly-detailed drawings reflect the dense style of Joseph Conrad's savage colonial story

In the 108 years since it was published, Joseph Conrad's colonial fable Heart of Darkness has infected TS Eliot, been excoriated for racism by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and transplanted to Vietnam by Francis Ford Coppola.

Now the book has been reinterpreted as a graphic novel in whose monochrome pages Conrad's exploration of power, greed and madness plays out as disturbingly as ever.

Catherine Anyango, whose drawings are peppered with David Zane Mairowitz's adaptation of the text, had her doubts about tackling the Polish-born novelist's most famous work.

Those reservations had more to do with the original medium than the enduring controversy over Conrad's views or the familiarity of Heart of Darkness.

"I wasn't sure initially if it was a good subject for a graphic novel as the writing is so dense and the style of it is partly what attracts me to the book," she said.

"As I knew we couldn't keep most of the text in, I tried to make the drawings very rich in detail and texture so that immersive feeling you get, especially when he describes the river and the jungle, was carried across."

Anyango was determined not to allow the horror of the book's subject matter to overwhelm her drawings. "I wanted to draw the reader in with seductive imagery, and then show them that even in the most beautiful of settings, terrible things can happen."

There was also Coppola's 1979 epic to contend with.

"I was too terrified to watch Apocalypse Now," the Kenyan-Swedish artist said. "Partly because I didn't want to end up with any similar visuals and also I had been warned that something nasty happens to a cow … [but] Apocalypse Now is huge and well, apocalyptic, but Heart of Darkness is a much quieter story."

Anyango, who grew up in Kenya where she went to a British school, wanted to steer a course that was as true as possible to the original so that her version did not sink under the weight of too much intellectual baggage.

"When I was dealing with the book, I was focused solely on the particular events of the Congo, rather than colonialism in general," she said. "I wasn't trying to tell the history of colonialism either, but to situate this particular narrative in a way that people might ask: what on earth was the attitude of that time that these things could happen?"

To reinforce the geographical and historical immediacy of Conrad's tale, the graphic novel is interspersed with excerpts from The Congo Diary – the journal Conrad kept of his 1890 voyage up the river.

Anyango's research also led her to the story of a man from a village in the Upper Congo called Nsala. She came across a photograph of him sat on a step contemplating the hand and foot of his daughter, which had been cut off by guards sent to his village by the Anglo Belgian India Rubber Company. The men, ordered to attack Nsala's village for failing to provide the company with enough rubber, devoured his wife and daughter, leaving only the child's hand and foot.

"I put him on one page, and similar portraits on others, so the Congolese characters have resonance at least for me, even if they remain stereotyped because of the existing narrative," she said.

In her efforts to ensure the authenticity of the uniforms she drew — the protagonist, Marlow, is given a cap with a prominent Belgian lion badge — Anyango was shocked to discover how markedly Belgian perceptions of the occupation of Congo still vary.

For some, it is a shameful episode in the country's history, while others still view it as a benign experience despite the evidence uncovered by recent histories such as Adam Hochschild's 1998 book, King Leopold's Ghost, which laid bare the barbarism inflicted on Congo.

The artist found that Belgium's colonial deeds "seem to have vanished into history, with the [country's] education system not dwelling on anything but positive aspects of the colonial rule".

That may not be not wholly surprising: at her school in Nairobi, Anyango did not learn about Britain's colonies.

It is this creeping colonial amnesia — not to mention a catalogue of recent and current events — which, she argues, give Heart of Darkness both its relevance and its universality.

"It's about the idea of entitlement; [how] through the ages we enforce our feelings of entitlement in whatever way that age will allow — from Leopold II owning the Congo as a private possession to the corporations involved with blood diamonds. The effects of entitlement have not so much gone out of fashion as out of sight."

Dr Keith Carabine, who teaches literature at the University of Kent and chairs the Joseph Conrad Society, agrees that Kurtz, the ivory trader whose misplaced idealism has putrefied into savagery and madness, has become an archetypal figure.

"Heart of Darkness is the most important book in the last 100-plus years not because it's the best, but because it anticipated how 20th century leaders with visions of bringing light and creating new models for humans beings – Hitler, Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao – all ended up," he said. "When disappointed by the response of the very groups they wanted to save or help or transform, they, like Kurtz, wish to (and actually do, of course) 'exterminate all the brutes!'"

Of the Edwardian novella's continuing relevance, Carabine is unequivocal. "If Bush and Cheney and the neocons had read Heart of Darkness and understood it, they would not have invaded Iraq under the absurd utopian illusion that the Iraqis were gagging for democracy."

As government cuts threaten libraries, the Reading Agency comes to their defence with a success story – the Summer Reading Challenge

With the government looking in every direction to wield its cost-cutting axe, the Reading Agency last week put out a plea that libraries should "not be a soft target for cuts". The declaration came in response to statistics released by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport last week showing that nearly two-thirds of Britons didn't visit a library last year. That triggered fears that the figures were a prelude to mass library closures.

The Reading Agency hit back, saying "where libraries offer a more dynamic, interactive reading service, the public respond with alacrity". One of its textbook examples was the Summer Reading Challenge (SRC), its literary initiative that encourages thousands of children to become avid readers every year.

Since its creation 12 years ago, the SRC has become an annual part of the long holidays for more than 750,000 children aged four to 11. Every year there's a theme: this year it's outer space, so children are encountering foil aliens, Plasticine planets and more. The libraries then display relevant books, distribute reading rewards such as stickers, certificates, folders and charts, and encourage children to read six or more books during the holidays.

On a warm summer afternoon in Wherwell, a small village in Hampshire, a bus covered in pictures of fairies and monsters has pulled up outside the local primary school. It's attracting scores of children, who chat excitedly as they await their turn. But this is no ice-cream van drawing the crowds: it's a library bus, and one of almost 4,000 libraries around the UK running projects encouraging children to read over the holidays as part of the reading challenge.

Among those standing in line at Hampshire's library bus this year are the Collis family – Deborah and her children Natasha, seven, and Isabella, five. Living in a remote village, Collis describes the bus as a "lifesaver". She says: "I couldn't troop all the way to Andover library that often, but the fact that the bus turns up every Monday with the books and rewards for the reading challenge is brilliant. Last summer, Natasha was moving up from year 1 to 2, and at that age they have minds like goldfish. I was worried that she would forget all of her reading progress, but in fact she got really into the reading challenge, and read a book a week.

"When she got back to school, her reading had not only kept pace, but actually improved – she went up a stage. It wasn't long before she was a 'free reader', choosing books without the structure of a reading scheme." Collis also credits the project with easing the back-to-school process in September. "It kept Natasha's brain ticking over, and stopped the barrage of 'can I watch TV all day'," she says. "It also meant she kept her school friendships going during the long break, because most of her classmates were at the bus every week."

The reading challenge might sound like a fun way for parents to fill the long, structureless summer, but there's serious academic reasoning behind it. After research showed that learners face a dip in reading levels during the summer holidays, Miranda McKearney, chief executive of the Reading Agency, decided that libraries could have a significant role in combating this. "They were the obvious place to encourage reading, but at that time, some of the projects being run by library authorities were ghastly," she explains. "It was clear that pooling everyone's resources nationally would create both serious economies of scale and great opportunities to innovate, and give everyone the chance to share ideas for a national summer reading activity."

When the scheme first ran in 1999, 65% of libraries took part. Now that figure has risen to 97%. Libraries pay the Reading Agency 40p per child for the packs of medals, posters and stickers, which are then free for children. "Every year I hear fantastic feedback," McKearney adds.

To find out more about the SRC's impact, last year the UK Literacy Association carried out more scientific analysis. Researchers compared the reading ability of 75 participants in the challenge with 75 children who did not take part. They used a combination of Assessing Pupils' Progress (APP) tests plus interviews with the children and their teachers.

After taking part in the challenge, more than 90% of the children who had previously recorded themselves as loving reading retained that level of enjoyment, whereas it dipped significantly for the non-participants. Teachers reported that almost twice as many SRC participants had improved in motivation over the summer compared with their classmates. The report also noted that almost all either maintained or improved their levels of reading achievement, while only those who did not undertake the SRC did not read any books at all during the summer.

Marie Harris, school literacy co-ordinator at St Mary Magdalen Catholic primary school in Brighton, says her students originally thought reading six books over the holidays was an "enormous, unachievable" number – but did it with great results. "I was impressed to see the boost in ability of the children who took part," she says. "Some were just starting to sound out individual words, using their phonic knowledge to blend and read the words, but after the SRC they could read text much more fluently. As they were not focusing on the actual reading of the words, they developed a love of reading books."

Only 12 year 1 and 2 students took part at Harris's school last year, but she still noted whole-school effects. "The SRC forged much closer school and library links. Some parents began going to the library in the summer as part of a routine for the first time, and said they continued after the SRC finished." In the UK as a whole, 47,000 children signed up as new library members through the SRC last year.

In north London, Sona Pandya, mother of Roshni, 13, and Hiren, 11, says that it now forms "the cornerstone of the summer". She adds: "Without the challenge, my children probably would pick up a few books, but with it they really look forward to it and their reading gets better and better. At first, the stickers and medals were a good incentive and helped get them into reading; now, they love doing it all themselves. They compete with each other to read more books." Her daughter Roshni says the SRC is "fun because you get to read books that the library recommends, and sometimes they are ones that I wouldn't have read otherwise. One year, I won a little yellow stretchy man, and a medal and certificate and stickers. I think the challenge has made me better at reading. I definitely enjoy it more, especially in the summer because you have more time."

Ahead of the massive spending cuts to be set out by the coalition government in October, McKearney is hopeful the scheme will survive. "This project is so important for children, and for libraries: the number of books issued as a result of the SRC now represents 20% of the total books issued every year.

"The scheme has built up really strong momentum. Although we're a tiny team – just one director and a few part-time staff – we have a huge impact on children. With all the talk of a 'big society', this is a very interesting model of how you can support local innovation through national charity co-ordination," she adds.

McKearney believes that schools and parents shouldn't be left alone to support children's reading. "It should be whole community effort. Through the SRC, libraries encourage children to become enthusiastic readers when schools aren't in action. They add value to a child's reading growth in a unique way that combines so beautifully with what schools are doing." And, McKearney adds with a nod to the fears of library cuts, "long may it continue."

New book comes under attack from Goncourt prize judge for 'affected writing style' and 'lack of imagination'

La carte et le territoire is being described as the novel that could finally win French novelist Michel Houellebecq France's top literary prize, the Goncourt – but not if one of the award's judges has anything to do with it.

Out later this week, the novel is Houellebecq's first since 2005's La possibilité d'une île (The Possibility of an Island). Telling the story of the artist Jed Martin, son of a famous architect, it sees him asking the writer Michel Houellebecq, "a celebrated author", to write the preface for his exhibition catalogue. It was described in Le Parisien as "ferociously funny" and has already been tipped as a frontrunner for the Prix Goncourt, an award that Houellebecq, for all his international renown, has yet to win.

But the French Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun, himself a former winner of the Goncourt and a member of the Académie Goncourt judging this year's prize, is unimpressed. In an article that stretches to almost 1,200 words in Italian newspaper La Repubblica, he lays into Houellebecq, criticising everything from the author's decision to include himself in the novel, to his mention of various consumer brands.

"What newness does this novel offer us?" writes Ben Jelloun, admitting that he would not have bothered reading the book if his duties as a Goncourt judge had not required it. "Some chat on the human condition, an affected writing style that pretends towards the clean and technically proficient, a pretence that summons up real characters and mixes them with others he has invented himself, a bit of publicity for a few consumer products."

Ben Jelloun later told French website Rue89 that "all the name-dropping, all the mystery around him [Houellebecq] stems from a lack of imagination". "Houellebecq turns to himself because he doesn't know how to invent any more," he said. "I don't like the style, I don't like the writing."

The Moroccan writer said that he had been surprised at the hostile response since writing his piece in La Repubblica. "I have discovered that Houellebecq has a very powerful fan club," he said. Whether that fan club includes the other nine members of the Académie Goncourt will be revealed in November, when the winner of the French literary prize is announced.

The acclaimed graphic novel about the mysterious, scarred old West bounty hunter has become a muddled, inept film, says Phelim O'Neill

Even if you didn't know how troubled this adaptation of John Albano's comic book was, with rumours of countless rewrites and reshoots, it's obvious something is drastically wrong here even before the opening titles are over. After we are introduced to gruesomely scarred semi-supernatural old west bounty hunter Hex (Brolin, in grisly prosthetics), there is a terrible expositional animated sequence; it's as if they simply forgot to film some key scenes. Otherwise, it seems like a bad case of lost nerve: Hex is never quite the bad-ass he is in the comics, while the plot attempts some clunky relevance as Hex hunts down a campy villain (Malkovich) who is making an olden-days weapon of mass destruction. It just gets louder and more nonsensical as it progresses, with Fox shoe-horned into as many scenes as possible.

Rating: 2/5

Tony Blair thinks the media got McCain and Obama the wrong way around in 2008, according to his autobiography

What did Tony Blair think of the 2008 US presidential election? Chris Brooke, who is valiantly live-tweeting his reading of Tony Blair's memoir, A Journey, highlights Blair's take, which comes on pages 512-513:

It's one of the oddest things about modern politics. The paradigm imposed, usually by a particular media view, completely disorients the proper analysis. I used to smile at the way the Obama/McCain election of 2008 was framed: Barack was the man of vision, John the old political hack. One seemed to call America to a new future, the other seemed a stale relic of the past. This was a paradigm that determined the mood and defined the election.

Actually, it was John who was articulating a foreign policy that could be called wildly idealistic for the cause of freedom. Barack was the supreme master of communicating a brilliant vision, but he was a practitioner of realism, advocating a cautious approach based on reaching out, arriving at compromises and striking deals to reduce tension. For these purposes, leave alone who is right. It's just a really interesting feature of modern politics that the mood trumps the policy every time.

In Downing Street, Blair never fulfilled his early promise and let Brown in. Now he can only emit a long wail of impotence

Who said books are dead? Did he blog or tweet, video or iPad? No, Tony Blair wanted to get a message across, so he wrote a book. He smeared the black stuff on trees, stitched it together and made people go out to buy it. Good for him.

Blair's mildly engaging stream of auto-eroticism shows him memoirising much as he ruled. He uses the first person singular a million times. He stages everything. He fixes on a theme and controls the narrative. The intention is to smother an Iraq apologia in endless quotables on Gordon Brown and his emotional idiocy and general hopelessness. It is cruel, but has worked a dream.

Blair was a politician of great talent, and a miserable prime minister. The service he did his country was considerable, but it was done by the time he took office in 1997. It was to anaesthetise the Labour party while he turned it into a vehicle to make him electable and his newly espoused Thatcherism irreversible, much as Attlee had made welfarism irreversible in 1945. The British left is still in denial on the subject.

When the Social Democratic party was formed in 1981, an ambitious young Blair abused them as "middle-aged, middle-class erstwhile Labour", with only "lingering social consciences [to] prevent them voting Tory". When, a year later, Anthony Blair fought Beaconsfield, he was for CND, against Trident and for withdrawal from Europe. (None of this is in his memoir.)

When Blair arrived in parliament in 1983, he was eloquent in defence of clause IV renationalisation: "not a question of reinterpreting it … but a question of giving effect to it". There should be no curb on trade union rights, and privatisation should be abandoned "here, now and for ever". When Nigel Lawson cut income tax to 40%, Blair demanded Labour increase it to 60%.

By the end of the 80s, ambition had worked a wondrous change. Blair abandoned nuclear disarmament and subscribed to the EU. As employment spokesman, he declared that Thatcher's union laws should stay. He did a U-turn on privatisation. Unlike Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Brown, Blair saw himself as classless and placeless, at ease in Thatcher's world. He travelled to the US with Brown and, like De Tocqueville, returned mesmerised, in particular by Clinton's use of political charisma.

When he became leader, Blair's self-styled "project" dared not speak its Thatcherite name, but it understood that success could lie only in capturing the middle ground, in the "electoral necessity of bourgeois ascendancy". New Labour should hang loose, talking about right and wrong, individual choice, community not state. Blair himself was unashamedly rightwing, espousing the nuclear deterrent and telling a police conference that "if we dare not speak the language of punishment then we deny the real world".

Such idealism in a prince, as Machiavelli pointed out, was useless without power. Blair's memoir is as its self-regarding best in recounting how he re-engineered the Labour party so it could never again undermine its leader, as it had Gaitskell, Wilson and Callaghan. Where previous prime ministers had struggled to bend a monolithic party to their will, Blair set out to smash it.

In 1996 Blair wrote that unions should have "no special or privileged place" in his party. "We will not be held to ransom by the unions. We will stand up to strikes," he assured the Sun, and he meant it. The bloc vote should go; the party conference should lose power over the manifesto; the national executive should be divorced from the shadow cabinet; even the holy of holies, clause IV, should evaporate.

The party was torn to shreds as Blair scored victory after victory against "old Labour". He turned a 19th-century movement into a 21st-century presidential machine, puffed up with candyfloss vacuities such as "traditional values in a changed world". Blair's appetite for cliche was, and is, gargantuan.

Blair never criticised Thatcher. In 1995 he lauded her as "a radical, not a Tory". He told the New York Times that Labour would be "unelectable" if it dismantled Thatcherism, one of the things "the 1980s got right". The lady returned the compliment, remarking during the 1997 election that he was "a man who won't let Britain down". She was the first VIP – before any Labour figure – whom Blair invited to Downing Street. He was obsessed by her good opinion, like Odysseus panting at the sirens' call but blocking his colleagues' ears.

In office Blair was a true fundamentalist. He adored Thatcher's policies on law and order, refusing penal reform. He carried privatisation far beyond what she had tolerated, fuelled by his affection for high finance and private wealth. He mimicked Thatcher's belligerence in foreign affairs, loving to be thought "not wobbly". Even his "regrets" have a Thatcherite tinge: the foxhunting ban and freedom of information.

The left's refusal to accept what Blair did to Labour is reminiscent of the Whig acceptance of reform in the 1830s. When Britain is experiencing radical change, it prefers to look the other way. Blair's conversion was so deft that his party bought the Thatcher ticket hook, line and sinker, but on the strict understanding that it was not mentioned.

Needless to say, little of this is in Blair's book, though he does let slip a tribute to Thatcher's "character, leadership and intelligence" in smashing the unions. One reason must be that, while Blair understood Thatcherism's potency, he was blind to its shortcomings. He grasped the essence of his creed but could not see how to take it forward.

Not for three decades has anyone in Britain charted a proper boundary between the public and private sectors. Blair noted that in 1997 Thatcher's public sector was "largely unreformed" and that, had Attlee returned, "he would have greeted it as an old friend". Yet he did nothing. He could change Labour ruthlessly, but quailed before the gods of public administration. This was despite having turned Downing Street into a furnace of centralised power. He and Brown tipped unprecedented quantities of money into the pockets of public servants, yet the quality of Britain's schools, hospitals and social services remains shocking.

Blair blames much of this failure on Brown, but the failure was Blair's. He left Brown in charge, with his co-architect of madness, Ed Balls – who without apology now thinks himself equipped to run the country. Blair never had the guts to sack either of them. As a result, one of the brightest sparks to cross the political firmament since the war can emit only a long wail of impotence.

Perhaps Blair is right, that Brown was his nemesis, a tragedy collapsed across the path of history. If so, a duo that could have created so much, and yet created so little, is just another might-have-been.

Publishing's notion of what women want is dated and patronising. In my case it's like trying to stuff a rottweiler in a dress

The latest literary dust-up in the United States concerns the outsize critical admiration of Jonathan Franzen's new novel Freedom, the follow-up to his 2001 National Book Award winner The Corrections. Freedom secured two worshipful reviews from the New York Times in one week, the Book Review's lengthy cover essay drooling with such jaw-dropped awe that it was hard to read for the saliva stains. Franzen himself appears on the cover of Time, and Freedom sits in President Obama's stack of holiday reading.

Fellow novelist Jodi Picoult ignited online fireworks last week by claiming that female writers never attract the same reverence as "white male literary darlings" like Franzen. Naturally Picoult risks the appearance of plain old envy. Though a skilful craftsman, Picoult may also lack the literary standing to make such a charge. Myself, I've yet to read Freedom, embargoed until this Wednesday, but it does sound like an excellent book, one I'm looking forward to.

Nevertheless, Picoult has a point. A female novelist would never enjoy a Franzen-scale frenzy of adulation in America, which maintains two distinct tiers in fiction. The heavy hitters – cultural icons who often produce great doorstop novels that no one ever argues are under-edited – are exclusively male. Rising literati like Rick Moody and Jonathan Franzen efficiently assume the spots left unoccupied by John Updike and Norman Mailer, like a rigged game of musical chairs. Then there's everybody else – including a raft of female writers who keep the publishing industry afloat by selling to its primary consumers: women.

Elaine Showalter did a bang-up job in the Guardian Review last spring explaining why American women are never credited with writing the Great American Novel while identifying female writers who deserve more acclaim. So in preference to singing yet more praises of the gifted Annie Proulx, I'll share an inside glimpse of how publishers are complicit in ghettoising not only women writers but women readers into this implicitly lesser cultural tier.

With merciful exceptions, my publishers constantly send prospective covers for my books that play to what "women readers" supposedly want. Take the American reissue of my fourth novel Game Control – a wicked, nasty novel about a plot to kill two billion people overnight. The main character is a man, the focal subject demography. Yet what cover do I first get sent? A winsome young lass in a floppy hat, gazing soulfully to the horizon in a windblown field – soft focus, in pastels. Dismayed, I emailed back: "Did your designers read any of this book?" When I proposed a cover photo by Peter Beard of sagging elephant carcasses – perfectly apt – the sales department was horrified. Women would be repelled by dead animals. We settled on live elephants, but it was pulling teeth to get girls off that paperback.

Or take the amicable difference of opinion I am having with my German publisher, since apparently this problem is also European. My latest novel, So Much for That, is told from two male points of view. Its subject matter – illness, mortality, and the fiscal depredations of American healthcare – is unisex, its tone furious. Yet what's on the cover? A woman, looking stricken. Male readers wouldn't be caught dead reading a book with that cover on the Strassenbahn.

The titling of that novel also came up against stereotypes of my ostensibly all-female audience. The US sales department vetoed the original title, Time is Money, for "sounding like nonfiction", though fiction appropriating and subverting nonfiction titles is commonplace (nobody mistook Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs for an international policy journal). It took me a while to discern the real problem: Time is Money was too direct, too aggressive, too in your face; it would frighten the girls away. This suspicion was confirmed when I suggested the Germans, with no equivalent of "so much for that", simply use my original title. Uh-uh. Zeit ist Geld is "too male and harsh". I admired my publisher's candour, if not his neutral substitute: The Better Part of Life.

Publishing's notion of what "women want" is dated and condescending. In the era of Venus Williams, girliness and goo isn't the way to every woman's heart. Yet publishers presume that women only buy a book that looks soft and that appears to be all about women, even if it isn't. Yet women, unlike men, buy books by and about both sexes.

Granted, the marketing logic seems unassailable: in the US, Britain and Germany, 80% of fiction readers are women. (Which mysteriously makes women look bad: those layabout ladies have nothing better to do than loll around and read. Yet if 80% of fiction readers were men, we'd assume that men are still far more cultured and better informed, while women squander their free time on mopping the floor.) Why appeal to the meagre male 20%?

Simple: smart female authors who twig that their careers depend on writing solely for their own gender will instinctively narrow their subject matter. Meanwhile, gauzy covers with shy titles signal that the literary establishment needn't take this work seriously. Little wonder, then, that the language of extravagant regard in that New York Times Book Review write-up of Jonathan Franzen – "Like all great novels," Freedom "illuminates, through the steady radiance of its author's profound moral intelligence" – is rarely lavished on female novelists. Little wonder that admiration of Franzen's focus on "family as microcosm or micro-history" would invert to disdain should a woman choose the same subject: look, just another bint stuck in her tiny domestic world.

When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I'm not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss. By stereotyping my work's audience as self-involved and prissy, women-only packaging also insults my readers, who could all testify that trussing up my novels as sweet, girly and soft is like stuffing a rottweiler in a dress.

Lionel Shriver won the 2005 Orange prize for fiction with We Need to Talk About Kevin

Lawyer says writer exposed embezzlement and migrants' suffering during building of Sanmen dam on Yellow river

Chinese police have detained an author for almost a fortnight following the publication of his book about forced relocations in the 1950s, his daughter said.

Officers said they were holding Xie Chaoping, a former journalist, for "illegal business activities" after detaining him at his home in Beijing on 19 August, said Li Mo.

Li said her father had just paid for the publication of his book, The Great Migration, which is about the construction of the Sanmen dam on the Yellow river.

The book charts the struggles of hundreds of thousands of people relocated due to the project, and reportedly accuses authorities in Weinan, Shaanxi province, of embezzling money meant to compensate those affected.

The 55-year-old writer has been transferred to a detention house in Shaanxi. Li added: "The charge doesn't make sense. My father didn't do illegal business. They arrested him for the book. My father just wrote the truth. He didn't just make up things, everything in this book has evidence. He didn't think there was anything wrong with the book. It is quite a shock for him to get arrested."

Xie's lawyer, Zhou Ze, told the South China Morning Post he had been allowed to see his client, who seemed in reasonably good spirits. "Xie thinks he's being persecuted because he's disclosed embezzlement, local government wrongdoing, migrants' suffering and land disputes," said Zhou. "It is another case of abuse of public power to repress public scrutiny and a breach of freedom of publication."

He told another newspaper that even if the book had been printed without official approval, it was the responsibility of the publisher, not the author.

Li Wanmin, an activist who tipped off Xie about the story, said: "The book is an objective account of what has happened to immigrant peasants, a marginalised group among peasants." He said that some of the farmers had to move eight times and that many died of starvation during the great famine in the early 1960s.

Another campaigner for the relocated residents said he taken several thousand copies of the book to Weinan in June, but that officials confiscated them, saying they were cracking down on illegal publications.

According to a reporter at the Beijing News, Xie first tried to write about the corruption allegations in 2006, but officials told the magazine he worked for to suppress the report.

His wife said he then began to collect more material on the issue and decided to publish a book himself. Flash magazine, in Shaanxi province, agreed to publish his work as a supplement if he paid 50,000 yuan (£5,000).

David Bandurski, of the China media project at Hong Kong University, said that many historical episodes remained highly sensitive in China. But he added: "A lot of actions against individual publications or reporters are coming from entrenched local interests [rather than higher officials]. There are so many examples of history being tied in with local immediate interests. You don't have to stretch very far to see how this could be more than a case of remote history which could touch on [local] leaders."

According to the English language Global Times newspaper, Xie's lawyer said the corruption allegations in the book related to residents who were relocated again in 1985.

An official at the publicity department at the Weinan public security bureau told the newspaper that the investigation was continuing, adding: "I have as little information as you do."

The Guardian's phone calls to Weinan public security bureau rang unanswered.

The former prime minister wearing a poppy in Jonathan Yeo's portrait was no coincidence. It was the first step in a deliberate plan to influence his political legacy

In January 2008, a portrait of Tony Blair by Jonathan Yeo was unveiled in which the former prime minister wore a poppy. Reviewing it for the Guardian, I was skeptical about the notion that, somehow, the artist had subversively caught his subject off guard or conned him into wearing this unmistakable reminder of the wars that have bloodied his reputation. Blair is an experienced manipulator of his own image, I opined: if he wears a poppy it is because he wants it that way. Would Blair, I wondered, one day find the words to match this apparently guilt-stricken image?

Well, here come 700 pages of them. The quotations already published from his book, and the reactions to it, should remind us that Blair is one of the most virtuous – in Machiavelli's sense of the word, meaning effective – politicians of modern times. On the front page of yesterday's Daily Mail, a photograph homed in on Blair's eyes. Making them look icy, it seemed to unconsciously ape the "Demon Eyes" poster the Tories used against Blair in the 1997 election, in which he is portrayed with a gash cut through his face to reveal the devil within. The interesting thing about this visual echo is that the Tory campaign poster failed to damage Blair, back in the day.

Words and images match – the Mail front page headline attacking Blair's "crocodile tears" seems hysterical and forced. The fact is Blair, in the quotes published from his memoir underneath the picture, sounds like someone who knows the enormity of ordering soldiers to die in a war. They are dead and he is alive. He knows that. At least admit these are articulate words: "I feel words of condolence and sympathy to be entirely inadequate. They have died, and I, the decision-maker in the circumstances that led to their deaths, still live". Where is the comparable quote from Margaret Thatcher about the Falklands, from Lyndon B Johnson about Vietnam, or even from president Obama about Afghanistan?

I have no idea if Blair means these words, if his charitable gesture is sincere or tactical, if he really loses sleep, or if it makes a difference that he does. But Blair is remaking his own image faster than critics can deface it. I think you could already see, in Blair's decision to wear a poppy for his portrait two years ago, how he was going to get to grips with history.

Why do writers whose prose is clean and clear turn into gushing Kate Winslets in the thank-you pages of their books?

The title story of If I Loved You, I would Tell You This, Robin Black's debut collection, is a shimmering, skewed tale of domestic disturbance and urban disaffection. It's one of 10 glacially poised stories that stand out for their simplicity; that quietly dissect the minor dramas of life and love, and blaze with understated emotion. However, on finishing the collection something else stayed with me almost as clearly as the stories themselves: the fulsome four pages of acknowledgements at the end.

Black stops short of thanking the baristas in the local coffee house or the manufacturers of the computer she uses, but it wouldn't have been a surprise to see them mentioned. Friends, fellow writers and her family are given long, involved thank yous explaining exactly why they are great critics, writers and/or friends. For someone whose prose is so lithe and without adornment, these pages seem gushingly unreal: as though a literary hybrid of Gwyneth Paltrow and Kate Winslet has wrested control of the keyboard.

Acknowledgements are one of the few places in a book when a writer can break out of their fictional world and address readers in their own voice. This is something that perhaps is more powerful than we realise. While I know the text is supposed to be the most important thing, and I'm well aware that the biographical details of a writer's life should be incidental to the reading experience, the acknowledgement pages can have a subtle effect on the way I read a book.

The best thing to do would be not to read them; to ignore those pages and stick with the story. But in moments of distraction I can't help flicking to the back to see whether I recognise the name of their editor, or if there will be gracious thanks to famous novelists or artistic grantors. I can't help but slightly judge an author by the way they acknowledge their debts: too effusive and they seem a bit needy and try-hard; too brief – a list of names in alphabetical order – and you run the risk of appearing cold and dismissive. It's probably the difficulty of treading such a fine line that makes me read long lists of names of people I have never met.

Despite my enthusiasm for them, there is a sense of the juvenile about acknowledgements – they seem longer and more sweated over in debut novels and collections than in books by more established names, from which acknowledgements are regularly entirely absent. Where they do appear they are often to express thanks for "Big" Jim Marshall, the Texas Ranger who taught the author the ins and outs of surveillance techniques, or Dr Ahab O'Shaunessy who explained the history of sickle cell anaemia, or captain Bryce Jones whose experiences informed the Afghan section of this book – normally suffixed by that staple of acknowledgement pages "all mistakes are of course my own". These kinds of acknowledgements can often appear to have been given with one eye on letting the reader know exactly how much research has gone into their fiction.

Let's be honest: it would most likely be safer for an author to eschew an acknowledgments page altogether and give the people they want to thank a bottle of wine and a copy of the book. But that somehow doesn't cut it when you've been writing a collection for years and have been helped immeasurably along the way. I can understand why Robin Black might want to pour her heart out to her nearest and dearest, but perhaps she might have done better by taking a leaf out of the rest of her book and keeping things clean and clear.

A sequel to the superhero hit has been greenlit, according to the writer of the original comic book. But doubts have been raised over the film's production schedule

Kick-Ass was always rather nicely set up for a sequel, what with that open-ended denouement, so it's hardly surprising that Mark Millar, who wrote the original comic book, has been talking up a second film. Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live, Millar said the film's success on DVD in the US, where it sold 1.4m units in its first week, meant the project was finally greenlit.

"The estimate is that Kick-Ass will do 100 to 150m on DVD based on the American sales, so it'll end up making a $250m (£160m) on a $28m investment," said Millar. "So it should be OK. The sequel's greenlit, we can go ahead and do the follow-up now. The first made so much compared to what it cost, it would be crazy not to."

Millar's announcement, however, has been greeted with a degree of scepticism in the blogosphere, not least because Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn and screenwriter Jane Goldman are tied up with preparations for X Men: First Class. In a later interview with MTV, Millar said the film was "probably about nine months away from production starting, at the earliest".

He added: "Matthew's got to do X-Men: First Class. He just wants to get X-Men done next year, then hopefully we'll just go straight into Kick-Ass 2. That's the plan."

All of which sounds a little less concrete. And there's the small matter of Vaughn's comments immediately following Kick-Ass's release, when he seemed to indicate there would probably not be a sequel.

Could Millar, who clearly stands to benefit from a second film, be over-egging the biscuit? Probably. Having interviewed him, he's a refreshingly candid chap, saying that film-makers attempting to bring less well-known superheroes to the big screen were "fucked", following the arrival of Kick-Ass's postmodern take. And this is a man who works extensively for Marvel Comics.

The truth probably lies somewhere between the two positions. What we do know is that if Kick-Ass 2 does get made, it will likely centre on Dave Lizewski's encounters with a new breed of wannabe superheroes and supervillains, inspired by his adventures. The film will show Hit Girl struggling to lead a normal life, and I can't imagine there not being a prime role for Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Red Mist.

Millar said in March that he was planning on writing the second book in April. "The idea of Kick-Ass was: what would happen if people in the real world tried to become superheroes?" Millar told IGN earlier this year. "The second one is: what if people tried to be bad guys as a reaction to the superheroes?

Millar adds: "And it's just that simple: The same way these wee guys were contacting each other on Facebook and trying out superhero costumes, what if bad kids started to do this? You've got this horrible Clockwork Orange kind of scenario going on, where these kids are happy-slapping.

"They're out there with their mobile phones dressed up as villains doing horrible things to people, recording it and putting it online. And that becoming massively viral all over the world."

It's a vivid image that one can imagine working well for Vaughn, if the sequel does end up being made. For me, Kick-Ass was an enjoyably throwaway, fluid and vibrant slice of comic-book silliness, which made great viewing on the big screen. I'd very much like to see a sequel. They'd better get a move on though – Chloë Moretz won't stay 13 forever, and a grown-up Hit Girl would rather defeat the object, don't you think?

The opening pages of Rebecca Hunt's debut novel, longlisted for the Guardian first book award

In a new book, world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking argues that the universe is the work of physics, not God. Do you agree?

Churchill got a Nobel prize for his - but other efforts by former PM's have succumbed to score-settling and defensiveness

Winston Churchill had the right idea about memoirs. "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it," he revealed during the second world war. Most former prime ministers set out with a similar ambition, though few prove as successful in setting the terms of debate as Churchill's heroic six-volume account of the war largely did for many years. It won him a Nobel prize for literature.

Tony Blair is only the latest former occupant of Number 10 to try his luck. He has one advantage shared by Churchill and Margaret Thatcher: a lucrative market in the United States, a place where he, like them, is more admired than at home.

Sales are only one test, and the awkward truth is that the memoirs of lesser politicians (minor figures with a good writing style and a ringside seat, such as Alan Clark or Chris Mullin) often prove more enduring. So do those of the also-rans of politics, less calculating characters such as Denis Healey, Rab Butler or Norman Tebbit.

After enduring attack from all sides, former premiers are too keen to explain and justify; they tend toward caution, defensiveness, and an unwillingness to exhibit vulnerability. Blair has clearly made an effort to avoid such pitfalls. He even admits liking a drink.

Rare indeed are the killer facts in such books, score-settling is more the norm.

Sir Anthony Eden's three-volume Full Circle passed up the chance to tell the truth of the Suez deception. Harold Wilson's dull thousand-page The Labour Government 1964-1970 makes no mention of his domineering political secretary, Marcia Williams.

Jim Callaghan's Time and Chance was modest and decent, like the man himself. So was John Major's The Autobiography, an unexpected bestseller for HarperCollins. It revealed a youthful affair with an older woman (but not the affair with Edwina Currie), and made him an estimated £600,000 against the £3m plus earned by Lady Thatcher's two volumes of score-settling, which sold worldwide.

She published while Major was still in office but was circumspect not to criticise him too much. Clem Attlee, always modest and famously reticent, guaranteed his book, laconically titled As It Happened, was published while he was still Labour leader, its most lively passages discreetly cut in advance.

At a likely financial cost (delay weakens market value), Blair waited until Gordon Brown lost power (as he feared he would) before revealing Brown has "zero emotional intelligence" and a temper. Others got in first. Ted Heath's The Course of My Life did not appear until 1998 when he had already said most of the unkind things he wanted to about Thatcher. But disloyalty or being boring are not the only risks. Money is another.

Blair deflected accusations of blood money by giving all his proceeds (£4m is probably half what Churchill made) to a British Legion fund for injured servicemen. Just before his fall in 1922, Lloyd George got into hot water by making a deal worth £3m at today's prices to publish his memoirs and serialise them in the Sunday Times. In the event they appeared only in 1933, settling scores with Douglas Haig and other first world war generals the Liberal leader had been unable to sack at the time; they were permanently diminished as a result.

• Physics, not creator, made Big Bang, new book claims
• Professor had previously referred to 'mind of God'

Poll: Is Hawking right?

God did not create the universe, the man who is arguably Britain's most famous living scientist says in a forthcoming book.

In the new work, The Grand Design, Professor Stephen Hawking argues that the Big Bang, rather than occurring following the intervention of a divine being, was inevitable due to the law of gravity.

In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Hawking had seemed to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. But in the new text, co-written with American physicist Leonard Mlodinow, he said new theories showed a creator is "not necessary".

The Grand Design, an extract of which appears in the Times today, sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have been created out of chaos.

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," he writes. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

"It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

In the forthcoming book, published on 9 September, Hawking says that M-theory, a form of string theory, will achieve this goal: "M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find," he theorises.

"The fact that we human beings – who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature – have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph."

Hawking says the first blow to Newton's belief that the universe could not have arisen from chaos was the observation in 1992 of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun. "That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single sun, the lucky combination of Earth-sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes.

Hawking had previously appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the universe. Writing in his bestseller A Brief History Of Time in 1988, he said: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God."

Hawking resigned as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University last year after 30 years in the position.

In the latest instalment of the cartoonist's showcase, Ben Jennings turns his eye to the publication of the former PM's memoirs

The response to a call for funds to restore dresses worn by Vivien Leigh show that fans of the film still give more than a damn

The true origin of the celebrated phrase "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn", which Clark Gable so savagely directs at Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind, lies in the Indian subcontinent. There it was apparently customary to express indifference by saying that an object, an idea, or a person was not worth a "dam" – a "dam" being a small, almost valueless coin. The Hays Office, which policed American cinema in the era in which the film of Margaret Mitchell's novel was made, was obviously unaware of this etymology, or it would not have agonised over whether it should permit the use of what it believed to be a swearword. The line, the film, the film's cast, the book and its author all went on to become aspects of what has proved to be an enduring cultural monument. Like it or not, Gone With the Wind is for many people the main way in which the American civil war is remembered, as well as a window on Hollywood and its stars in the years before another conflict, that against Hitler, underlined Sherman's famous observation that war is hell. Atlanta today houses several shrines to the book and the film. But the appeal of both remains powerful across America and the world, as has just been shown by the response to a call for funds to restore dresses worn by Vivien Leigh in the film. It was oversubscribed within three weeks. Lovers of Gone With the Wind are obviously ready not only to give a dam, but to give quite a lot of dollars to keep the myth and all its accoutrements alive.

He may not have all the answers to the big questions posed in his beguiling and maddening book, but he has some of them

Tony Blair has written an extraordinary political memoir. He could hardly do otherwise. This is not a judgment on the quality of his prose, which is sometimes erratic. It is a statement of the politically obvious. Where some former PMs – John Major or James Callaghan, for example – wrote interesting and useful tomes that were more often put down than picked up again, others – most recently Margaret Thatcher and now Mr Blair – write as polarisers and protagonists. Mr Blair writes as what he himself is, a controversial leader and a continuing player. As he said to the Guardian in his interview this week, he believes he has something to say and something to explain. He wants the chance to be heard. He could not have written a boring book if he had tried. And he hasn't.

Reactions to Mr Blair's book inescapably say as much about the person reacting as about the book itself or Mr Blair. Treat the last 48 hours as a media event, and it is something of a triumph for the author and his publishers. The headlines started on Tuesday evening, became a flood on Wednesday morning, dominated the media most of yesterday and get a second wind this morning. There will be a predictable aftershock in the weeklies and Sundays. The many who are resolute about not buying the book are all but certain to be outnumbered by the many more whose interest has been whetted. Good news for Random House and for the Royal British Legion.

Treat Mr Blair's book as an account of a big political career and it largely depends on what you thought of that career in the first place. In most cases, if people are honest, that verdict is likely to be mixed (which does not mean evenly balanced) as opposed to monochrome. There can be admiration for a formidably intuitive politician – none better – who took over a four-time losing party and took it to three victories, rebuilt the public services and reinvested in the welfare state, who fashioned major changes in equality and human rights, who devolved power to Scotland and Wales and helped fashion peace in Northern Ireland, and who was fortunate (and perhaps skilful) enough to preside over a long era of general prosperity and optimism. Read his book in that light and one is reminded of a lot that is now overlooked.

Against that, there is a charge sheet whose toxicity and seriousness in no way diminishes with the passing of time, headed by the catastrophe in Iraq, but pushed close by the live-now, pay-later approach to the credit boom, the insouciance towards growing extremes of wealth, the eager embrace of the most reactionary US president in memory, and a too often contemptuous approach to his party, the press, the law and the public ethos. Mr Blair's career was made up of all of those things. He had an opportunity no centre-left leader in this country has ever had, and the wounds caused by what he did, as well as by what he failed to do, with that opportunity are still raw. Read his book in that light and it is hard to see past so many disappointed hopes.

All the same, inside Mr Blair's book there is something else. In his distinctive way, beguiling and maddening, his book poses some sustained big questions, while neglecting others, about the present and the future, not just the past. How should the modern world respond to terrorism? What should it do about the spread of nuclear weapons? How can Europe play an effective role in a world where power is shifting to the east from the west? How can the public services be prevented from declining into a second-class option for the less well off? How much government spending does a modern society need? And, not least, how do parties of the left win and sustain power in democratic post-industrial societies? Mr Blair has much to say on all of these questions. He may not have all the answers. But he has some of them. His book is a reminder that he has something to say as well as much to explain.

Amid torrid prose and Tony Blair's moral absolutes are truths and revelations that make A Journey impossible to put down

No political memoir has ever been like this: a book written as if in a dream – or a nightmare; a literary out-of-body experience. By turns honest, confused, memorable, boastful, fitfully endearing, important, lazy, shallow, rambling and intellectually correct, it scampers through the last two decades like a trashy airport read.

You can't put it down. But then it is so badly written in parts that you can barely pick it up. Blair loved to describe his world as one of absolute contradictions, and what was true of his conference speeches is also true of his book.

At times its great flaws are magicked away by his brilliance as a politician, the man who can make you believe. Then, pages later, you feel almost sick. There are at least three gushing sexual passages, more Mills and Boon than prime ministerial memoir.

Yet the impressive thing for such a commanding figure, the only rival to Attlee in Labour history, is that he confesses to an absence of control. Government, as described in these pages, happened to Blair as much as because of him. Though this is surely true of all politicians, few are big enough to admit it.

There is an underlying realism to his acceptance of weakness and eventual disappointment. This book is not by the "Bliar" of protesters' imaginations. It is by a man with a grasp of policy and an intellectual framework which he applied to power. The inexplicable thing is why he was a Labour prime minister, not why he was prime minister at all.

Blair himself never answers the question. "After leaving Oxford I joined the Labour party," he writes, with no explanation why – as if it were as natural as taking friends for a pizza. Perhaps to him it was. But Blair's idea of Labour had nothing to do with the substrata of socialism embedded in Gordon Brown.

"I'm not a great one for the Establishment. It's probably at heart why I am in the Labour party," he writes. But having joined, and risen, he found Labour wasn't a radical movement, or at least what radicalism it possessed ran counter to his own. "I voted Labour in 1983. I didn't really think a Labour victory was the best thing for the country and I was a Labour candidate."

He must have thought that again in 2010, if the tone of his postscript is any guide: it is the most politically toxic part of his book. We know all we want to know about Brown the grump; Blair says nothing fresh on this. But as to Brown the irredeemable statist, the roadblock to reform, as the Tories used to put it, he is revealing.

Their shared government was riven by an ideological dispute, not just one of personalities, from the start. The disagreement is most explicit at the end: Blair's attack on "state spending dressed up as fiscal stimulus", his mockery of the resurrection of Keynes by people who like big government. This reveals him to be a man who now must see his natural home in the coalition.

But he isn't just a stock rightwinger. He offers an apologia to Labour like a man penning a necessary tribute to a cuckolded partner, but somewhere inside beats the heart of a liberal.

He had a radical instinct to smash up vested interests, and that was the best of him as prime minister as well as sometimes the worst.

The book confirms that he was not shallow or empty, the actor of repute, but someone grasping for huge things that could never be achieved. It was Brown, he says, who "operated essentially within familiar and conventional parameters". Blair describes himself as the bolder and more significant man.

Of course one consequence was Iraq, to which he devotes long and uninformative chapters. Suffice it to know that Blair thinks he was right and the war on terror both real and continuous. He won't persuade unbelievers on this.

More telling are the small things. The weirdly chatty tone (one paragraph just ends "blah, blah, blah"). The banal opening lines to each chapter – so dire you wonder if he is playing Robert Harris's game from The Ghost and spelling out a secret message with them. The endless self-belief (and unwillingness to give others credit – John Major, for example, gets no thanks for starting the Northern Ireland peace process).

And the flashes of truth: "The truth is, MPs were underpaid and expenses were used to top up income: but you can't say it". Spot on. So why did he do nothing about it?

There are obvious absences and distortions. There are also standard grumbles, such as a sustained attack on the media – odd from a man who courted Rupert Murdoch and admits to "a grudging respect and even liking for him".

But since that is what he thinks, he is right to say it. The book is redeemed by such truths. Blair has a world view and is unafraid to describe it, bigger and bolder than anyone else. You can say he was mad. You can say he was a flawed genius. But you can't say he didn't matter.

Billy Liar, a story of smalltown frustration, captivated a generation, pre-empted the 60s – and even inspired Oasis. As the stage play returns, Laura Barton asks Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie why it endures

^'I don't think about Billy Liar very often." Tom Courtenay's voice hovers on the line. We have been discussing his upcoming holiday to the north-east coast, splashing about in the warm shallows of the present-day; at this detour into the past, he pauses, and retreats a little. "If I read it now, it would make me laugh," he concludes lightly, distantly. "But I honestly don't know why it's lasted. Who can say why some things are successful?"

It is now 50 years since Keith Waterhouse's novel transferred to the stage, casting in its title role first Albert Finney and later, Courtenay. Published in 1959, Billy Liar has, over those five decades, enjoyed a rich and varied existence, remembered not only as a novel and a play, but also as a film (again starring Courtenay), a musical and a TV series. This Saturday will see it revived once more, in a lavish stage adaptation at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

Crucially, Billy Liar's longevity is not an example of a tale that is told and told again with a dulling faithfulness; rather, the long life of Billy Liar is a story of reincarnation, of each new generation seizing upon the tale afresh and making the story its own. Its influence may be felt in half a century of creative endeavour, in drama and literature and film, and, perhaps most keenly, in popular music: referenced, for instance, in the video for the Oasis single The Importance of Being Idle, and in a song by the Decemberists, and popping up, too, in many of Morrissey's lyrics, including the Smiths' 1984 hit William, It Was Really Nothing.

Set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Stradhoughton, Billy Liar tells of a young undertaker's clerk named William "Billy" Fisher. Billy, still living at home with his parents, is bored with his small-town existence, and in an effort to bring a little colour to his life tells lies – from the trifling and relatively inconsequential (the goings-on in the mythical world of Ambrosia, for instance), to the overblown, compulsive whoppers (this rather loose grasp of the truth leads him to be simultaneously engaged to two women).

Meanwhile, Billy dreams of moving away to the city and becoming a successful comedy writer – though he has yet to summon the courage to actually do anything about it. "Today's a day of big decisions," he announces at one point. "Going to start writing me novel – 2,000 words every day. Going to start getting up in the morning." And then he looks at his overgrown thumbnail. "I'll cut that for a start," he decides. "Yes . . . today's a day of big decisions." It is a story that is funny, and familiar, but also tremendously sad, and not without sweetness.

"It's terribly exciting, in lots of ways, to unearth this beautiful play, to unearth beautifulness every day in rehearsal," says Nick Bagnall, director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse production of Billy Liar. It is, he points out, now a year since the death of Waterhouse, and so a revival of the play (co-written by Willis Hall, who died in 2005) seems a fine tribute. And that it has enjoyed such longevity and so much reinterpretation should not come as a surprise, Bagnall believes. "The language is warm and muscular, it's tender, and honest. And the character of Billy Liar is one that we all have inside us."

For all Courtenay's reticence, his passion for the character of Billy is still tangible. He took on the role at the age of 23, a young actor who had himself left Yorkshire to pursue his own dreams. "I'd seen Billy Liar more than once," he says. "I loved it. It was something I knew about. It was a graphic illustration of how we lived. Billy Liar was in every molecule of my body."

Courtenay's own upbringing, as a working-class boy from Hull, was not wildly different to that of Billy. "It was such fun to talk in a language I could understand," he says of the broad, everyday talk found in Waterhouse and Hall's script. "The most graphic speech is the speech about being grateful," he remembers. "I couldn't get it out when I did it on stage . . ." Courtenay falls quiet for a moment. "Because I was always told about being grateful, too. I'm sure I'm the only boy from my primary school to have gone to university. I know I was the only boy on my street. But my parents wanted me to be educated. They didn't want me to work on the docks; people who worked on the docks would say, 'If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for my son!' But my father, he didn't want it to be good enough for me."

To return Billy Liar to Yorkshire is a feat that has brought Bagnall much delight. "This area owns this play," he says firmly. Bagnall left Yorkshire when he was 16, hoping to pursue his own creative ambitions. "I think if I'd seen this play, then I'd have left the next day," he says. He recalls a scene from the play in which Liz, the most bohemian of Billy's girlfriends, tells him to leave town and follow his dreams. "She says to him, 'All you need to do is go to the train station and go.' And he says, 'Is it that simple?'" Bagnall sounds flummoxed. "I still feel it shocking that he doesn't go."

In the 1963 film adaptation, directed by John Schlesinger, the role of Liz was played by Julie Christie. It was only Christie's third acting job; she filled the shoes of Topsy Jane, who was forced to leave filming when she became ill. "It was my lucky break," Christie recalls. "Without it, who knows what I would have been doing?" She remembers the film fondly, and also with a certain respect. "As a film, I think it was historically and socially very perceptive," she says. "It captured that strange period between the end of postwar austerity and the start of what became known as the 60s, with all the hedonism that involved and which my character represented. It was a grasping of freedom, a rejection of convention that she stood for and which people were all having to grapple with at the time. Billy – in the book and the film – couldn't quite make the break. What John did was capture that moment perfectly."

It is that rejection of convention that perhaps lies at the heart of Billy Liar's enduring success. It was, of course, part of a wider movement, Billy sitting alongside the working-class heroes found in the Angry Young Men plays, novels and later, films, such as John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey and Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; works that challenged what Bagnall terms "the pretty, establishment plays, the plays that refused to acknowledge that we'd even been in a war". He compares Billy Liar to the famous shot from Kes, the adaptation of Barry Hines's Kestrel for a Knave: "Where he's trying to stick two fingers up at the establishment. It's kind of punk."

Colin Meloy, lead singer and songwriter of the Decemberists, is in agreement. "Billy Liar totally embodies the rock spirit," he insists. "But it's also blessed with none of the earnestness of the 60s counter-cultural movement – let's tear it all down, with our tongues in our cheeks."

Bombast and bravado

In 2004 Meloy wrote a song he named Billy Liar that appeared on the Oregon band's first album. "At that time in my life I was just eating up all the Angry Young Men movies — it was really the peak of my anglophilia, and it's such a funny movie, and it's kind of revolutionary." The story of Billy struck a particular chord with Meloy. "I was in my mid-20s and like the Tom Courtenay character, working a dumb job – not as a clerk but in a pizza parlour. And, like him, I was chafing against authority, and burdened by an overactive imagination. The song I wrote is more about the spirit of the movie; it's about being a waylaid youth with too much time on our hands and not enough power. It's a paean to laziness."

Oftentimes, the story of Billy Liar strikes me more like a song than anything else. Like so many rock'n'roll tracks, it is essentially a story about escape; about love and dreams, and the search for them both, and with them, too, the search for oneself. It is about telling stories with bombast and bravado and the half-belief that if you say it, it will become true. More, it is a story of youth, and of a generation coming to believe that it is different from the last. And perhaps this is why it is a story that has survived so well these past 50 years – arriving alongside a youth movement that recognised in Waterhouse's story something of its own spirit.

Waterhouse wrote a sequel, but I ask Meloy what he thinks would have happened to the Billy in the play, a young man full of fire and vigour and ambition, yet too scared to get on a train. "How would Billy Liar have turned out?" Meloy laughs and thinks a while. "Well," he say, "I guess he would have turned out like the punk movement . . . you know, it kind of fizzled out."

• Billy Liar is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse from Saturday to 2 October. Tom Courtenay is in conversation with Laura Barton there on 10 September. Box office: 0113-213 7700.

Fair Oaks Ranch, Texas, Author Publishes New Book with Dorrance Publishing

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This Adventure Novel Tells the Tale of a Fearless Young Woman with Bravado and Street Sense Who Becomes an Underworld Power Figure

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This charming book teaches kids the value of sharing

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This beautifully illustrated book is a light-hearted approach to the serious problem of animal abandonment.

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An historical preservationist is drawn into an old murder mystery in this compelling book

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This is the true story of a young boy whose dreams of becoming a major league baseball player were shattered early in life

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In this story of revenge, Wade Garrison hunts the four men who gunned down his best friend in cold blood

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This book will help readers better understand debt and handle their finances rationally.

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This book offers a compelling case for the unification of science and religion

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A frantic adventure unfolds as twenty-first century interlopers vie for control of the time-space continuum

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