It began seven years ago in 2002, during an idle conversation over lunch. My longtime friend and schoolmate Orhan Pamuk had just completed what he described as his first and last political novel.

How the Internet and mash-up culture change everything we know about reading.

Mitford's genius lies in the wicked humour with which she recounts the travails of the spirited Radletts

I read The Pursuit of Love as a child, mystified and delighted by the spirited Radletts and their terrifying father, and have returned to it at least once a year ever since. It is a darker book than I first realised, the superficial lightness concealing a faint and beguiling pessimism about love's pursuit and its consequences. Linda Radlett, the intensely English heroine, is the most beautiful of an eccentric aristocratic family closely modelled on Nancy Mitford's own. The children spend most of their days tucked up in the airing cupboard – the only warm place in their vast house – learning the rudiments of sex from Ducks and Duck Breeding and squabbling over the exact nature of Oscar Wilde's crimes. Lord Alconleigh doesn't approve of educating women – or of foreigners, intellectuals and other sundry "sewers" – while fraternising with the opposite sex is limited to hunt meets and rural dances. Linda bolts into a serious of wildly unsuitable liaisons before falling at last for the endearingly wicked Fabrice, a French duke. The story's genius lies in its wicked humour, which remains relentlessly uplifting even as the Blitz begin to smash all the hopes of that pre-war arcadia. Not everyone will warm to Mitford's bright, brittle tone: she prefers the bon mot to the bleeding heart and Linda's abandoned child gets short shrift. With the advent of war her acute ability to poke fun achieves a kind of perfection. The lacerating ironies of the very posh have never seemed so life affirming.

• Classics

Olivia Laing
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

This satire on academia and religion is crippled by its need to show how clever it is

With atheism fashionable and religious fundamentalism on the rise, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God gently mocks the delusions of both the godly and the godless. Cass Seltzer is an academic psychologist at a middle-ranking university whose book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, becomes an unexpected bestseller because of an appendix that provides a series of refutations to proofs of God's existence. Cass's position is admirably moderate – that belief in God has little to do with the nature or value of religious experience – but he becomes an atheist poster-boy. He may have just received, at the novel's start, an offer of a post at Harvard, but Cass – neurotic and fairly drippy – can't help mooning over his absent girlfriend and worrying about an upcoming theological disputation.

Most of the book is dedicated to Cass's time as a graduate student, when he fell under the tutelage of Jonas Elijah Klapper who, with his rotund physique, orotund periods and obsession with genius and mysticism, is a dead ringer for Harold Bloom. As Klapper's mind pirouettes across the literary and philosophical canon, Goldstein pitilessly exposes how erudition and verbosity can mask an intellectual vacuum: "As must anyone who regards with seriousness the eschatological idea that scaffolds the strata of the greater metaphysics", yadda, yadda yadda.

Unfortunately, Goldstein as much as Klapper is a purveyor of superficial scholarship. Novels of ideas are crippled when their authors use the story to peacock their cleverness and patronise their audience. Here we are subjected to game theory for dummies, Kabbalah for dummies, Matthew Arnold for dummies – none of them integrated in the texture of the novel. Much of her comedy is abysmal, relying on flaccid wordplay, and even her good jokes are destroyed by the accompanying exegesis, as if she is concerned tha t her readers who don't get them should at least realise how well-read she is.

More damagingly, the thesis that 36 Arguments attempts to dramatise – that religious attitudes are to be found in all sorts of areas of life – is essentially trivial. If being religious simply means "having strong feelings", then it is meaningless (and somewhat offensive to believers) to term this universal propensity to unreason as "religious" just because, in our more sober moods, we are suspicious of it. Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher who has written on Gödel and Spinoza, but 36 Arguments proves that with fiction, a lot of learning can be a deadly thing.

• Fiction

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Roy Hattersley finds this history of his own party to be long on detail but short on analysis

Most of the details are there. Those wishing to know the exact composition of the TUC which met Ramsay MacDonald to protest against the Labour government's proposed cut in unemployment benefit have only to turn to page 213 of Martin Pugh's Speak for Britain. But a "new history of the Labour party" needs to be far more than a catalogue of names and events. Pugh certainly has opinions which, irrespective of their merits, make welcome additions to the narrative. Michael Foot, whose failings as a leader are cruelly if accurately described, would have been consoled by the discovery that Pugh believes Attlee should have made Aneurin Bevan his foreign secretary and that Hugh Gaitskell was "an elitist who failed to understand the [Labour] movement". But most of Speak for Britain (one exception is constitutional reform) lacks analysis. As a result it informs without teaching the lessons that Labour needs to learn.

When, on 23 August 1931, the Labour cabinet voted in favour of cutting unemployment benefit "by a perilously narrow majority of 12 to nine", every minister faced a dilemma that illustrated the burden which progressive governments bear. To restore international confidence it was necessary to demonstrate that Labour ministers had abandoned their most cherished principles. Even the dissidents – having not been told that devaluation would soften the blow – thought that the choice was between austerity and bankruptcy. They simply argued that it was better to leave the cuts to the Conservatives. MacDonald chose to sacrifice the party rather than what he saw as the national interest. I think he was wrong. But his error was more than what Pugh describes as "the blunder of an arrogant leader". Political life is more complicated than that.

Historians ought to have a point of view. So I mean no offence when I describe Pugh's opinions as often representing the cynicism about successive leaders that so debilitated the party before the early love affair with Tony Blair. It is true that, under Neil Kinnock, the party abandoned its commitment to wholesale public ownership. But there was no agreement that "full employment could no longer be a serious goal". Nor was the party suffering from "intellectual demoralisation". Perhaps we should have been. For another defeat awaited us. But we believed in the eventual triumph of our ideas. One of them was devolution – not, as Pugh claims "the best means of blunting the nationalist challenge and thus burying the case for Scottish independence" but a way of passing out power from London.

Despite devolution, Pugh finds Labour guilty of failing to treat constitutional matters as a priority. He asserts that Attlee, typical of all Labour leaders, illustrated a willingness to accept the status quo by supporting Baldwin against the king when Edward VIII proposed to marry Wallis Simpson. The notion that a social democratic party should seek to depose the elected government by siding with the hereditary monarch – Pugh's preferred course – is at least original. It is justified by the explanation that Edward wanted "to do the decent thing by marrying his sweetheart". Pugh does not quote Attlee's letter to Baldwin which explained that, in the parliamentary party, support for the king was confined "to a few of the intelligentsia who could be relied on to take the wrong view of everything".

Some things have changed. Margaret Bonfield, Pugh tells us, was only accepted as a cabinet minister in the second Labour government because of her motherly persona. She knitted in meetings. Labour has lost its fear of dominant women. It has also abandoned its puritanical streak. In 1906, the leadership voted against the Street Betting Act. Fifty years later Harold Wilson called premium bonds a squalid lottery. Gordon Brown's maximum popularity coincided with his cancellation of plans to build a "super casino" and he began to decline in public esteem when he authorised the development of 12 regional gambling houses. Even the bare facts of its history confirm that Labour is at its strongest when it is visibly a party of strong belief.

• Politics
• History
• Labour

Roy Hattersley
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

When Daisy Goodwin complained of too much 'grimness' in this year's list, she was lambasted. She should have been applauded

The ever-controversial Orange Prize hit the headlines last week, when Daisy Goodwin, the chair of the judges, complained that there had been too much "grimness" and not enough "joy" in this year's entries.

Of the more than 100 novels that she and her fellow judges had to wade through to come up with their longlist, Goodwin remarked: "There are a lot of books about Asian sisters. There are a lot of books that start with a rape. Pleasure seems to have become a rather neglected element in publishing."

Unsurprisingly, these words did not go down too well. Some suggested that there was a racist undertow to Goodwin's "Asian sisters" comment, interpreting it as an attack on ethnic-minority fiction (or at least a slur on its writers' comic abilities).

Others argued that it was odd for the chair of a prize expressly designed to "celebrate" women's fiction to launch the longlist by in effect denigrating most women's novels published that year. A third criticism was that Goodwin was simply wrong to suggest that contemporary women writers don't write books that are funny and joyful. What about Zadie Smith and Margaret Atwood? Or Zoë Heller and Sarah Waters? Aren't these writers as capable as men of writing books that are great fun?

As a man, I must admit to some wariness about venturing any sort of opinion about the state of women's writing. But I do think there's a possibility that some of Goodwin's critics may have misunderstood her. For she clearly wasn't calling on women writers to cast out anything remotely depressing from their novels, and instead write books that are relentlessly upbeat.

That would have been absurd, because, as anyone who thinks about it for half a second knows, fiction has to be in part about unhappiness. Without things going wrong, there is no possibility of plot, of character development. Happiness, as the saying goes, writes white.

But while it may be true that novels must contain some misery, this doesn't mean that they can't be about happiness too (and funny into the bargain). What Goodwin demanded was more "light and shade" in women's writing. And this, surely, is perfectly reasonable. As a form, the novel has always worked best when, like life itself, it contains both joy and sorrow. Most great novelists have been brilliant at comedy as well as tragedy. And this is no less true of Jane Austen, left, and George Eliot than it is of Tolstoy and Dickens.

Recently, however, there does seem to have been a movement away from comedy in fiction, a growing feeling that, in order to be "serious", novels have to be dark in tone. And, arguably, women have been affected by this much more than men, because of the pronounced divide in women's fiction between frothy, commercial "chicklit" and more serious, "literary" work.

As Amanda Craig, one of the novelists longlisted for this year's Orange Prize, told me: "There really is a sense that women writers have two paths – on the one hand, towards chicklit; on the other, the serious route. And if they take the latter, there's a feeling that they have to be extra serious in order to be treated with respect."

Goodwin should surely be applauded rather than lambasted for raising this issue, one that is deeply important for novelists of either gender and for publishing as a whole. And it has to be said that the longlist she and the other judges have come up with does a good job of displaying the range of "light and dark" in women's writing today.

• Orange prize for fiction
• Zadie Smith
• Margaret Atwood
• Sarah Waters
• Awards and prizes

William Skidelsky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

DeLillo's latest is hypnotic, if sometimes baffling

Don DeLillo's vision has always been unusually sharp. If some writers are praised for having "ear", DeLillo, above all, has "eyes". His 16th novel is his most focused yet, a pared, intense anti-parable that begins in a New York art gallery.

Imagined art has a rich history in DeLillo's novels (Underworld's painted planes, Falling Man's performance artist and White Noise's "most photographed barn in America") but here the work being described – 24 Hour Psycho – is real. Douglas Gordon's heavily slowed-down screening of Hitchcock's film was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 2006.

The piece is being intensely watched by an unnamed narrator who observes: "It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at." It's a neat description of the novelist's task, too – to scrutinise those things that "shallow habits" overlook. But the narrator turns out to be a cipher: this whole first section merely a prologue, as its title, "Anonymity", suggests.

It's a pair the narrator spots in the gallery, and wrongly assumes to be a film professor and student, who turn out to be the protagonists. Richard Elster, an ageing "defence intellectual", advised the Pentagon over Iraq. Jim Finley, an idealistic young director, wants to make a film of Elster talking uninterruptedly about his work ("no plush armchair with warm lighting and books on a shelf in the background. Just a man and a wall"). Elster, though unconvinced, invites Finley to join him at his home in the desert and it is here that most of the action (if that's the right word) takes place.

In the desert – as in the equally austere, if chillier, gallery – time seems to slow down. Protracted time seems to contract meaning, or at least the possibility of meaning. The cosmic overtones of this movement of simultaneous contraction and expansion are reinforced by the novel's title. French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point is "a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe appears to be evolving".

Finley's film never gets made and the pair fall into a quiet but intense routine punctuated by pronouncements from Elster, which tend towards the incomprehensible ("the mind transcends all direction inward"). This routine is interrupted when they are unexpectedly joined by Elster's daughter, Jessie, who is no less odd than her father (there's an "eerie depth in every stray remark she made"). When the men return from a drive in the desert, she has disappeared, a development as inexplicable as her arrival: "passing into air, it seemed this is what she was meant to do."

When Finley searches the house for her, he "[throws] back the shower curtain, making more noise than I intended", as if he half-expects to find a murdered and bloody Janet Leigh. The suggestion is that images as iconic as Psycho's shower scene are so powerfully imprinted on our consciousness that we can enact them without even noticing (that "shallow habit of seeing" again).

Despite such moments of illumination, the meaning of Point Omega remains frustratingly shady. So too do Elster's often objectionable ramblings: there's something very queasy about his thinking of war, specifically Iraq, as a "haiku".

It's fortunate, then, that DeLillo's prose is so rigorous and so precise.

This is a book that is as hypnotic, if sometimes baffling, as watching the hyper-slow Psycho. Both novel and film are a reminder that it's "impossible to see too much".

• Don DeLillo
• Fiction

Hermione Hoby
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Derek Walcott is a ghostly figure in this collection in which he contemplates his own demise

Derek Walcott was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1992 – and the book that earned him his reputation was Omeros, an outstanding homage to Homer written with buoyant originality. But the Nobel prize has done Walcott no favours. Stature has become a literary issue. It cannot be easy to know how to exist within your own work – where to put yourself – when you have acquired almost legendary status as a poet. I read the new collection looking for Walcott as a recognisable, distinctive human being and observed him disappear repeatedly behind his own majestic lines. He would often launch himself into the first person, then retreat into the mercy of the third, as if the exposure of speaking as himself were too great.

It is easy to guess why this might be. For in this collection, he is writing his own valediction (a risky undertaking). He wonders whether, at the age of 80, these poems might be his last. He explains that if he felt his gift had "withered", he would "abandon poetry like a woman because you love it/ and would not see her hurt, least of all by me…." It is an uncomfortable expression of a painful thought but he pulls himself together to conclude:

"be grateful that you wrote well in this place,/ let the torn poems sail from you like a flock/of white egrets in a long last sigh of relief ".

Egrets, in this collection, are multitaskers. Walcott even refers to himself as an "egret-haired Viejo". And there is no need to shy away from the observation that egret is only one letter away from regret – Walcott does not resist the rhyme. His particular regret is about unrequited love – the keen humiliation of the old man who falls for a younger woman:

"It is the spell/ of ordinary, unrequited love. Watch these egrets/

stalk the lawn in a dishevelled troop, white banners/ forlornly trailing their flags; they are the bleached regrets/of an old man's memoirs, their unwritten stanzas./ Pages gusting like wings on the lawn, wide open secrets."

Walcott is never fully available for comment; his heart is a million miles from his sleeve. Here, the egrets are again on duty to rescue him from himself and, for a second time, he likens them to poems. Actual and written landscapes frequently become hybrids in Walcott's work – a stale device upon which he over-relies. Wriggling insects are "like nouns", sunflowers are "poems we recite to ourselves", barges "pass in stanzas along canals". The breakers Walcott loves so much are trusted collaborators. They roll and smash their way into poem after poem. They shore up the verse. And birds become gracefully blameless alter egos.

We accompany Walcott through Europe and visit assorted hotels. At Durrants, in London, he drinks "hot, broadening tea" (not quite sure what that "broadening" means). In Amsterdam, canals bring calm (though the poem contains a howler – the local people are described as "Flemish"). There is a lovelorn sequence set in Spain and an amiable poem, set in the United States, in a barber's shop, where the talk is of Obama.

What I enjoyed most about the collection was its occasional moments of lofty, salted beauty. The last – untitled – poem (printed below) has an aerial perspective: it is a farewell to a blue world. There is a sense that it has been written by a grand old man of the sea (with a Victorian command of the iambic pentameter). But what one must finally salute is the courage it takes to look failure in the eye as Walcott does (he is ruthless about his attempts at painting) and write on, regardless.

Untitled

This page is a cloud between whose fraying edges

a headland with mountains appears brokenly

then is hidden again until what emerges

from the now cloudless blue is the grooved sea

and the whole self-naming island, its ochre verges,

its shadow-plunged valleys and a coiled road

threading the fishing villages, the white, silent surges

of combers along the coast, where a line of gulls has arrowed

into the widening harbour of a town with no noise,

its streets growing closer like a print you can now read,

two cruise ships, schooners, a tug, ancestral canoes,

as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes

white again and the book comes to a close.

Derek Walcott

• Derek Walcott
• Poetry

Kate Kellaway
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

"UK security firm joins bidding for world's biggest detective agency" (Business) inaccurately stated that Control Risks, the business risk consultancy, was poised to bid for Kroll, the security and detection company, and had "declined to comment".

We should make clear that Control Risks has no such intention of bidding and at no stage indicated that it intended to do so.

"Who wrote Shakespeare?" (Review) referred to the Marlowe Society as "hierophants" who believe that Christopher Marlowe wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.

But the policy page on its website (www.marlowe-society.org/) specifically states that the society is not dedicated to proving that Marlowe was the true author of the Shakespeare canon.

Editing errors turned Dana Milbank, sketch writer for the Washington Post, from male to female in "Liberals choke on their pretzels" (Seven Days) and Olly Grender, the former Liberal Democrat director of communications, from female to male in "Lib Dems adapt their message to bridge Britain's class divide" (In Focus). Apologies.

Write to Stephen Pritchard, Readers' Editor, the Observer, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU, tel 020 3353 4656 or email reader@observer.co.uk

• Theatre

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

The legend surrounding the late Roberto Bolaño is inflamed rather than explained in these playful interviews

Despite the phenomenal success his work has enjoyed since his death in 2003, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño remains a tantalising figure, a man about whom much has been said but little is known, a magnet for all manner of fabrication. Was he ever a heroin addict? Apparently not, although that was the rumour that no less scrupulous a publication than the New Yorker put into circulation. Even the known facts of his life have acquired the flavour of myth: he was a young revolutionary in Allende's Chile; he founded a "punk-surrealist" poetic movement; he lived for many years as a "poet-vagabond". And then, of course, there are his singular fictions, which so masterfully juxtapose the lives of artists and criminals, which flirt so audaciously with the idea of truth. All this has helped ensure that Bolaño remains a cult figure even as his work has become thoroughly mainstream.

This compilation of interviews seems destined to inflame the legend more than it will further the truth. Bolaño didn't often give interviews, and it is apparent from the ones featured here – including his last, to Mexican Playboy, months before he died – that he didn't take them too seriously. His answers tend to be playful, deflecting. Asked why he "always take(s) the opposite view of things", he responds: "I never take the opposite view of things." Asked what feelings "posthumous" works awaken in him, he replies: "Posthumous, it sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator." But Bolaño's often withering assessments of other writers and of the literary establishment ("The Royal Spanish Academy is a cave full of privileged cranums") are well worth reading, and there's an illuminating introduction by Marcela Valdes, which explains in detail how Bolaño came to find out about the killings in Ciudad Juarez that formed the basis of his masterpiece, 2666.

• Roberto Bolaño

William Skidelsky
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

In a new book, Matthew Bishop and Michael Green say that “toxic ideas,” not toxic assets, caused the financial crisis.

If, as HG Wells said, the bicycle is a good reason to have hope for humanity, then my London neighbourhood is nirvana already

I have headed east. The exotic people and the heady mix of spices in the air have lured me, and I've moved to the sunnier, mysterious climes of E8. London Fields, to be precise. A place where all the women dress like foxy suffragettes, all the men dress like Billy Childish and a conversation about cabbage on Broadway Market manages to be impossibly cool. It is, in many ways, utterly lovely, but so far I feel like an interloper. I am not, never have been, am unlikely ever to be, cool. I'm used to not feeling stylish enough to be in a certain shop, but it's a new experience when that shop is a butcher's.

Everyone's incredibly friendly, and I'm very aware that it's not them, it's me. It's just the usual post-move acclimatisation, and I know I'm going to settle in splendidly in time. I know this for one reason. The indicator above all indicators for a place being all right.

There are bicycles everywhere.

And the bicycle is the most civilising, spiritually enriching, philosophically magnificent invention of all time.

It's the psychological effect of cycling that's so beautiful. The NHS could save a fortune on Prozac by providing Bromptons on prescription. Cycling makes me happy.

You have to be aware of what's around you when you're cycling, in a way that you don't in a car, or even walking. If your attention wanders while walking down the street, you're not going to fall off your legs. If your attention wanders while driving, certainly bad things can happen, but in the city you're relatively safe in a ton of metal, compared to the cyclist protected by a plastic hat. That'll concentrate the mind. And hurray that it does.

On a bicycle, you are utterly in the moment; there is no past and future, only right now, and being "present" is what, ultimately, we're all after. It's Buddhist, is cycling. I find myself content, believing in the fundamental decency of the human race and the notion that everything's going to be all right. It's impossible to stay melancholy or furious on a bike. Obviously, there are times when I get angry at fellow travellers, cutting me up or stepping into the road without looking. But it passes, as it must because there's that great big lorry to think about.

On a bicycle, colours are brighter, birds sing a sweeter song. People say hello to each other on bicycles. All right, I say hello to other people on bicycles. And they pedal fractionally faster.

Plus you get to discover tiny streets and cafes you'd never see in a car, rarely on foot. It's like a spiritually enriching version of the Knowledge. And that's spiritual in the non-religious sense. After all, one of the sounder arguments for the non-existence of God is that an all-knowing, benevolent creator would have put a couple of bikes in the garden of Eden, so we'd have had them from day one. Or at least day six.

So I shall be happy in London Fields, because if, as HG Wells so rightly said, "When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race," then seeing lots of adults on bicycles means everything's going to be awesome.

• Follow the Guardian's Bike blog, and listen to our monthly Bike podcast

• Cycling
• London
• HG Wells
• Ethical and green living

Carrie Quinlan
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

David Shenk argues that discipline, not giftedness, is vital to greatness.

Mr. Muscatine was a scholar who transformed Chaucer studies by turning attention to the French models for Chaucer’s poetry and an education reformer.

As Brooklyn’s new poet laureate, Tina Chang wants to “demystify the role of the poet.”

When Terri was diagnosed with cancer, Lionel Shriver was doting – at first. But as her condition worsened, there always seemed to be a reason not to call…

I met Terri in the early 1980s at an arts camp in Connecticut. We were both in the metalsmithing workshop, and this sharply featured, appealingly surly Armenian taught me some new tricks. Her speciality was rivets and other "cold connections", an apt expression in her case. She was a wilful, stubborn woman, more fiercely so than I first realised; 25 years later, I'd discover just how defiant my closest girlfriend could be, even in the face of the undeniable.

Terri was full of the contradictions that always captivate me in people: inclined to bear grudges but incredibly generous (often rocking up with gifts for no reason – why, I still have half a dozen pairs of her shoes). Harsh but warm. Prone to depression but with a knack for festivity. I conjure her scowling down the pavement and rolling in laughter with equal ease. She was tortured and brooding; she was terribly kind. And she was a serious artist in the best sense: not pretentious, but determined to craft interesting work well.

Back in Queens, where we both lived in our mid-20s, we found common cause in our improbable aspirations. She wanted to become a famous artist, I a famous novelist – but Terri had then sold next to nothing and I'd not published more than my phone number. It was a big, indifferent world out there, and an ally was crucial. We'd conspire over a six-pack in my tiny one-bedroom flat, jovially certain that we'd still be best friends when we were "cancerous old bags". It was a running gag. We thought it was funny.

Beware the jokes of your heedless, immortal youth. Fast-forward through two and a half decades, during which Terri and I survived abusive boyfriends, marital problems, professional setbacks, my expatriation to the UK and her exile to New Jersey, Terri's painful endometriosis and four failed IVF treatments, as well as, of course, each other. During my regular summer migration to New York, in 2005, Terri shared her perplexity that she'd been running a low-grade fever for weeks. I said it sounded like a tenacious virus. But shortly thereafter she rang from hospital.

She was being tested for a range of ailments, the most far-fetched of these a rare disease called mesothelioma. Thus it was quite a shock when the doctors confirmed that peritoneal mesothelioma was exactly what she had – almost certainly caused by exposure to the asbestos that laced metalsmithing materials when she was in art school. Her husband Paul reported grimly that the average survival rate for this ravaging cancer was a single year.

Terri was only 50, and the timing was tragic for other reasons, too. From frustration, malaise and exactingly high standards, through most of her career she had underproduced. Yet in recent years something had loosened up, and her output had accelerated. Better still, she was at last imbuing her creations with the feeling they'd sometimes lacked, the most moving of which was an elegy to her unavailing IVF treatments. She was finally pulling in big commissions, one of which was about to go on display at the V&A. At the same time, her brooding demeanour had brightened; she'd grown more outgoing, energetic and relaxed. Almost... happy. Well, so much for that.

On the heels of her diagnosis, I was doting. I'm not tooting my own horn. I suspect being a paragon at the very start of a loved one's illness is pretty much the form. We're on the phone daily. We stop by regularly, and bring freshly baked scones. We follow every medical twist and turn. And we're inclined to rash promises. With a flinch, I recall declaring before Terri's surgery that I'd be willing to move into their house in New Jersey for weeks at a time! I'd be at her beck and call, running errands, preparing meals and filling prescriptions.

Useful tip: if someone close to you falls gravely ill, at the outset, in the first flush of anguish and desperation to help? Watch the mouth.

For the timing of Terri's cancer was terrible for me as well. A month after her diagnosis, I was intending to return home to London, where a host of professional commitments could not (or so it seemed) be reneged upon. Although for most of my literary career I'd scribbled in obscurity, my prospects were suddenly looking up. My seventh novel had inexplicably hit the bestseller list in the UK, and subsequently won the Orange prize earlier that summer. (I still have the droll good-luck package Terri and Paul delivered when I made the shortlist: orange marmalade, orange candles, orange oil.) For the first time, I faced a smorgasbord of opportunities – festival gigs, bookstore appearances, feature assignments – and I was in the middle of a new book.

So, however reluctantly, I flew back to London. After Terri's surgery, Paul phoned with the lowdown: the surgeons had discovered a patch of aggressive "sarcomatoid" cells, which meant Terri's prognosis was bleak.

I will give myself this grudging credit: I did fly back to visit Terri for Thanksgiving that November, and for a while I kept in faithful touch, ringing weekly and following every grisly detail of her punishing chemotherapy. But this is not a boast about what a wonderful friend I was in Terri's time of need. This is a mea culpa.

Little by little, I'd notice that it had been a fortnight since I'd rung New Jersey. I'd kick myself. But some book review would be due that afternoon, so I'd vow to ring tomorrow. Time and again some immediate task would seem more urgent, and I'd tell myself that I should ring Terri when I'm settled and concentrated. Watch out whenever you "tell yourself" anything; it's the red flag of self-deceit. Long hours of being "settled and concentrated" mysteriously failed to manifest themselves.

I stuck a Post-it note on the edge of my desk: "RING TERRI!" Over the months, the note faded, much like my resolve. On the too-rare occasions I acted on the reminder, I had to put a mental gun to my head. But why? This was one of my closest friends, and she was dying. While she was still on this Earth, why was I not battling to maximise every moment? Surely the problem should have been my ringing too often, whizzing back to the States too many times, making a pest of myself.

Granted, our conversations were sometimes awkward. My own life had never gone more swimmingly, while Terri's was circling the drain. I was embarrassed. I found myself editing from our discussions anything I'd done that was exciting or fun. When I returned from an author's tour of Sweden, I portrayed the trip as a drag. This  sort of cover-up reliably backfired. So apparently I felt sorry for myself – for going to Sweden! When Terri could rarely leave the house.

I make no apologies for this, since this is what novelists do: at some midpoint in Terri's decline, I decided that my next novel would draw on this encounter with cancer. At least I had the humanity to refrain from taking notes during our phone calls, thus relinquishing many a "telling detail" and much "great material". Consequently, I had to do an enormous amount of research on mesothelioma later, and this is what I do apologise for: not having done all those web searches on her treatments – the surgery, the drugs, the side-effects – when Terri was still suffering through them. Now, I'm mortified to have Googled "mesothelioma" only once the search was for a book.

When I returned to the US that second summer, Terri had alarmingly deteriorated. Thin to start with, she'd lost weight. She was gaunt and weak, her skin tinged a dark, unsettling orange: a chemo tan. It was obvious where this was headed. But whenever anyone acted as if she wasn't going to make it, Terri grew enraged. She resented the "sentimental" testimonials her friends and relatives recited at her bedside; she thought they were delivering a death sentence. Though she wouldn't have put it that way. I wonder if throughout her illness I ever heard her say the word "death" aloud.

Thus on one count only could I blame Terri herself for my increasingly deficient friendship. Her refusal to admit she was dying meant we couldn't ever talk about the elephant in the room. Pretending that the treatments were working and she was going to come through this injected an artifice in our relationship at odds with the confidences we'd shared for 25 years. Days I did visit, afternoons I did ring, we'd end up talking, lamely, about recipes. Indeed, on a brief trip in November 2006, I visited Terri in New Jersey; it was the last time I'd ever see her, and I knew this instinctively at the time. Yet we spent an appalling proportion of that final visit talking about mashed potatoes.

When her husband rang me in London a few days later with the news, he was consumed with a steely rage. Obviously Paul was angry that he'd lost his wife. But he was also angry at other people. Oh, he expressed his disgust in general terms, as a disillusionment with the human race, a good-riddance to our whole species. But I knew what he meant. Paul's fury was aimed at Terri's friends and family, who had almost universally made themselves scarce for months. His fury was also aimed at me.

I thought I deserved it. I had visited, some. I had rung up, some. But not nearly often enough, and in truth one of my best friends perishing before my eyes had instilled a deep aversion, an instinctive avoidance, a desperation to flee.

It would be a far better thing if I were a lone shithead amid an ocean of altruists. And surely some folks really do step up to the plate when a friend or relative falls mortally ill – wonderful people who keep popping by with casseroles to the very last day. I have a new admiration for such stalwarts, as well as a new appreciation for the Christian duty to "visit the sick". Yet I fear this suddenly-remembering-somewhere-you-gotta-be is a common failing of our time. In fearing and avoiding death, we fear and avoid the dying.

I'll risk sounding preachy, since I've paid for my sermon with a regret that never leaves me. Most of us will experience the afflictions of our nearest and dearest perhaps multiple times before we're faced with a deadly diagnosis of our own. So be mindful. Disease is frightening. It's unpleasant. It reminds us of everything we try not to think about on our own accounts. A biological instinct to steer clear of contagion can kick in even with diseases like cancer that we understand rationally aren't communicable. So the urge to avoid sick people runs very deep. Notice it. Then overcome it. There will always be something you'd rather do than confront the agony, anxiety and exile of serious illness, and these alternative endeavours seem terribly pressing in the moment: replacing the printer cartridge, catching up on urgent work-related email. But nothing is more pressing than someone you love who's suffering, and whose continuing existence you can no longer take for granted. So never vow to ring "tomorrow" – pick up the bloody phone.

• So Much For That, by Lionel Shriver, is published by HarperCollins on 25 March at £15. To order a copy for £14, with free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.

• Bereavement
• Relationships
• Cancer
• Health

Lionel Shriver
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

If you are what you eat, then Rich Pelley would like whatever Sophie Dahl is having in her new cookery show. Here goes …

Hi, Soph! You've got a new cookery show, The Delicious Miss Dahl. Now that you're thin and that, is it all Ryvita, low-fat cottage cheese and Special K on diet toast?

You forgot grapefruits and hard-boiled eggs! No. It's more likely to be fish pies and mushy peas, good comfort food. There's a cornucopia of food out there. How much time have you got?

Er, not long. There's a cookbook too, Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights. Should more chefs name their books in keeping with their personalities, eg Gordon Ramsay's Sweary Recipes or Everything's A Sexual Innuendo with Nigella Lawson?

Ha ha, um, should they? Yes! Anyway, shouldn't it be The Delicious/Voluptuous Mrs Cullum now? You're out of date! That might be a bit confusing. People will think, "Who is this Mrs Cullum?" They'll think I'm Jamie's mum! (1)

Talking of which … when we interviewed Jamie last year he definitely said we could come to your wedding (2). What happened to our invite?

Um, it must have got lost in the post.

OK. We've been strictly informed that we're not allowed to ask you about your wedding (3), but sod that. Did you have a nice time?

Yes. It was lovely. Thanks.

Pleased to hear it. At home, does Jamie help with the cooking or can't he reach the worktop? (4)

Jamie cooks 50% of the time, he's a really good cook, and yes, he can reach the worktops! He makes really great poached eggs.

What's his secret? White wine vinegar? Make a little whirlpool? Novelty egg poacher?

You'll have to ask him!

Apparently, you have "nightmares involving food". You're back at school, sitting your exams but your pen has turned into a leek?

It was one nightmare about men made of lumpy, school mashed potato running through a forest. Remember school mashed potato? Really lumpy, really unseasoned and really disgusting. There were these weird mashed potato men wearing weird stripy tights. I don't know if there's some sort of deep, Freudian meaning behind it. But I was only about seven.

In The BFG (5), you sit on the Queen's windowsill waiting for her to awake from a special dream. In real life, you'd have been gunned down by MI5 ages ago. Where's the realism?

Ha, I've been to Buckingham Palace and nobody tried to shoot me. I went for Party At The Palace (6) and they used all these characters from children's literature and I was there in my Sophie incarnation.

Did you meet Her Maj? What did you say?

How do you do?

According to the other anthropophagous (7) giants, humans taste of where they come from, so Greeks taste greasy, Danes taste like dogs, Swedes taste sweet and sour etc. Who would make the tastiest human pie?

It would have to have some Irish in it. The Irish taste of poetry and peat fires. The Scots taste of whisky and heather. The Welsh taste like mountains. And the English taste like rain and bonfire smoke. Er, not sure it would make a nice pie though. I think I'd blend them all into a nice range of soups!

Thanks, Soph! What do you say to people who say it's actually men who make the best chefs (8)?

I'd say, "Get a life!" Ha!

The Delicious Miss Dahl, Tuesday, 8.30pm, BBC2

1 Oedipus?

2 Well, not definitely

3 They wed in January

4 Jamie is 5'6", Soph 5'11"

5 Roald Dahl's Big Friendly Giant

6 HM's Golden Jubilee knees-up in 2002

7 Cannibal, basically, but with more syllables

8 It's mainly men who say that of course

• Roald Dahl
• Jamie Cullum

Rich PelleySophie Dahl
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Josh Lacey is taken in by centaurs

Louisa Young and her daughter Isabel Adomakoh Young, who write together as Zizou Corder, had huge success with their first book, Lionboy. Their fifth collaboration, Halo, is a funny and fast-moving adventure set in ancient Greece.

The story begins with a baby being washed ashore on a beach on Zakynthos, one of the larger Ionian islands, famous for its pulsating resorts packed with sunburnt Brits. Luckily for the little girl, she's 2,500 years too early to meet any of them. Instead, she's found by one of the locals, a centaur, and taken back to his tribe.

The centaurs, half human and half horse, live undisturbed in the hilly north of the island and don't have much experience of people, but they decide to keep the baby anyway. They name her Halosydne, quickly abbreviated to Halo, and rear her alongside one of their own children, a toddling centaur named Arko.

A decade later, Halo and Arko are swimming in a secluded cave when they are trapped by fishermen. Arko escapes, but Halo is caught, kidnapped, sold into slavery and taken to the mainland, where she embarks on a picaresque journey with two contradictory aims: to rejoin her adoptive family of centaurs and discover her real identity.

Halo soon learns that "no one has any respect for women, let alone girls", and decides to disguise herself as a boy. Stealing a man's knife and cloak, she plunges into a breathless series of adventures: she is schooled by the Spartans, defects to the Athenians, trains as a doctor, learns archery, witnesses a plague, travels from one end of Greece to the other, finds her family and even has time to fall in love.

The novel has flaws: the plot is episodic and too reliant on a string of unlikely coincidences; characters are introduced, then forgotten and discarded; the ending is rushed. But these irritations are swept aside by the  energy of the writing and some great set pieces, the best being a wonderfully vivid description of the oracle at Delphi.

The book is crammed with a multitude of real and invented characters, and oozes geeky information about the ancient Greeks. (Some notes at the back even explain how to make a bow or bake baklava.)

It will undoubtedly inspire young readers to learn more about the period, although they may be disappointed to discover that Pericles never really met a centaur.

Josh Lacey's novel Three Diamonds and a Donkey is published by Scholastic.

• Children and teenagers

Josh Lacey
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Lola Shoneyin's grandfather had five wives and her grandmother, the first, never forgave him. But she was shocked to find that polygamy is still prevalent in Nigeria

As a 10-year-old girl, I liked reading obituaries, and would stare in fascination at the photographs of the recently deceased. But on this particular day I couldn't help noticing the large image on page two. My mother and I were travelling home to Ibadan from Lagos, Nigeria, and she passed the newspaper to me when she tired of my relentless chatter. In the picture was a tall well-known socialite with three women dressed in identical lace and head-tie, each with flawlessly lightened skin; each was dripping with golden jewellery and each wore the same eager smile. The caption read: Chief Solomon [not his real name] and his wives at a birthday bash.

My eyes travelled from one woman to the other. I thought how fantastic it would be to be one of many wives. I imagined my friends and me being married to the same man, going shopping together, eating out together and wearing the same clothes, like sisters. I was so excited that I announced to my mother that I was going to be one of many wives when I grew up.

I noticed the disapproving lines gathering at her brow as she held up her glasses to her eyes. Sharply, she dropped them on to her lap. First, she asked if I was listening carefully, then she told me that the women in the picture might be smiling on the outside, but inside they were sad and bitter. I was crushed. I was never comfortable with the idea of it after that.

As I approached my teens, I often heard my parents offering advice to my brothers, who were old enough to bring their girlfriends home. Ethnicity was not an issue for them (unlike most Nigerian parents); their main concern was that my brothers didn't date young women from polygamous homes. This seemed unjust to me. I couldn't understand the logic in judging anyone on the basis of a family situation they had no control over. I took my mum to task on this one day. She said she didn't have anything against the girls themselves, but that children from polygamous homes were often conditioned to be devious. She said they needed to be that way in order to survive. Well, she would know. Her own father had five wives.

My grandfather, Abraham Olayinka Okupe, was born in 1896 into one of the four ruling houses of Iperu, a town in Ogun state. He was educated by missionaries and graduated from the prestigious Wesley College, a teacher training college in Ibadan set up by the Methodist church. There, he learned to play the church organ beautifully and his handwriting was the most perfect cursive you ever saw. After graduating, he married Jolade, also a teacher, and together they embarked on joint careers as travelling teachers. Before long, they had two daughters (my mother being the second) and lived what could only be described as a modern marriage, given the times. My mother recalls that he was a hands-on father and that her parents shared domestic duties.

Everything changed when a letter arrived, informing them that the oba (traditional ruler) of Iperu had died. This news generated much anxiety. The four ruling houses have been operating a power rotation system for hundreds of years. Finally, it was the turn of the Agbonmagbe ruling house again, and my grandfather, the eldest son of the family, would have to give up his career and the comfort he had created for his family. The letter said categorically that the gods had chosen him, so he knew he didn't have a choice. My grandfather ascended the throne as His Royal Highness Alaperu of Iperu (Agbonmagbe IV) in 1938, with his wife humbly looking on.

He was to marry four more wives, and with each additional wife, his relationship with my grandmother broke down a little further. Granny was always a very quiet woman, and there must have been times when she wondered if those early days when they lived for each other were just a figment of her imagination. After 11 years of marital bliss, and before her very eyes, the husband with whom she had shared dreams and duties became increasingly distant and self-indulgent.

Of course, my grandfather could have resisted the women who desired his prized royal seed. He could have rejected the women who were given to him for free, without dowry. But he didn't. He was the ruler and such power came with many privileges. Perhaps out of guilt or maybe because he found her silent displeasure difficult to deal with, he ignored my grandmother. His third child would come from his second wife.

As more wives arrived, my grandmother withdrew deeper into herself; she became overly protective of her children, to the point where she would warn them not to associate with the other wives. She warned them never to eat food that had been cooked by them in case it was poisoned. It was common knowledge that newer wives went to great lengths to destabilise the powerful first wives. Children were often casualties in the tussle for the biggest share of the husband's affections. Surprisingly, neither my mother nor her sister heeded their mother's words. When their mother's back was turned, they interacted freely with their younger half-siblings and often ate food that the junior wives gave them. They were, after all, their father's first fruit, the ones who knew him first. My grandfather died in 1976, 21 years before my grandmother. She never forgave him. She lived in the oba's court until the day she died, sad and unfulfilled.

Growing up hearing these stories had a marked effect on me. By the time I got to university at 16, I found that I felt great sympathy for the children who came from polygamous homes. The children from the first wives would often say how cheated they felt, how unkind life was because they didn't have their father to themselves. Most of them were terrified because the behaviour of their mother had a direct impact on how they were treated at home; nearly all of them despised their fathers because of the misery their mothers had been put through. With these children, there was often a bloated sense of entitlement; they spoke disparagingly of their half-siblings and treated them with disdain. On the other hand, the children of subsequent wives were either defeatist in their outlook on life, or obsessively competitive. They were used to fighting for every smidgen of attention that came their way. Coming from a monogamous family, I viewed these character traits with interest and wonder.

I haven't always made the right choices. My first marriage was to a man who was born to the second wife in a polygamous home. I should have listened to my mother; the marriage lasted 40 days and maybe our different backgrounds had something to do with our incompatibility. After the annulment I was a little more careful. I was introduced to my husband, Olaokun Soyinka, son of the Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, by a mutual friend of both families. We had a short, intense courtship and were married 12 years ago.

Now, in my working life as a teacher and writer, and as a mother of four children, I watch with horror when women of my generation opt to be second or third wives. And I have been shocked by the ease with which men in their mid-30s marry additional wives. We recently returned to Nigeria after five years in the UK. We decided to go home in order to re-introduce our children to Nigerian culture and I wondered how best to explain to my children that some of their new friends would come from households where there were two mummies or more.

A few months after I arrived in Abuja, Nigeria's capital city, I struck up a friendship with a very warm 26-year-old woman called Aisha. By northern Nigerian standards, she was ripe for marriage. Luckily she had Abdul, a man she couldn't stop talking about. Abdul was in his 30s and very generous, showering her with expensive presents. I'd often see him parked outside the flat she shared with her mother. On one occasion, when she was gushing about Abdul's virtues, she mentioned that he was an amazing father to his three-year-old daughter. Naively, I asked how long it had been since his wife passed away. She looked at me coyly, hoping that I wouldn't think less of her. She told me he was married and that his wife was expecting their second child.

Some time later, she came to me crying that this same man wasn't returning her calls. He's probably with that wife of his, she said through her tears. I told her that what she was experiencing was a foretaste of things to come, and asked how it would feel if, after marrying her, Abdul then took a third wife. I was shocked that she was shocked. I couldn't believe this hadn't occurred to her. A few days later, she told me she had broken up with him. I was pleased for her. Husband-sharing is ugly and, one way or another, someone's dreams are crushed when a new wife joins a household.

According to the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey 2008, a third of married women in Nigeria are in polygamous unions and 16% of married men (aged 15-49) have more than one wife. Polygamy is more prevalent in northern Nigeria, which is predominantly Muslim. The survey also found that older men, those in rural areas and those with lower levels of education, were more likely to have two or more wives than other men.

But why do women agree to it? Why did Thobeka Madiba, who recently visited the UK with the South African president Jacob Zuma, agree to become his third wife? Was it because she fell hopelessly in love with a married man? Was it because she wanted five minutes of fame? Or was the allure of being married to the No 1 citizen of South Africa too delicious to resist? Where some women may go into these polygamous arrangements for love or status, there is no doubt that a majority of women walk into this minefield for financial security.

Last year, two of the daughters of the president of Nigeria married men who happened to be governors of northern Nigerian states. One became wife No 4 and the other joined the family of a man who already had two wives. What sort of parents would allow such a thing? Yes, there is a possibility that the president's daughters married for love, but it is easier to conclude that these marriages were politically motivated, the women pawns in a game far beyond what they themselves understand.

The sad truth is, polygamy constitutes a national embarrassment in any country that fantasises about progress and development. Polygamy devalues women and the only person who revels in it is the husband who gets to enjoy variety. You, poor women, will become nothing more than a dish at the buffet.

The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin is published by Serpent's Tail for £10.99. To order a copy for £10.99 including free UK mainland p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 68467

• Nigeria
• Marriage
• Wole Soyinka
• Family

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

'Even on bad writing days there was something I could spend time finding out'

Lots of the rules for writing non-fiction are just the same as they are for writing fiction ("Put one word after another", 20 February). Whether it's biography, history, astronomy or anything else that comes in the category of factual, you need to be at your desk just as early (or at least as long) as if you live by your imagination. And you need to turn up there every day (unless you are somewhere else, of which more later).

You need to avoid exclamation marks and clichés (like the plague), you should use adverbs as if they were rationed and remember that in real life – which is where non-fiction writers are – people say things, or possibly argue them, or occasionally insist on them. They do not proclaim, or aver, or laugh them (as celebrity magazines would have us believe) – or mull them, for heaven's sake, as I read recently. And if you ever start a sentence with "meanwhile", you have literally lost the plot.

Non-fiction writers have many advantages over fiction writers: the most profound being, as Richard Holmes said when he was writing his biography of the poet Shelley, "At least I always have the man." As I wrote The Thirties: An Intimate History, I felt grateful every day for the fact that I always had the decade, and even on bad writing days there was something I could spend time finding out that I was pretty sure I would be able to use. The crumpled ball of paper syndrome (or its electronic equivalent) still happens, of course, but it can usually be smoothed out and used somewhere.

The other plus point is research – and that brings us to where the being somewhere else comes in, because writing non-fiction books requires months, if not years, in libraries and archives and record offices, reading newspapers, invariably on that mind-numbing interim technology, microfilm. Or talking to experts, or what we now call "witnesses to events", following up leads, interviewing people, listening to tapes, poring over illegible scrawl in letters and diaries that, when you have finally managed to decipher it, might well say nothing more arresting than, "Rained again. Vicar called. Mother had headache."

But at least non-fiction writers are not usually advised to "wear their research lightly", though all should try to, as should rather more novelists. On the whole, what you have found out, you can tell straight on the page, without having to invent some intermediary to be the messenger.

Another advantage is that, if the worst comes to the worst, you can comfort yourself with the thought that, even if a reader finds your book boring, or thinks it is badly written, at least they are bound to have learned something from it. But they might have garnered little from a mediocre novel and be none the wiser about anything.

So, if those are some advantages of being a non-fiction writer, what are the disadvantages? One is the osteopath's bills. Most writers sit cramped hour after hour over their laptops, but when non-fiction writers get up from their desks, it's often to go off to libraries and load themselves up with so many books that they develop aches in muscles they didn't know they had. Another is the photocopying costs. One has to be iron-willed not to photocopy that whole chapter, this entire article, just in case, rather than choosing the bits you really need to transcribe. There are digital cameras, of course, but the British Library won't allow them, and you have to be adept to ensure that you can read more than just the centre third of a page when you upload the image back at home.

Then there is the amount of money it is all too easy to spend at AbeBooks, or increasing the number of books that can be borrowed from the London Library from the statutory 10 to the maximum 40, to assuage that insecure feeling that a long out-of-print biography, or a foxed and forgotten memoir, will provide just the illuminating quotation that will vivify a whole chapter for you.

It is the sources that shackle a non-fiction writer: if something didn't happen, you can't say that it did. You can't write what you would have liked someone to have said, or even improve on how they said it. You can speculate a bit – Hans Magnus Enzensberger does so wonderfully in The Silences of Hammerstein, but then he is also a poet. Most readers get irritated if a writer presumes an omnipotence and tells them what someone thought when they can't possibly know. And the shackles are material, too: Lady Antonia Fraser invented her lady detective, Jemima Shore partly so that she could sit in the sun with Harold Pinter and still be writing, without needing to have shelves of books and tottering piles of paper surrounding her, as she did when producing her historical biographies.

Literary festivals and bookshop events are harder work for the non-fiction writer: the audience expects a proper talk, an argument – maybe even a PowerPoint presentation. You can't get away with just reading a few pages of lovely prose from your latest book, as a fiction writer can. But perhaps the real killer is that while fiction is read and reread over generations – centuries even – non-fiction, even really fine non-fiction, with a very few exceptions, becomes all too soon outdated and overtaken. Some writers cross the boundary, of course: novelists do sometimes turn their hands to non-fiction, and vice versa. But not often, and not usually very successfully. I don't think I could. And I am not sure that I want to. My curiosity is boundless, and I don't want to make up characters and imagine situations; I want to find out about what exists and try to write about that as fluidly and as compellingly as if it were a work of fiction.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds