James Smythe has read everything Stephen King has ever written – and now he's revisiting each novel in chronological order. First: a young girl with some dangerous powers

Carrie is Stephen King's first novel. A large part of its fame comes from the fact that it was actually the fourth novel he wrote and submitted to publishers – a story that people love to tell when discussing the roads to publication of big-name authors. "Did you know King wrote three books before he was accepted?" goes the common confidence-boosting phrase. And, nearly as famously, he actually threw his only draft of it away at one point, until his wife convinced him to rescue it from the rubbish. The rest is, as they nearly say, a 70ish-strong publication history. (The first three books King wrote, incidentally, were Rage, The Long Walk and Blaze, all of which found publication in later years, and all of which will be covered soon enough.)

Carrie ended up being quite a zeitgeisty novel: published in the same rough timeframe as Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, and when cinemas were showing Don't Look Now and The Wicker Man. The public were beginning to fall in love with the weirder, more human side of the paranormal – moving away from ghosts and hauntings, which used to preoccupy horror fiction.

The book itself is the story of Carrie White, a high-school student with latent – and then, as the novel progresses, developing – telekinetic powers. It's brutal in places, affecting in others (Carrie's relationship with her almost hysterically religious mother being a particularly damaged one), and gory in even more. By the end of the novel, there's a pretty impressive body count, and it's a body count you don't necessarily see coming given the general tone of the novel. Or, bluntly, given the character of Carrie herself.

Structurally it's a really weird one, with a standard Kingian third-person narrative voice interspersed with extracts from other media: newspaper reports, autobiographies of characters, transcripts of police interviews, that sort of thing. It's not a structure that entirely works, as the extracts are still slightly too close to King's standard narrative voice, and are often the worst (read: slowest) parts of the novel. While still reeling from the excitement of some of the third-person sections – particularly the classic prom scene – being dragged somewhere else entirely and presented with an often less-interesting viewpoint isn't always ideal. (In particular, there's a series of extracts from Susan Snell's fake biography; none are very interesting. Apart from anything else, they don't read like biography: they read like monologues.)

But, it's a really good story. Carrie herself is a fascinating character: an archetype (the damaged girl with powers beyond her sphere) to which King would return later in his career, and the book drags the reader along at a fair-old whack. King himself has described the novel as being "a cookie baked by a first grader – tasty enough, but kind of lumpy and burned on the bottom". And that's a pretty fair assessment, I'd say. As a debut novel, it's a fairly good piece of juvenilia. As a statement of intent – that intent being to write stories that deal with the weird, twisted and human in equal measure – it's exceptional.

Kingisms

In every review, I'm going to look at the tropes and common stylistic touches that appear in King's novels. Carrie's obviously interesting as it was the first, and it throws up a few ideas he would repeat throughout his career. The big one in Carrie is the internal monologue. King has a habit

(habit? habits are formed, this is something innate)

of indenting brackets or dropping the italicised thoughts of his characters into his third-person narratives. (See what I did there?) It's an easy way to bypass "She thought", and actually pretty elegant. In Carrie, it's a stylistic device that's still new to him, and whereas he now uses it sparingly, here, it's everywhere. By the end of the novel, some pages are almost more internal monologue than not.

Carrie is also a relative tone-setter of a novel: the narrative is distinctly King's, covering themes he would revisit again, and to greater effect; and some of the dialogue – particularly in Carrie's conversations with her mother – is delivered in voices he would also return to in later novels (Misery, the Dark Tower series, Dolores Claiborne).

Flagg-raising

One last thing. King has a character who has officially appeared in nine novels: Randall Flagg (aka Walter O'Dim, the Dark Man, the Man in Black, the Walkin' Dude). He's not a nice chap, and I'll take a much closer look at him in later novels – starting, if memory serves, with 1978's The Stand. But there are plenty of arguments to be made for his appearance in other King texts, and Carrie is no different.

Carrie's mother, in her religious fervour, frequently refers to – either directly, or through Carrie's prior indoctrination – "the black man … his cloven feet striking red sparks from the cement". Now, while it's meant to be the devil in this instance – or, rather, a more direct suggestion of the devil than Randall Flagg's usual appearances – that particular being is never mentioned by name. And "the black man" is awfully close to the Man in Black and the Dark Man, I'd say …

Next up

1975's Salem's Lot, a story of vampires, small towns and another of King's common themes – writers.

The London tube system deserves this hymn of praise

I don't know if I'm going to be able to convey – surely the apposite word – the full extent of my love of the London tube. It's a love that exists prior to any sense I have of an estrangement from the world – I suppose if I were inclined to all that Freudian malarkey I'd say that the tube is not "other" to me, for it – or possibly she – is no mere transitional object, but my very internalisation of Mother London herself. Let me expand: I grew up about 10 minutes' walk from East Finchley tube station, and I cannot properly remember a time when I didn't travel by tube. That said, the first regular journeys I clearly remember were when, aged about eight, I began going to school in Hampstead. My older brother and I would travel the five stops to Camden Town, change to the northbound Edgware platform, and go the further three stops to Hampstead. A more direct route was to take the 102 bus to Golders Green, but while I liked the 102 well enough – and especially the breakneck plunge from the back platform as the Routemaster caromed on to the station forecourt – I loved the tube.

I loved its foody-dusty-breathy warmth – a zephyr that seemed to be expiring from the bowels of the earth once the trains had sunk below Highgate Hill. I loved the frowsty look of my fellow-passengers, their faces creased by the ivory light, their clothes lying dishevelled on the dark red moquette. I loved the acrid stench of the smoking carriages – soon enough I was puffing along in them – and I adored the huge and creaky old lifts that winched you up the deep shaft at Hampstead, and which, with their brassy levers, wooden-slatted benches and concertina doors, were undoubtedly steampunk avant la letter. (Although, actually when you come to think of it, London's entire multi-layered infrastructure is, was, and always will be steampunk to the core. I remember seeing Terry Gilliam's Brazil for the first time in Leicester Square, then descending into the tube to be confronted by the same monstrous spaghetti of flaking ducts, and a convoluted mechanism made out of beige metal miniature Venetian blinds that had a small Bakelite sign attached to it which read "SPEAK HERE". I collapsed, helpless with laughter.)

Actually, my brother and I also adored the new lifts just then being introduced at Hampstead, because if you jumped up as they plunged down you experienced a split-second sensation of weightlessness, a spatial oddity perfectly in tune with 1969. As I grew older I explored the tube further. I can never claim to be like those eccentrics Andrew Martin writes about in this book, who strive to break the world record for the fastest trip to every one of the 270-odd (some very odd) stations on the network – indeed, I doubt I've got on or off at a fraction of these – but the tube remains coextensive with my own marrow, that's how much I feel it bred in my bones. With the run of the city, I would tube down to the museums in South Kensington – in the 1970s there was an exhibit there that consisted of a coal mine sunk several levels down into its basement. It was experiences of this form: rising from deep below ground to walk through a foot tunnel, rise up momentarily to the surface, and then descend once more into the bowels of a large public building that turned the urban world comfortably upside down.

In winter, when there were still thick fogs in London, you could easily get the sensation that the "outside" as usually understood, didn't really exist at all – that all there was were these lighted burrows connected by long tunnels through which we, the rat people, scuttled. Martin writes of the 60s and 70s as decades when the London tube was unloved – rundown through lack of investment, and out-glamorised by road transport. But for me this wasn't the case – indeed, the very epidermal tattiness of poster peeling away from poster peeling away from poster was its glamour. Besides, the salient moments in my life often occurred in or around the tube: I was violently assaulted one midnight in Chalk Farm tube station only minutes after seeing the Jam play "Down in the Tube Station at Midnight"; I missed out being immolated by the 1987 King's Cross fire by a matter of a half hour or so, as I walked up that fateful escalator en route to a karate class on Judd Street (and yes, I probably was smoking); I've been drunk on the tube more times than I care to think about; had sexual congress; and, on one hopefully never-to-be-repeated occasion, actually fainted on the platform at Camden Town during the rush hour, where I lay for about 10 minutes during which people stomped on and about me, before a kindly woman – a retired nurse, natch – tenderly got me on to a bench and pressed a boiled sweet between my lips. "They probably thought you were on drugs," she said, to explain away the indifference of the rather more acute masses.

What I'm trying to say is that the stylised statue of a Native American with his bow, who sits incongruously atop the softly Modernist prow of East Finchley Tube Station, was loosing me into the metropolis, and it's against this highly emotive background that I read Underground, Overground: it's a comprehensive book (Martin edited the tube talk column in the Evening Standard for some years), it's an amiable one, it's reasonably well-written, and it's by a man who clearly loves the tube. But, with the best will in the world, he simply ain't a native Londoner, so it isn't the smother love that we feel. True, as a teenager he would borrow his father's free pass (his dad worked for British Rail), and come down from York to ride the system, but for him it must always be something outside of himself, not the uncoiling of his own electrified bowels.

The story Martin tells, from the early cut-and-cover sections of the Metropolitan Railway in the 1860s, through to the colossal deep-bore tunnelling machines that will hollow out the 17 miles of the new Crossrail beneath the city centre, is, to the tube buff, a familiar one: Charles Pearson, the visionary of underground railways as a public good, is succeeded by others that Martin thinks of as "tube martyrs" – such as Watkin of the Met, the American Yerkes (the Sam Kiley of his day), Greathead of the tunnelling shield and Whitaker Wright of the Bakerloo – all men who died before their visions of the system could be fully realised. Then there are the successful tubesters: Albert Stanley, Frank Pick, Lord Ashfield, and the great designer Harry Beck, who between them really made the modern integrated network that we know today. This grand narrative is well-told by Christian Wolmar in his The Subterranean Railway, and Martin leans on his account, quoting extensively, as he does from Stephen Halliday's equally fine Underground to Everywhere, and from Stephen Smith's brilliantly whimsical Underground London.

But where Martin's book comes into its own is on the experiential aspects of tube travel – and this is what justifies its subtitle as a "passenger's history". Whether he is meditating on the vexed question of urinating on the live rail (would you survive?), or the flattering qualities – for women of a certain age – of the aforementioned ivory lights in the 1930s-vintage rolling stock, or uncovering the recording history of that great ambient hit "Mind the Gap", Martin is never less than engaging. He also mounts a spirited – and even to this sceptic, thoroughly convincing – defence of Ken Livingstone's tenure as London transport supremo, which should be required reading by public policy wonks all the way to the top. On balance, if you're a tube neophyte – I mean reading about it, as much as riding it – I would strongly endorse Martin's book as the stop to get on at. On the other hand, if you're an old baby like me, you probably needn't bother, as you've already sucked most of it in down that umbilicus some people call the tube.

• Will Self's new novel, Umbrella, will be published by Bloomsbury in August.

Listen up! Padgett Powell turns from questioner to commander in this exclusive extract from his short story, The Imperative Mood

Put that nice blue and white pitcher on the marble washstand. Determine your sock size. Play favorites. Have some. Be all you can be and all anyone else can be. Fall back and regroup. Be for heroes. Try not to fail. Recall your mother. Forget your father. Please release me. Let me love again. Trust that I will be okay.

Whatever floats your boat, go ahead and float it. Do not have large untenable quantities of despair. Do not go to parades. When you feed orphaned wild animals, do not expect them to make it. Be forewarned. Be careful that your genitals do not show outside the strict confines of your underwear. Learn at least three racquet games during your lifetime. Study the coin flip. Please understand, and have according sympathy when relevant, that pink-skinned people and animals have tender feet.

If I tell you that I have robbed a bank, prepare the correct reaction. Let us abort the mission, if we are on one. Supply me with the name of that comic who climbed into a condom and tell me if it was specially manufactured or off the shelf. Be more forgiving. Test the wind. Brave the currents. Be strong, strong, strong. Tell me my name. Be gone.

     * * *

Go to harbor town and pee on someone's boat. Chase dreams. Smoke a pipe, or pipes. Fix the toilet. Put on those wax lips over there and wear them all day I don't care how deformed and drooly they get if you take them out at any point I will call the law. Try to keep your temperature in the accepted homoeostatic range for humans, can you? Hand me that newspaper without letting it make a sound. If I make a sound reading it, be grateful that I, not you, made the newspaper make a sound. Just thank your lucky stars, young man, thank your lucky stars.

     * * *

Sit in good old overstuffed chairs the live-long day and rejoice that you are not mixed up in the turmoil inside a church or outside the perimeter of a military position under attack or near an abortion clinic or in an airport. Prepare colorful drinks that are not particularly tasty but don't have to be look at them! Call all your pets to you, living and more importantly dead. Keep your belt cinched just a tad tight. Believe in Jesus whether you do or not. Remove staples when you discover them not to be actually stapling things together and carefully discard them. Sing songs to ladies and appreciate the scarves they wear. Determine, were you to have put in your will the method by which you would like to be put to death, if this could have any bearing on how the state might put you to death should it come up.

     * * *

Do not always be of good cheer; sometimes act as if you are a possum. Throw rocks at children. Leap tall buildings, of course. Remain calm. Try to win. Be winning whether you win or not. Declare bankruptcy not quite with pride. Alternate the theories you entertain about all things. Investigate leather tanning. Learn to swim again. Steadily decline in all your strengths until that steadiness is your strength. Purchase a packet of indigo dye and place it so that you can regard it every day. Call your friend who walked the wire in the circus and ask about the shoes. Change the linen. Realize yet again that for a long time you had too much courage to kill yourself or even entertain it but that now you can entertain it but have too little courage to do it. Regret that you have never seen a real cotton field in operation or a cotton exchange either and that these wants are both unrelated to many other things you should have witnessed but did not, both of the sort you can imagine and, worse, of the sort you cannot even conceive you are so small and deprived. Locate, purchase, and construct an industrial-grade galvanized swing set in your backyard, and if you do not have a backyard in the backyard of someone with a child whom you can convince that you mean the child no harm.

Since the mid-00s, his novels have been more elegant and psychological ... doesn't surprise me to hear about his strong work ethic

Comprehensive survey of DIY writers suggests that despite a few high-profile successes most authors struggle to sell

Despite the splash caused by self-publishing superstars such as Amanda Hocking and EL James, the average amount earned by DIY authors last year was just $10,000 (£6,375) – and half made less than $500.

With Hocking raking in sales of $2.5m, Fifty Shades of Grey's James signing up to a mainstream press for a six-figure advance and a slew of deals for other self-published successes, the sector is starting to look like a gold mine for would-be authors. But a survey of 1,007 self-published writers – one of the most comprehensive insights into the growing market to date – found that while a small percentage of authors were bringing in sums of $100,000-plus in 2011, average earnings were just $10,000 a year. This amount, however, is significantly skewed by the top earners, with less than 10% of self-publishing authors earning about 75% of the reported revenue and half of writers earning less than $500.

"The majority of the information out there is about the outliers, whose success is inspiring, but as we can now confirm bears scant resemblance to the experience of most authors," said Dave Cornford and Steven Lewis, who carried out the survey, published on Thursday, for the Taleist website.

Those who want to do best at self-publishing, they found, would be well advised to focus on romantic fiction. Romance authors earned 170% more than their peers, while authors in other genres fared much worse: science-fiction writers earned 38% of the $10,000 average, fantasy writers 32%, and literary fiction authors just 20% of the $10,000 average.

It's also best to be female, educated and in your early 40s: the survey's "top earners" – those who indicated they could live exclusively off their earnings – were 68% female, and 33% had a degree, compared to an average of 28%. High earners also dedicated more of their time to their writing, churning out 2,047 words a day on average, as compared to 1,557 for the rest of the sample.

With Jackie Collins announcing plans to self-publish a revised version of her novel The Bitch, even traditionally published authors are now dabbling in self-publishing, and the survey found this was to good effect: they earned 2.5 times more when self-publishing than did rejected authors or authors who went straight to self-publishing. This suggests, said Cornford and Lewis, that "traditional publishers are decent arbiters of quality" and that "the reading public finds, in these authors' work, the same high standard (or marketable writing, at least) that led publishers to choose them in the first place".

Authors who tick none of these boxes would be well advised to spend time and money on making a title look professional, the survey found: self-publishers who received help (paid or unpaid) with story editing, copy editing and proofreading made 13% more than the average; help with cover design upped earnings by a further 34%.

Half the respondents failed to reach $500 in royalties in 2011, and a quarter of the books are unlikely to cover the direct costs of production. "Sobering" news, wrote Cornford and Lewis. "Who'd come back for more?"

But money isn't always the primary goal for self-published writers, they discovered, with only 5% considering themselves "unsuccessful". The respondents were also still keen to continue self-publishing: nearly half plan to release more titles this year than they did last, and 24% have a whopping five or more works due for publication this year. This means, said Cornford and Lewis, that the 695 respondents who told them about their future publishing plans will be releasing about 48 new books between them for each week in 2012.

"It shouldn't have surprised me that 75% of the royalty pie is going to 10% of authors: that's life in many industries. If I'm being honest, though, I'd hoped self-publishing might be a bit more democratic. Someone asked me if I thought this might deter authors from self-publishing, but actors don't stop heading for Hollywood despite the odds against them," Lewis told the Guardian.

There's a clear link, he said, "between earnings and the amount of help, and therefore feedback, that an author is willing to take on board. Authors who engage editors, for instance, end up with more royalties. Readers are excited by having access to new voices, but they've not been waiting for unedited, unproofread and amateurish books. There's more to being a successful author than finding the 'Save and publish' button on Amazon, but there are a lot of authors who haven't realised that yet. In that sense, the low earnings were not surprising."

Academics have charted reviews on social media sites and broadsheet books desks, and ranked their impact on novel sales. The results make for interesting reading

Last week's paper from the Harvard Business School asking "What makes a critic tick?" put me in mind of teachers and bombs. Literary critics can be either, but are they any longer central to the chances of a novelist's success?

The Harvard report compared "professional" reviewers (ie those working for newspapers and magazines) with their new competition: the folk who leave reviews on Amazon. Though they limited themselves to Amazon reviewers, they could have cast their net much wider; these days the ivory towers of book reviewing are under attack by a ragtag, undisciplined army of humanity, dispensing their reviews and their ratings across Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThing, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the whole glittering panoply of the social web.

The conclusion of the Harvard academics was broadly this: that professionals are slightly more likely to review and approve of books written by writers who worked for the same titles as they, or books that had won prizes. Amazon reviewers, on the other hand, were rather more eclectic, and in particular seemed to be more supportive of debut authors.

I find the first part of this analysis less surprising than the second part. I think it's almost axiomatic that reviewers for the Guardian will look more favourably on books written by Guardian writers. I don't think that's especially sinister, either. As the paper's authors say, what is actually going on here is a secondhand audience bias: writers who write for the Guardian are more likely to write books that people who read the Guardian will like. Similarly, a book that has won a prize has a badge of assumed quality; someone else has already done the filtering.

But this bias also sparks the immemorial cry of the debut author who doesn't know anyone on the books desk: how on earth am I to get noticed?

My first book, The English Monster, came out in March. I now know that the thing first-time authors crave above all else – above food, water and love – is attention. And you're more likely to get that from Amazon reviewers than from newspaper critics, for the simple reason that more books are published now than at any other time in history, and there's only so much room for them in the pages (actual and virtual) of the press.

Which is not at all to say that a review in a newspaper is worthless. Quite the opposite; it is a particularly rarefied form of attention, and can in itself seed even more coverage on the social web. It is attention – to your book, and to you – that makes the difference. Another recent academic paper, called "Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: When Negative Reviews Increase Sales" (Berger, Sorensen, Rasmussen) looked at reviews in the New York Times and estimated their impact on hardback fiction titles. What they found was that a negative review had a negative impact on the sales of books by established writers, but that a negative review of a debut title actually increased sales.

The reason is pretty obvious: if nobody knows who you are, and the New York Times reviews your book, more people are going to be aware of you, and that's much more important than the content of the review. But if you're Stephen King and the Gray Lady gives you a hiding – well, you can only lose.

Being reviewed is a bizarre experience, wherever the review appears. Positive reviews are blissful but strangely transitory, forgotten within hours. Negative reviews are crunchingly terrible things which can haunt sleepless nights. Worst of all are thoughtless reviews: those that reveal the plot, or take quotes out of context and pillory you for them, or compare you with heartless indifference to a great author against whom you would never choose to be measured. One reviewer said my book recalled the work of Peter Ackroyd, only to follow this up with the kicker "Shepherd is no Ackroyd". Well, of course he isn't, but did you really have to say so?

This kind of thing would be perfectly recognisable to any author from the past 200 years. A review is a review, wherever it appears. What would be completely unrecognisable would be the avalanche of feedback which, within days of publication, starts to come through to you from the web. It used to be said that there were two types of author: those who read their reviews, and liars. Now, there are two types of author: those who have a Google alert set up for the title of their book, and those who don't know how to.

This feedback can send you a bit mad. It can spark agonies and ecstasies, and the fact that most authors work on their own, often at home, doesn't help matters. One's partner can come home from their proper job and find you pulling wallpaper down because someone you've never met in Albuquerque didn't understand the clever Adam Smith joke you made on page 342.

But it brings its own joys too. One Saturday night my search alert on Twitter lit up, and I found a male nurse from Bury raving about my book. I started chatting to him, and he showered me with praise and said he was going tell everyone he knew to read my book. That's the kind of positive review which stays with you.

What shall we call this? Crowd criticism? Community reviewing? Mob feedback? Whatever we call it, it seems unruly and uncontrollable – but also a fair bit more accessible to the author than traditional reviews in the book pages. You won't get much mileage complaining to the books editor about the mugging you received in his pages. But you might be able to have a conversation with someone who wrote that they didn't like your book on their blog.

It's a strange world we find ourselves in. I recently heard about an author who self-publishes her books on Kindle. She had someone write some code for her which correlated her sales with her reviews. She found that a negative review led to an immediate drop in sales of up to 70%. So now, as soon as her software alerts her to a drop in sales, she contacts a friend and asks them to write a positive review. As soon as this goes live on Amazon, her sales pick up.

Such gaming is inevitable. In a world where so many of us like to broadcast what book we're reading, what film we've just seen, what music we're loving – indeed, when the social media we use tells everyone what we're listening to, reading or watching without us ever asking it to – authors will try every trick to get attention for what they do. As one writer who fully understood the value of attention and celebrity once said: there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

• Lloyd Shepherd's novel The English Monster is published by Simon and Schuster.

Golf, gay sex and the fate of faulty footballs are some of the subjects tackled in this final pillar of Updike's wisdom. If only he'd been alive to compile it himself

Higher Gossip, edited by Christopher Carduff, is a posthumous selection of John Updike's prodigious output, matching six substantial previous volumes mainly of critical or personal prose. The set amounts to seven pillars, if not of wisdom then something not far off, of warm scrupulous attentiveness. To salute Updike's professionalism, though, is to insult something more important, as he pointed out when accepting an award for a previous selection (Hugging the Shore) in 1984: "to be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is aesthetically boring – an anti-virtue where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed."

Once or twice in the book Updike excels himself, once or twice he falls short of his own standards, and once or twice he produces work which stands at an odd angle to his usual preoccupations. One example is The Beloved, a story accepted by the New Yorker in 1971 but then withdrawn after the editor, William Shawn, expressed "qualms", as Updike puts it, "about the theatrical background I had concocted". Shawn wasn't the most confrontational of editors (his successor, Bob Gottlieb, referred to him as "the White Rabbit"), and it may have been something not exactly theatrical that bothered him.

The story, about an actor who can't escape from the spell he casts on others, is unusual for Updike in the negativism of its sexual psychology. The hero, Francis, has dealings with both sexes and feels a certain amount of disgust for each. Leaving one woman, he realises that "in some way, physically, she had always repelled him. There had always been in the texture of her buttocks a faint and disturbing grittiness, like sand on a damp day at the beach, and a panicky sweatiness in the yellow soles of her little high-arched feet." Updike's gaze is never exactly gallant, but it's usually more forgiving than this.

With men, Francis enjoys the sex but dislikes the people ("They dominated the company, and aspired to the dignity of a culture"). Even after he has returned to heterosexuality he is "inwardly bent" by remembered details, "the fleshy freedoms, amid a rub of planes satisfyingly solid and flat and rank, that, carried to the porch of pain, could never be reestablished on the body of a woman, however corrupt". His final verdict on the world he has been exploring is that "there was a sourness here Francis could not help relating to the sourness of the male rectum". You might think that the rectum was not strongly gendered in its attributes, but this is a world away from the rapt descriptions of women's bathroom smells in Memories of the Ford Administration (1992).

In one of his finest late novels, Seek My Face (2002), Updike's refusal to enter the gay world imaginatively compromised his achievement – you can't write seriously about the post-war New York art scene while neglecting this constituency. His conflicts are nearer the surface in The Beloved, and it's clear that his attitude was closer to a willed withholding of interest than an untroubled dismissal.

Few people want to read about gay sex but even fewer, surely, want to read about golf. Yet the pages on this subject provide some of the book's high points. The friend or functionary who approached Updike for a contribution to a centennial volume (celebrating the Massachusetts Golf Association) must have been incredulous at the richness of what he turned in, not a thin sketch or slack reminiscence but something packed with social texture and novelistic detail. He describes, for instance, his move from public golf courses to private ones: "Gradually I acquired a country-club manner, at ease with chits and caddie tips, and an expectation of lush green spaces populated by discreetly scattered golfers, of three- or even four-level tees and carts equipped with grass-seed ladles that make replacing divots a faux pas, of clubhouses whose walls shone like those of Byzantine churches with gold-lettered walnut plaques proclaiming tournament results from bygone ages and with silvered clubs and balls of intense historic interest, and of pro shops stocked as densely as flower shops with bouquets of high-tech multi-metal clubs…" This is an America not much written about in the last half-century, not even by Updike.

With another golf piece, written for the Talk of the Town section in 2000, the New Yorker for once received short measure from a favoured son. Its conceit of falling in love with golf, personified as a femme fatale, has run out of steam even before the passage about her liking guys "(gals too – she's through with gender hang-ups)" who keep it simple. A little later Updike comes up with one of the few cloth-eared sentences he ever wrote: "When you connect, it's the whistle of a quail, it's the soar of a hawk, it's the sighting of a planet hitherto unseen; it's mathematical perfection wrested from a half-buried lie; it's absolute."

This would be embarrassing even if there wasn't a loving discussion earlier in the book of You're The Top, exactly the Cole Porter lyric that is getting such a catastrophic makeover here, and in which (as Updike puts it) "something tender, solemn, nonsensical and absolute seems to be being said". If Updike himself had been compiling the volume, rather than Carduff, it's hard to imagine In Love With a Wanton making the cut.

There's one piece with obvious formal problems, The Football Factory, which still earns its place in the book. It's neither quite article nor quite story, describing the visit of a "dignitary" to, yes, a football factory (the one Updike visited was the Wilson Sporting Goods factory in Ada, Ohio). The dignitary isn't characterised but is given a full page of romantic fantasy in which he imagines settling down ("Their first years, he sat home with the babies…") with one of the women who work the die-cutting machines. The piece is described by Carduff as antedating and "perhaps" inspiring Rita Cohen's visit to the Swede's glove factory in Philip Roth's American Pastoral, though it would be nice to have some evidence beyond the theoretical possibility.

Updike describes the face of the factory's floor manager as "slightly plump, with a disagreeable deep dimple in the center of his chin, and an asymmetry to the eyes that would have led an inspector to toss his head into the reject barrel". The narrator knows, though, that rejected footballs aren't thrown away but marketed cheaply to relatively undemanding customers. He imagines these as "old-fashioned poor boys in patched knickers" or "inner-city high schools on slashed budgets".

Updike acted as his own agent, and presumably made his own choice of journalistic placement for this not-quite-reject of his own making. Let's hope he didn't think his marvellous imperfect product had come down too far in the world, consorting with ragamuffins or sink schools, when it appeared in the Observer magazine in 1989.

A young financier taking a drunken tumble might have been an easy target, but this gentle poem has no interest in blame games

This week's poem, City Boy, is by Peter Daniels and appears in his recently published first collection, Counting Eggs (Mulfran Press, 2012). Daniels' poems are good at noticing the unfamiliar, or highlighting the familiar from an unexpected angle. Here, the faintly spivvy young financier, "comfortable and sharp in a suit that fits him," might have been an easy target, the tumble he takes as he "steers" homewards after closing time a cause of vengeful glee should the poet have chosen to play the anarchist or the virtuous taxpayer. But the poem has no interest in blame games. Any irony belongs primarily to the term "city boy" itself. Both the character and what he represents in a contemporary or recent London context are treated gently. The tone is occasionally amused but never judgmental.

The poem's first line suggests its speaker might have been predisposed to kindliness: "In a moment of love I caught a sense of money …" That "moment of love" could be coincidental, part of another story altogether. However, the overall mood suggests otherwise: the love is provoked by the city boy, an imaginative response to his moment of humiliation. Money's human dimension, its connection with our more vulnerable selves, is the thought associated with this "love", and it winds persistently through the poem. Meanwhile, the sentence continues, first rather gingerly holding money at a distance ("how they make it") and then bringing it into the sphere of the human with the unexpected "and make it up". This last thought may be the cornerstone of the poem. Money is like a story or a face; it is fluid and constructed – something we create.

The narrative shifts to the present tense, and what writing gurus call "the inciting incident": the young man's fall. Interestingly, the important event is left until the end of the second sentence in line six: we're told that "an evening of gin is a good anaesthetic" before we're told he "smacks the concrete". The gritty consonants of the verb and noun register the painful jolt, but then more anaesthetic is applied. "He'll get home" is reassuring. Syntax mirrors psychology. Someone who falls over in public scrambles up quickly and tries to give the impression nothing has happened. The long, free-flowing lines of the poem help this continued effect of smoothing things over. Feminine endings are a recurrent characteristic of its music, and while there's no direct rhyme, faint echoes soften the edges of words like "anaesthetic", "spreadsheets", "credit".

Before the city boy gets to his feet in line 16, the poem expands on its gentle phantasmagoria. Money becomes a dream, a property of the subconscious. In a rapid alchemy, the abstract and seeming opposites "work and lust" are transmuted into "metal and paper" – money at its most tactile. Spreadsheets certainly can look like flattened office blocks, and in the poem they build them, nocturnally and in secret – "Even after closing time..." They also build up "credit that creates the pavement to land on", furthering the earlier thought that for the city boy, the concrete and the dream of money are one. Numbers themselves behave like lovers; they "whisper to each other, transact and multiply".

"The drunken city" suggests collective amnesia: perhaps others are about, in a condition similar to that of the protagonist, but agreeing not to notice. "The sober city" goes to work as usual the next morning, determined "to keep it happening". Somehow, the two patterns of behaviour are interdependent. Although it avoids the crude cliche of money as religion, the poem uses parallelism here, and skims a biblical lexicon in phrases like "got up and walked" and words like "faith" and "trust". This element of incantation recalls the last stanza of Philip Larkin's Money: "I listen to money singing … It is intensely sad."

A familiar synecdoche operates in terms like "the city" and "money". The particularity of "what we are and where we're tender" makes effective contrast, and insists on private resonance. The word "tender" is nicely ambiguous, and takes us beyond bruised flesh to the emotionally tender spots.

Almost casually the poem yokes the negative and positive effects of the money, part of which is love, and the love, of which part is money. There's a new development, or emphasis, in conclusion. The earlier narrative concerned one person's fall and rise. Now we have "buildings and people standing up, or falling down". If the idea of a financial crash has hovered earlier, it seems more sharply evoked here. The image could suggest a cataclysm beyond the economic. We have no choice, however, but to trust the "harness" of exchange mechanisms woven from, and for, ourselves.

The voice remains calm and dreamy. City Boy has an argument, but it is didactic rather than polemical, a poem that takes no sides and draws no lines. There's not even a suggestion that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. The denarius, after all, had a human face.

City Boy

In a moment of love I caught a sense of money
and how they make it, and make it up. That city boy,
comfortable and sharp in a suit that fits him,
steers through the station when the city bars have closed,
and an evening of gin is a good anaesthetic
when he trips and smacks the concrete. He'll get home,
he'll recover in the faith that the concrete
is his dream of money: work and lust
made into metal and paper, made into numbers
that whisper to each other, transact and multiply.
Even after closing time, spreadsheets
are building up office blocks, and credit
that creates the pavement to land on.
I saw the drunken city exercise discretion, and
the sober city dream of how to keep it happening.
I watched the city boy get up and walk. I felt how this money
is part of us, and keeps ourselves within it. Some of it
has to be love, what we hope and where we're tender.
All we have is to trust for it to care for us, curse us
and keep us in harness, to work for something in a city
made out of buildings and people standing up, or falling down.

Publishers say it would take too long to 'fix the text' of historian's interview-based book on Stalin's Russia

When the British historian Orlando Figes admitted writing flattering reviews of his own work – and scathing attacks on rivals – on Amazon two years ago, his peers were aghast. Particularly those whose work had been damned as "awful" and "dense and pretentious". Damaging though the affair was, it did little to dent the scholar's reputation as a brilliant narrator of Soviet history, a man whose writing brought vividly to life the wretched decades in which an entire people was atomised by a paranoid leader.

Now Figes has become embroiled in new controversy over his academic practices after Russian publishers said the reason they scrapped a translation of his history of the Stalin era, The Whisperers, was because the book contained inaccuracies and factual errors.

Figes had commissioned hundreds of interviews with the relatives of victims of gulag labour camps to produce a 700-page chronicle of "private life in Stalin's Russia", published in 2007. But the Moscow-based publisher, and a historian who conducted some of the interviews, claim some of the material was misrepresented. While none of the alleged errors would strike the lay reader as particularly egregious, the Russians argue Figes' version of some of the most tragic events in Russian history would cause distress to relatives of gulag victims.

Varvara Gornostaeva, head of the Corpus publishing house, told the Guardian problems came to light after her firm sent the Russian translation of Figes' book for a pre-publication check to Memorial, the human rights organisation that conducted the interviews with families of gulag victims.

"When they started to do a fact-check, there were a huge number of inaccuracies and factual errors," said Gornostaeva. "These were factual errors, and if we didn't fix them, it could bring about serious displeasure … some of the people themselves are still alive."

She said that to "fix the text" would have taken up to a year, and would have resulted in a different book.

Figes has conceded that he made a number of errors, but said he had offered to amend anything deemed necessary for publication to take place in Russia.

He denied that many of the alleged factual inaccuracies and misrepresentations were mistakes. Some, he said, were the result of loose translation into Russian; others were a matter of opinion, which "should be subject to normal scholarly discussion on the basis of a published text (rather than pre-publication censorship)".

The dispute between Figes and the Russians was first unearthed by two US academics, Peter Reddaway and Stephen Cohen, both historians of communist Russia, who since March 2011 have been investigating his use of source material. They have published their findings in the US news magazine The Nation.

Among the more serious mistakes Figes is accused of making are:

• Wrongly calling Dina Ielson-Grodzianskaia, a mother of two who was sent to a gulag labour camp in 1938, a collaborator when there was no evidence of this in the interviews, according to Irina Ostrovskaya, a Memorial archivist who conducted the interview with Ielson-Grodzianskaia's daughter. Figes described the prisoner as one of the "trusties", and said she had been allowed to send and receive frequent letters when others were not.

Ostrovskaya said the claim was "an insult to the memory of an imprisoned woman". "This is literature," she told the Guardian. "But for people, it's their life. It is people talking about their tragedies. They knew their stories would be used for a historical book … but can't imagine their life stories could be turned into such an operetta." Figes said he regretted "any misrepresentations I may have made, but there was no intention to 'insult the memory' of anyone". He has offered to correct the text.

• A quote attributed to Natalia Danilova, whose father was arrested, does not appear in the Memorial interview. In the quote, Danilova was supposed to have said that except for an aunt, "the rest of us could only whisper in dissent". Figes said the error, which he regretted, was the result of an annotated file that was substituted for the master copy by an assistant.

Reddaway and Cohen believe they have identified other examples where Figes has erred. They cite the case of an arrested student, Mikhail Stroikov. Figes wrote that for helping Stroikov's family a friend then in exile was "rearrested, imprisoned and later shot". Reddaway and Cohen say this didn't happen, and he lived to be over 90.

The Americans argue the historian has not been faithful to the memory of Stalin's victims. and allege he maligns the memory of a Soviet poet and editor, Alexander Tvardovsky, by stating that he "betrayed" his own father to the police during the terror. "Figes's allegation has been convincingly refuted in the Russian press," the academics say.

Anna Piotrovskaya, executive director of Dynastia, which owned the Russian rights, said in a letter in April 2011 to Figes' literary agent, Stephen Edwards, that publication of the translation "would definitely provoke a scandal and result in numerous objections, either to the factual inaccuracies contained in the book or to the misrepresentation of the original transcripts of the interviews, especially taking into consideration the complexity and the sensitivity of the topic to the Russian society".

The letter alleged that the book combined "nonfiction materials and artistic interpretation".

Figes responded: "It is not my intention to cause offence or misrepresent the painful history of any family included in The Whisperers … I regret any misrepresentations I may have made, but there was no intention to insult the memory of anyone."

Another publisher, Atticus, dropped plans to release a Russian version of The Whisperers in 2009. "The first cancellation [Atticus] cited commercial reasons, though I speculated that politics was involved," Figes said. "The second [Dynastia] cited about a dozen 'factual inaccuracies' and 'misrepresentations'. I responded: some were in Memorial's sources, others debatable, or mistranslated by Dynastia – leaving a few genuine errors in a book based on thousands of interviews and archival documents. These I regret."

"He feels strongly the editorial matters should be discussed in private between an author and an editor," said Stephen Edwards, Figes's literary agent. "That would have been a fairer way of dealing with the matter."The allegations come amid a politically charged battle in Russia over Stalin's role in the nation's history. Under Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin has been accused of playing down the dictator's crimes in history textbooks and seeking to portay Stalin as an effective leader who industrialised a backward Soviet Union and defeated the Nazis. The Whisperers, by contrast, sets out to give an intimate portrait of the atmosphere of fear and terror, particularly among children who grew up under Stalin and whose parents were arrested and shot as enemies of the people.

Memorial's archive of interviews with survivors was confiscated by Russian police in late 2008. At the time, Figes told the Guardian it was "part of a broader ideological struggle for control of history publications and teaching in Russia".

Figes said this week: "I am puzzled as to why this private matter has now come out in the press a year later, precisely when I have a new book out."

Edwards said: "On receiving an electronic copy on 15 April of Dynastia's letter, dated 6 April 2011, Orlando Figes wrote back to them on 18 April answering their specific concerns and offering to co-operate in addressing the 'revisions' they wanted. We wrote to Dynastia again on 3 August 2011 enclosing another copy of Orlando's original letter, to which they have yet to respond."

Alena Kozlova, head of Memorial's archive, praised Figes' writing, saying it was part of his "great talent" that "he really shows the atmosphere of the time from these interviews". She said: "We have no complaints about his interpretation; that's his right as an author. What worries us mainly are accurate presentations of our characters. These are people we know, who are still alive."

It's hard to know where to start with books by and about Papa – so here are a few suggestions

The first thing to clear up in this Further Reading post is what we should actually be reading in the first place. There's considerable confusion around, since In Our Time is proving tricky to get and there are now two different versions of A Moveable Feast available.

To take the latter book first, I'd recommend sticking with the original published version, which is short and sweet and (depending on whom you talk to) appears to be closest to Hemingway's vision. The new edition, with excisions and additions by the family of Pauline Hemingway, is also fascinating, however, and contains two excellent introductions that give a good account of the rationale behind changing the book. They also make you think that Pauline's side of the family were desperate to improve the image of Hemingway's second wife, the woman history remembers for stealing Hem from first wife, Hadley.

As for In Our Time, there's a fine Scribner classic edition available if you live in the US. Otherwise, I'd highly recommend the Everyman's Library Collected Stories. This contains the full text of In Our Time on tactile, acid-free paper, has an excellent introduction from James Fenton and just about every other story that Hemingway wrote – which has to be a good thing.

Talking of other books by Hemingway, we've also got discounts in the Guardian book shop on For Whom the Bell Tolls (RRP £7.99, offer price £5.99), A Farewell to Arms (RRP £7.99, offer £5.99), The Old Man and the Sea (RRP £6.99, offer £4.99) and Death in the Afternoon (RRP £9.99, offer £7.99).

Death in the Afternoon is an acquired taste (although it contains some magnificent writing), but the other three are essential and beautiful.

If you want to dig deeper into In Our Time, meanwhile, I'd also highly recommend By-Line Ernest Hemingway, a collection of journalism that demonstrates how Hemingway started to develop his pared-down style, as well as including the original reports that inspired stories like On the Quai at Smyrna.

Elsewhere, it's hard to know where to start with books relating to Papa. Possibly a good place is the book called Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir by AE Hotchner, one of the best reminiscences from the many people who knew the big man and felt compelled to write about him. If you want your heart broken, meanwhile, Papa: A Personal Memoir by Ernest's troubled youngest son, Gregory, is full of love, poison and sadness. Spookily, it is also extremely well-written.

In terms of more formal autobiographies, Michael Reynold's five-part biography, 25 years in the writing, is the one most often called definitive. It's also a cracking read, almost novelistic for all the onslaught of facts. And in terms of informal biographies, I loved Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson, who came on to talk to us last week. It's packed with real insight into Hemingway himself, but also takes in far wider themes of love, loss, sickness and sadness. Its portraits of individuals who ran into the path of the great charging bull Hemingway are often deeply moving. There's also the novel The Paris Wife by Paula McLain, which does an excellent job of explaining how it must have been to be a woman in Hemingway's life, and manages to describe many scenes and situations Hemingway himself wrote about without seeming like a pale imitation.

Then there are all the other books written by Hemingway's contemporaries in Paris and America in the 20s. Reading Group contributor Jericho999 has already pointed out that Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas is an excellent companion to A Moveable Feast. While you're reading Hemingway, you might as well treat yourself to his frenemy F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. There's also no escaping Ulysses by James Joyce or Ezra Pound's The Cantos. Also, to straighten the record after the unflattering portrayal of him in A Moveable Feast, seek out Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. It is a wonderful book.

Finally, I've never read anything by Sherwood Anderson, but he was supposedly a big influence on Hemingway's early stories – which is part of the reason Hemingway turned on him so viciously (and so amusingly) in The Torrents of Spring. If anyone has read Anderson, I'd be very keen to hear opinions. As usual, I'd also be delighted to receive any other recommendations.

And oh yes, Hannah Freeman says that four winners of Hemingway's Boat are yet to claim their copy! Savidgereader, Giozboy, jediperson and GetOver99 do email in (to hannah.freeman@guardian.co.uk).

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Mobile services company will not be renewing its sponsorship of the book awards that have borne its name for 17 years

In one of the biggest upsets in literary prize history, the mobile services company Orange has announced this morning that it will not be renewing its sponsorship of the prize for women's fiction that has borne its name since the award's inception 17 years ago.

The prize, which was set up to "celebrate excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from around the world", is given annually to the best book by a woman written in English. Winners, who in the past have included Marilynne Robinson, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Zadie Smith, are presented with a cheque for £30,000 and a bronze figurine known as "the Bessie".

The prize money itself is supplied through the endowment of a private donor, but the remainder of the award's expenses have been met by Orange's sponsorship since the prize was launched in January 1996. After this year's award is presented on 30 May, Orange – which joined with mobile company T-Mobile to form the UK's largest communications company, Everything Everywhere, in 2010 – will withdraw its support of the prize in order to focus on film industry sponsorship.

Speaking to the industry magazine the Bookseller, Steven Day, chief of brand and communications for Everything Everywhere, said: "While relinquishing sponsorship of the prize is tinged with sadness, we're hugely proud of what Orange and the women's prize for fiction have achieved over the past 17 years. The partnership has significantly raised the presence of international literature written by women in bookstores and on bookshelves across the country, and has played a key part in Orange's success over the past decade and a half, taking our brand into areas that were traditionally harder to reach."

Despite the termination of what is at this point the longest continuous arts sponsorship in the UK, Kate Mosse, the award's co-founder and honorary director, was upbeat about the prize's future. Speaking to the Guardian, she praised Orange's sponsorship of the prize, but said that while she was "very sad" not to be working with them anymore, "we're excited at the idea of taking the prize on for another 17 years, and working with a new sponsor to grow it. It's very rare for a sponsorship like this to come onto the market - the investment generates something in the region of £17.5m a year in advertising, and the cultural capital of the women's prise for fiction is practically second to none. The potential is very exciting."

Although there was not yet a firm agreement with another sponsor in place, Mosse said, the prize was in talks with several interested parties. "We're in the very early days," she said. "Over the last few days we've started to have informal conversations with companies, and as a result of going on the Today programme this morning to announce the end of Orange's sponsorship, we've had more calls. Of course, I'll be a happy women when we've signed on the dotted line, but I feel pretty confident that this time next year it'll be a bigger and better prize just with a different name over the door. Sponsorship is a marriage between the company and the prize, and it's about finding the perfect match."

The six titles on this year's Orange prize shortlist are Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, The Forgotten Waltz by Booker winner Anne Enright, Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick, and State of Wonder by former winner Ann Patchett. Chair of judges Joanna Trollope, said emphatically that the change would have "no impact" on this year's prize, and was optimistic about the award's future under different sponsorship.

"Because it's been orange from the beginning, of course it's very embedded in people's minds," she said, "and Orange have been terrific sponsors. But there can be something very liberating about a change. The prize is in such a strong position that it's a sponsorship peach; I imagine there'll be a lot of competition to pick up the baton."

A core sample from an essential storyteller

"I was thinking," says one of Simpson's shattered mothers at one point, "what a cheesy business Eng Lit is, all those old men peddling us lies about life and love. They never get as far as this bit, do they." The mother is on what we shall purely for convention's sake call a holiday, looking over Thomas Hardy's cottage with her baby, toddler and husband. It was Hardy, we are reminded later on, who has an entire brood kill themselves "because we are too menny". ("The third's the killer," says an embittered mother to her later on.)

Yes, Simpson is the writer who most famously went where male writers were either too frightened or bored to tread: examining the "ever after" that follows the supposed happy ending. And doing so more or less unimprovably, against some highly stacked odds. She makes much of the inroads that motherhood carves into the intellect, and although not all of her characters have literary hinterlands, many of them have enough to notice the lack of fit between reading and child-rearing. In "Heavy Weather", the story I've been quoting from here (and which is, in its way, the quintessential Simpson story, the one you'd have to rescue if you were only allowed to rescue one), the father makes an unfamiliar observation about Hardy's life and the mother is able to accuse him of reading. She's right: but he only pulled over to the side of the road for five minutes, and she lets it go. (In my experience, doing this kind of thing – the crafty use of a pleat in time to pick up a book – is not usually treated so lightly. It is perhaps the only implausible or false note in any of Simpson's domestic dramas.)

So this may well be why a new collection of Simpson stories only comes out at five-year intervals, although 22 years after the first one you would have thought that she might have a bit more time on her hands by now. We're due another in three years, so until then, here is a sort of greatest hits compilation to keep us happy. In her strangely ill-tempered introduction (which is set up as an imaginary question-and-answer session with someone who accuses her of being a "baby bore" and then a "global warming bore") she responds to the suggestion that novels have more breadth than short stories by saying: "I think a good short story can be like a core sample." This is true, and a good way of putting it: and this selection, from which five stories have been taken from each of her five collections so far, could also be seen as a core sample of Simpson's career. A core sample of core samples, as it were.

I had worried, on picking the book up, whether I was on the point of wearying of Simpson's schtick, or becoming inured to it. I have, after all, made a point of regularly recommending her in this column. Would this be one recommendation too far? Well, no, because I found her stories just as hard to put down as I used to; and repeated exposure to them (although there seem to be one or two here which are unfamiliar, which is odd, because I thought I'd read every word of hers) just makes one appreciate the artistry even more. (Notice the lack of a question mark at the end of "they never get as far as this bit, do they" – the speaker is too tired even to raise her sentences to the interrogative.)

There is also a little bit of dating going on: "Besides, it was difficult to sack people these days," says a woman who discovers a talent for oversleeping in "The Bed". (This was in 1990. Oh, happy days.) Details like these show, mainly, that Simpson keeps her eyes open to what is around her, as well as to what is within her characters. It's the kind of detail that makes us wish she would hurry up so that we can read her thoughts about what's going on right now, the precise contours of our present anxieties. I suspect that she will have much to say, and be able to say it very well.

Until then, though, we at least have this to be getting on with.

A fair few 'genre' novels, no non-fiction at all, and the mysterious disappearance of the previous No 4 make the new Penguin library a radical update

The literary canon, supposedly, is a monolithic entity, serenely permanent against the merely voguish and faddish. Looking through the Penguin Press catalogue for July to December, I was struck by their relaunch of the Penguin English Library – which shows just how permeable and fluctuating the canon actually is.

The distinctively orange-spined Penguin English Library first appeared in 1963, "planned in all respects to take its place alongside the Penguin Classics" – which then was reserved for work in translation. Its aim was to be "a comprehensive range of the literary masterpieces which have appeared in the English language since the 15th century". As an avid collector of them, I have never quite managed to shake the idea that if a work wasn't in the Penguin English Library (or the Classics, or the Modern Classics, or the American Library) then it probably wasn't much good.

There is, of course, a great deal of crossover between the original 1960s list and the 100 titles Penguin will publish this year – the "Great Tradition" of FR Leavis still hangs over the whole endeavour. But the differences are more significant.

One of the first in the new series, Bram Stoker's Dracula, wasn't considered for the original at all. It seems to be part of a trend for recognising literary merit in ostensibly "genre" fiction. Stoker is joined by HG Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and the Victorian "sensation novelist" Mary Elizabeth Braddon. There is a pronounced bent towards the gothic, with James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer and Matthew Lewis's The Monk all being honoured as classics. By contrast, the original 1963 list included "Three Gothic Novels" – Frankenstein, The Castle of Otranto and Vathek – bundled together as if they were insufficiently serious to be read on their own.

All of the first 100 books in the new Penguin English Library are novels, but the original list was equally open to non-fiction. Nor was it just selections from the great essayists, including William Hazlitt, Thomas de Quincey and Samuel Johnson. Works such as Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France were deemed works of literature as much as of philosophy or science. The English Library was an empowering phenomenon; with one foot in the old belles-lettres tradition (I still rather hanker for the days when every gentleman's library was considered incomplete without Motley's The Rise of the Dutch Republic and Stanley's Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church) and the other in the Open University curriculum.

The biggest loser in the new series is a book that has never been out of print, and was once almost universally known: John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. It was the fourth of the 1963 publications (after Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch and Great Expectations) – and it isn't even in the first 100 of the new series. There are far more "difficult" literary texts in the new 100, and given the preponderance of Trollope, it doesn't seem as if there's an allergy to church, rather than religious, literature. I am rather at a loss to explain its omission, although it is noticeable that the new Penguin English Library only begins in the 18th century, and is somewhat scant even in it: no Rasselas, or The Vicar of Wakefield, or any of those novelists like Robert Bage, Ann Radcliffe and Henry Mackenzie who graced the grandfather of this project, Ballantyne's Novelist's Library). Certainly it is odd not to have The Pilgrim's Progress but to have a novel whose title is derived from it – Vanity Fair.

Overall, the 2012 English Library so far is less keen on fact, more keen on fantasy. Is this a fair reflection of our contemporary state of letters?

The story of mass murder during the second world war was travestied by the film

It takes courage to demolish a cherished icon, and when that icon is the film The Great Escape, saviour of many a strained family Christmas, the iconoclast needs steel nerves worthy of the escapers themselves. But that is what Guy Walters achieves in his new study of the second world war's most famous mass breakout, which, far from being a rehash of an oft-told tale, is a clear-eyed inquiry into a myth that does not stand up to examination.

What Walters claims is missing from the film, with its jaunty theme tune and boy-scout characters, is that this was essentially a story of mass murder. His focus is not so much on the heroic ingenuity of the PoWs tunnelling themselves out of their camp, but on their ultimate destination. Fifty of the 76 escapees were summarily shot by the Gestapo on Hitler's orders, and only three (none British) made a successful "home run" to Blighty. Was the sacrifice really worth it, Walters asks. His answer is a resounding "No".

The central figure in Walters's story is the escape's inspiring leader, Sqdn Ldr Roger Bushell (played as "Roger Bartlett" in the film by Richard Attenborough). Bushell was a driven character: charismatic, determined, stubborn, perhaps a little crazy. The son of a mining magnate in South Africa, idolised by his mother, he had an English public school and Cambridge education. He drove fast cars, dated "popsies" and excelled at skiing. Characteristically, he tended to ski over obstacles in his path rather than around them. A skiing accident gashed his face, which lent his appearance a sinister aspect.

Though neglecting his studies for sport, Bushell was no fool; he was proficient in several languages and, despite an indifferent degree, was called to the bar and got several murderers off capital charges. He learned to fly as a hobby, and when war came, found himself commanding a Spitfire squadron. After downing two enemy planes, he was himself shot down over France and captured.

Bushell made two initial escapes – on the second occasion, accompanied by a Czech fellow flier, he reached occupied Prague and spent several months hidden by a Czech family. However, in the manhunt that followed the 1942 assassination of SS overlord Reinhard Heydrich, Bushell's hiding place was betrayed. The Czechs who had sheltered him were shot, and Bushell himself was roughly handled by the Gestapo.

After this experience, he could have had no illusions about the ruthlessness of the Nazis, and his suffering seems to have sharpened his already intense hatred of his tormentors and his desire to escape them.

Arriving at Stalag Luft III, the huge new camp built for allied flying officers in a gloomy Polish forest, Bushell instantly initiated his plan for a mass breakout, starting three simultaneous tunnels nicknamed Tom, Dick and Harry, on the premise that if one failed and another was discovered, then the third would surely succeed. It says much for Bushell's drive and leadership skills that the vast organisation required to dig the tunnels, dispose of the conspicuous yellow sand displaced by the digging, and to manufacture an enormous array of clothes, passes and other documentation for 200 escapees remained secret.

Walters's description of the build-up to the breakout makes nail-biting reading. Bushell knew he was risking death, and realised that the vast majority of the fellow escapees – most of whom spoke no German and still wore uniforms unconvincingly disguised as civilian clothes – stood no chance of getting away across thick snow. Bushell justified his grand plan, however, by arguing that hunting such a vast number of escapees would divert German resources from the war. Walters shows, though, that the escape did nothing whatever to hinder the German war effort.

Along with indicting Bushell's irresponsibility, Walters reveals the extent to which the camp was effectively controlled by its inmates. It was nominally run by senior Luftwaffe officers who had sympathy for their charges and feared the encroaching power of the Gestapo. On a lower level of command, the poor quality of the lesser German guards made them susceptible to bribery and blackmail.

By this stage in the war (1943/4) Germany was running short of resources, and the prisoners, kept supplied by generous Red Cross parcels, had more food, drink, tobacco and other creature comforts than their guards. Many of the aids used in the escape – passes, uniforms, stamps – were genuine rather than forgeries, smuggled into the camp by suborned guards. On those impervious to bribery, pressure could be exerted by blackmail, which was ruthlessly applied by the "Kriegies" (inmates) if they discovered some transgression committed by their guards, or a weak point in their defences – such as an infatuation for a Kriegie.

Walters underlines repeatedly that the Germans at the camp, from the commandant Von Lindeiner down, were explicit in warning the Kriegies of dire consequences if they were caught on the wrong side of the wire and fell into Gestapo hands. Bushell disregarded these warnings, and for this, Walters finds him culpable for his own murder and those of his comrades. The great escape, he sadly concludes, was a great folly.

• Nigel Jones's Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London is published by Windmill.

China Miéville's powerful adventure is a delight

What kind of novel might someone produce if he had been influenced by writers such as Joan Aiken, the Awdrys, Daniel Defoe, Ursula Le Guin, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, the Strugatsky Brothers and Spike Milligan? The answer is Railsea, China Miéville's latest book, a wildly inventive crossover/young adult fantasy with elements of SF and trains, lots of trains, all done with the kind of brio of which most writers can only dream.

Those are only some of the names listed in the acknowledgments at the end of the book. Melville's influence is the most immediately obvious in a story that features a captain's obsessive quest for a great white beast, but others come to mind. The gothic weirdness of Mervyn Peake is definitely in there, but the bottom layer of this particular palimpsest might well be Frank Herbert's Dune and its giant worms. Or Tremors. Or maybe Mad Max … None of this is a bad thing. Lesser writers are often overwhelmed by the anxiety of influence, but Miéville has an imagination of immense power.

The great hunter is actually the captain of a train, one of the many endlessly crossing the "railsea" of the title – for the surface of this world is covered by an intricate network of railways. Beneath them the earth (or "earthsea"?) heaves with spectacularly dangerous predators – colossal insects, carnivorous rabbits, and whale-sized "moldywarpes" or giant moles, including a cunning and elusive white one. Complex as this might sound, it's always credible and consistent.

Our hero is the pleasingly named Sham ap Soorap, a young man apprenticed to the doctor of the mole-hunter's train. Sham is drawn to the life led by the cool scavengers who search for "salvage". A chance discovery plunges him into an adventure of abductions and rescues, chases and escapes. He makes friends and loses them, and goes on a quest that takes him to the edge of his endurance – and that of the railsea itself.

A bare plot summary does the story little justice, leaving out most of the things that make the book a great read. Fantasy and SF writers often struggle to create rounded characters, but teenager Sham has plenty of appeal, and everyone he meets is memorable. There's also loads of humour, plenty of action sequences, and enough bizarre violence to keep horror fans satisfied.

Yet for all this, the book's chief glory is its prose. Every sentence is packed with wit, strange but appropriate neologisms, and jostling clusters of consonants that are there for no other reason than sheer delight in language. Some paragraphs are almost too dense, and could be quite a challenge for younger readers.

A challenge, but worth it. Once I'd tuned into the rhythm, it wasn't long before I was happy to let the story rattle along on its rails with me clinging desperately to the caboose. The only fault I can think of is that it finally coasts into the buffers rather than crashing into them, but that's probably just to let you catch your breath before the sequel. I'll cheerfully buy a ticket for the next ride.

By PD Smith

Grace Hopper, who became a "coder" (or programmer) in the 1940s, was one of the great pioneers of the computer age. In 1934 she had been the first woman in Yale's 233-year history to graduate with a doctorate in maths. After Pearl Harbor, she worked on "a new type of secret weapon that could change the outcome of the war". The Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator was 8ft high, 51ft long and had 530 miles of wiring. As well as calculating rocket trajectories, this "electronic brain" was used by the Manhattan Project scientists to build the atomic bomb. But it was in the 50s that Hopper invented the key software technologies that paved the way for today's computer languages. It was her genius for programming and her formidable powers of persuasion that prompted government agencies and corporations to agree on a common business programming language: Cobol. Beyer's meticulously researched biography shows how Hopper was one of the first to realise that software was the key to unlocking the power of the computer.

A book that gets to the heart of man's inhumanity to man

My big sister was unaware of what effect her words and actions had on other people. One day when we were middle-aged I was driving her across the snow-covered Yorkshire moors. She was telling me about how her husband had been depressed. In tones of great incredulity, she said: "His psychiatrist wanted to see me. And do you know what he told me? He said that other people have feelings."

I jumped with surprise and nearly drove off the road into a ditch. In saying these words, she was not telling me anything about her I had not known since I was a small child. It was the fact that she had this revelation that shocked me. However, she soon went back to her comfortable unawareness, and life went on as before.

Developmental psychologists have shown that what interests newborn babies the most are human faces, movements and voices. Babies are born able to distinguish between humans and objects, and thus able to form a bond with a mothering figure. Out of this bond comes the skill of empathy. However, when babies have no opportunity to form this bond they do not develop the skill of empathy. Some of these babies fail to develop a conscience and later in life are called psychopaths. I once worked with a psychiatrist who would collect the prisoners he thought were psychopaths from the local jail and install them in a psychiatric hospital for him to study. I found it a very strange experience to have a long conversation with a patient who, when I asked him about his ideal self, the person he aspired to be, would look at me in complete incomprehension.

My sister was not a psychopath but a well-respected pillar of her community. However, other people's behaviour was often a mystery to her. She had been very unlucky to be born to a mother who could not cope with the experience of childbirth, and who became angry and withdrawn for six months or more. The same had happened when I was born, but I was lucky because my aunt, who looked after me, and my father, were able to provide the bonding that allowed me to develop my intense interest in people.

Babies make the most of whatever bonding opportunities are available, and with luck are able to create what John Bowlby called the internal pot of gold. Simon Baron-Cohen summarises this as "what gives the individual the strength to deal with challenges, the ability to bounce back from setbacks, and the ability to show affection and enjoy intimacy with others".

A few babies are born without the ability to distinguish people from objects. Diagnosing and treating such children has never been easy. In the early 1960s I worked in a children's unit in a Sydney psychiatric hospital. All of us professionals there struggled to distinguish autistic children from those who had language problems and those whose intelligence was limited. Not that these diagnostic categories were mutually exclusive. Few diagnoses are.

Baron-Cohen has made a major contribution to our understanding of autism. Autistic people lack any comprehension that other people have feelings. They do not understand what empathy is. Like most psychologists, he loves categorising and measuring. He describes how our degree of empathy can be measured, and how our scores form the familiar shape of the bell curve. If you want to find your Empathy Quotient (EQ), the questionnaire is in the book. There is also the Systemizing Mechanism and references to questionnaires that establish the Systemising Quotient (SQ). Such measuring instruments enable him to create different categories for degrees and kinds of empathy. He defines empathy as "our ability to identify what someone else is thinking, and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion". He does not mention Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, and his emphasis on accurate empathy, something central to counselling and achieved only by very careful listening.

We can never know precisely what another person is thinking and feeling. As neuroscientists have established, we cannot see reality directly. All we can ever do is to create theories or guesses about what is going on in the human-sized world in which we appear to live. (Ants live in ant-sized worlds, and elephants in elephant-sized worlds.) Our guesses come from our experience and, since no two people ever have exactly the same experience, no two people ever see anything in exactly the same way. Thus we each live in our own individual world of meaning. Empathy is always a leap of the imagination.

While Baron-Cohen writes at some length about examples of cruelty, he does not mention how we can be most empathetic towards the group to which we belong but be cruel to those who belong to another group. Before the advent of Hitler many Germans already saw Jewish people as not quite human; Hitler merely built on this belief. Such attitudes are learnt and serve many purposes. In Australia I meet white Australians whose lack of empathy towards the Aboriginal people strengthens their relationship with their group and enables them to take pride in what they see as their virtues of hard work and tidiness.

Baron-Cohen's final paragraph is extravagantly hopeful. He writes: "Empathy is like a universal solvent", the way to resolve all interpersonal problems. He believes that those who are deficient in empathy can be taught. But teaching empathy can take a very long time. As a psychologist I have spent the past 30 years trying to teach empathy to those who have a particular blindness to people who were psychiatric patients. In Baron-Cohen's section on borderline personality disorder I counted 19 uses of the words "borderline" or "borderlines" as a noun, in sentences such as "Borderlines are very manipulative". We all need to remember that, whatever form our mental distress takes, we are always more than our misery.

Dorothy Rowe's Why We Lie is published by Fourth Estate.

Michel Ocelot uses the darkening properties of digital 3D to make his animated silhouetted characters come alive and enact sad, strange and funky stories

France's Michel Ocelot made a striking case for the revival of traditional animation techniques with his Kirikou films and Azur & Asmar. His latest is a technological leap of sorts, using the darkening properties of digital 3D to make its silhouetted characters – an old man and two youngsters, enacting global legends on an abandoned cinema stage – pop out even further from vividly shaded backgrounds. The tales, sad, strange and funky, are a riot of wandering accents, nipples, morals and monsters, underpinned by a love of storytelling and pretty things, whether melancholy princesses or illustrations ripped from art history books. The pick-and-mix approach is limiting, but there's no denying these are gorgeous amuse-bouches, likely to be devoured by older, more discerning children and dyed-in-the-wool stoners alike.

Rating: 3/5

Paul Duane has created an enthralling documentary portrait of former criminal and tournament chess player John Healy

In 1986, Faber published The Grass Arena, a stunning memoir of life on the streets by John Healy, a former vagrant, violent criminal and tournament chess player who'd been taught the game in prison: it was a bestseller that became a film. Healy was unprepared for the whirl of celebrity, and for the letdown afterwards when Faber didn't want any more books. He began showing up at the publisher's offices and in an explosion of temper, threatened to attack everyone with an axe. Terrified executives severed relations, and Healy remained out in the cold until The Grass Arena was re-issued as a Penguin Classic in 2008. To mark that occasion, Healy gave a reading for his fans, and I can be glimpsed among them in this enthralling documentary movie-portrait by Paul Duane. Healy is a lonely, haunted, brilliant man, for whom chess and literature were not simply aspirational alternatives to his former life: there is assertion and even aggression in chess and in the act of writing. The film skirts around his emotional life, but it's a gripping study.

Rating: 4/5

His analysis of the role of education in the reproduction of social inequality challenges Nick Clegg's belief that he was 'lucky' in life

Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of the role of education in the reproduction of social inequality challenges Nick Clegg's belief that he was "lucky" in life. Luck, says the French sociologist, has nothing to do with it. Just 10 years after his death, Mr Bourdieu's work is already a classic to rank alongside Foucault or Lacan. The recent publication of his courses at the Collège de France has put his name back into the headlines. In contrast to those who trumpet self-determination, Mr Bourdieu focuses on the forces which shape an individual. If Mr Clegg really wants to "factor social mobility into the education system", he must recognise that the difference between success and failure is not luck but the ways in which social inequalities repeat themselves. The role of government is to break this vicious circle not to reinforce it. The drastic shrinking of the state is hardly the way to remedy what Mr Clegg called an absolute scandal.

His classic study, The Great War and Modern Memory, was rooted in his own bitter experience of loss and waste in combat

Paul Fussell, who died on Wednesday at the age of 88, was the classic public intellectual who wrote on everything from poetic meter to the role of class in American society. Like the late Christopher Hitchens, Fussell had the intellectual confidence to tackle any subject that interested him.

But what made Fussell more than just a versatile and gifted academic (he had a long and distinguished teaching career at Rutgers and the University of Pennsylvania) was his writing on war. His insight into the first world war, achieved in his breakthrough 1975 study, The Great War and Modern Memory – which received the National Book Award for Arts and Letters – was brought full circle by his own combat experience in the second world war. He was wounded and awarded the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

The Great War and Modern Memory made Fussell's critical reputation. At its emotional core is the British experience on the western front and Fussell's own anger at how the language of the first world war seduced so many young men into needlessly sacrificing their lives.

For Fussell, the murderous idealism of the Great War was summed up in a newspaper notice a young volunteer published two days before the declaration of war. "PAULINE", the notice read, "I will dash into the great venture with all that pride and spirit an ancient race has given me."

Fussell believed such idealism, naive as it may appear to us now, had to be taken seriously. In his eyes, pronouncements like this summed up centuries of misplaced faith in the power of personal action and Christian sacrifice.

In The Great War and Modern Memory, the answer to such murderous idealism is countered by the reaction to the trench warfare felt by such British writers as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves. Particularly revealing is Fussell's analysis of Graves's celebrated first world war memoir, Goodbye to All That.

Fussell treats Graves's book not as a gritty documentary (an English version of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms) but as deliberate farce in which the British army – with its emphasis on rank and top-down orders – becomes a death trap for its most dutiful soldiers. Fussell admires Graves because he harkens back to the satirical tradition of Ben Johnson and looks forward to that of Joseph Heller in Catch-22.

Fussell's own second world war experience as a second lieutenant, who carried a leather-bound New Testament into battle because he thought it might slow down shell fragments, came very close to duplicating the experience of Graves. Fussell, too, was wounded in battle and, like Graves, he took no pride in the suffering he endured. On a night-time mission that should have never been undertaken, Fussell was struck by German fire that killed the two men next to him.

Fussell's response to his injuries and those he saw in the fighting leading up to Germany's surrender was not satirical, however. On hearing the news of his friends' deaths, Fussell was overcome by a "black fury" that, as he goes on to say, "has never entirely dissipated".

For Fussell, who was 20 at the time he entered the army, the result was a life-changing experience. He was, he knew, lucky not to have been killed. What his time with the infantry showed him was that as far as his commanders were concerned, he was expendable.

Fussell's postwar military experience (he was not discharged until 1946) only deepened his hatred of the army and large institutions in general. "I am entirely serious when I assert that if I have ever developed into a passable literary scholar, editor, and critic, the credit belongs to the United States Army," Fussell observes midway through his 1996 memoir Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic.

But Fussell's observation is not merely ironic. It also explains the passion that lies at the center of his best work. All too often, Fussell was described as sardonic when, in fact, he was a deeply caring critic who wanted the world he lived in after second world war to avoid the wartime chaos and violence he saw firsthand before he ever entered college.

In no place in his writing is the pleasure Fussell took in basic decency on greater display than in his much-overlooked 1982 essay, The Boy Scout Handbook. Fussell begins his essay by lamenting that the famed critics of his generation never turned their attention to The Official Boy Scout Handbook. They should have, he argues, and to demonstrate that he is perfectly serious, Fussell goes through the Handbook, with meticulous care before concluding that it is a "compendia of good sense".

At no point in The Boy Scout Handbook is there ever a hint by Fussell that ordinary life demands less attention than high poetry. Instead, he concludes his praise of the Handbook by reminding us: "The generously low price of $3.50 is enticing, and so is the place on the back cover where you're invited to inscribe your name."

Brit director Kirk Jones keeps this on the sunnier, dopier side of offensive, but this is insight-deficient fluff

Someday Hollywood will think of women as more than fallopian tubes in heels; until then, we're stuck with this kind of project. It's based on a self-help bestseller, of course, and set in that bitty, crapestry format Valentine's Day made regrettably profitable. The labour pains extend from white-bread reality celebs Cameron Diaz (right) and Matthew Morrison's disproportionate squabbling about infant circumcision, to an unpersuasively penniless J-Lo's struggles with adopting from Ethiopia. Brit director Kirk Jones (Waking Ned) keeps it on the sunnier, dopier side of offensive, but it's the sort of insight-deficient fluff that thinks the misery of a miscarriage lasts only so long as a sad song, and assumes what women want – beyond babies – are reality show callbacks, a Cheryl Cole cameo and male TV stars with their tops off.

Rating: 2/5

Author of a revolutionary book about the first world war

The US writer Paul Fussell's 1975 book The Great War and Modern Memory was, according to the British military historian John Keegan, revolutionary. Fussell, in what he called "an elegaic commentary", shaped a picture of the horrors of the first world war, and the cold stupidity of its leaders, made more trenchant by his own experiences in the second world war. He also used the writings of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and others to show how the romanticising of the war and its heroes provided the creative spark for modernism, and the sensibility of disillusion and distrust of authority that characterised the so-called "lost generation".

The success of that book, acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic – though Philip Larkin thought it "obscene nonsense" – and the winner of America's National Book and Book Critic Circle awards, propelled Fussell, who has died aged 88, from a scholar of 18th-century English literature into a position as a public critic. From that position, the influence of his early subjects, such as Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, became evident in his scalpel-like dissections of American society.

Fussell grew up in Pasadena, California, where his father was a lawyer. He often claimed that, but for the second world war, he might have followed his father's career, but he also described himself as already in rebellion by 1941, when he enrolled at nearby Pomona college. At this small liberal arts institution, he and his brother, Edwin, edited a literary magazine.

Edwin went on to a career as a professor of American studies, disrupted by his refusal to swear a loyalty oath during the McCarthy era. Paul enlisted in the army in 1943, and arrived in France the following year as a second lieutenant in the infantry.

On his first morning on a battlefield, he woke to find corpses strewn in front of him. He was wounded, and awarded a Purple Heart as well as the Bronze Star for gallantry. He concluded that only those who had experienced battle, "true testifiers" as he called them in a Guardian interview in 2004, were, in the end, fit to write military history.

After returning to Pomona, he gained a BA in English. In 1949 he married a fellow student, Betty Harper, and undertook an MA and PhD at Harvard. His dissertation, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England, was published in 1954, by which time he was teaching at Connecticut College for Women. It formed the basis of Fussell's popular textbook, Poetic Metre and Poetic Form (1965).

In 1955 he moved to Rutgers University, New Jersey, where he taught for 28 years, while his wife worked in publishing in New York and became a cookery writer. He published academic studies of Johnson, and of the Augustan era of English literature. Later he traced the origins of The Great War and Modern Memory, which marked such a change in his work, to his growing discomfort with the Vietnam war and what it showed about American society. Indeed, when the book appeared, its parallels with Vietnam did not pass unnoticed.

Fussell followed with another work that broke new ground. Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (1980) might be seen as a sequel to The Great War, and opened up literary criticism of a genre that had previously been overlooked. But it also set out a new tone for Fussell, as both social commentator and curmudgeon, who decried the decline in "travel" brought about by the growth of "tourism", and was dismissive about the prose style of Graham Greene. He followed that with a collection of essays, The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations (1982), which showcased his talent for extrapolating social analysis from literary sources.

After the collapse of his marriage, the subject of Betty's scathing My Kitchen Wars (1999), he became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1984-94), and in 1987 married Harriette Behringer. Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983, published in the UK as Caste Marks) was an acerbic dissection of the US's hidden class structure, and might be seen as a reaction to the "preppie" culture of the early Reagan years.

The even more acerbic Bad: Or, the Dumbing of America (1991) and the title essay of his second collection, Thank God for the Atom Bomb (1988), revealed that Fussell had not abandoned the satiric models of the 18th-century writers who were his original subjects. In 1994 he published The Anti-Egotist, a study of Kingley Amis, who became a close friend in his Rutgers days, while Amis was at nearby Princeton, and then retired from teaching.

However, Fussell returned frequently to war, as an editor and in books such as Wartime (1989), addressing the experiences of soldiers, and The Boys Crusade (2003), which might be seen as a corrective to celebrations by writers such as Stephen Ambrose (Band of Brothers) or Tom Brokaw (The Greatest Generation). As he wrote in his 1996 memoir Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic: "My adolescent illusions, largely intact to that moment, fell away all at once, and I suddenly knew I was not and never would be in a world that was reasonable or just."

In 2009 Fussell moved to Oregon. He is survived by Harriette; by a son and daughter from his first marriage, who are both published writers; by four stepchildren; and his sister, Florence.

• Paul Fussell, writer, born 22 March 1924; died 23 May 2012

New Vic, Newcastle-under-Lyme

In Thomas Hardy's novel, sheep farming is a tough, unforgiving existence. The prospects of the hero, Gabriel Oak, are wiped out when an immature sheepdog, "incapable of knowing the difference between doing a thing and doing it too well", drives his flock over a cliff. An outbreak of bloat spells disaster for Oak's beloved, Bathsheba Everdene. The loss of a single ewe at lambing time can be the difference between survival and the bailiffs closing in.

In other words, sheep are a serious business, though Theresa Heskins's production fails to take them altogether seriously. The mood is set when a pair of cute collie puppets bound on stage, which gains a laugh and round of applause. Yet the cuddly atmosphere feels closer to a petting zoo than a subsistence farm, while the decision to improvise sheep out of old cardigans smacks of woolly thinking.

In most other respects the charm of Heskins's production works to advantage. Far from the Madding Crowd is one of Hardy's earlier, sunnier novels, destined to end with a satisfying union rather than harrowing disaster. There's a holiday feel to the celebrations and rituals of the rural year that can feel almost Shakespearean. The interspersion of traditional folk airs and dances (enchantingly performed by the cast of actor-musicians) enhances the mood considerably, and there's plenty to enjoy about the performances. Ali Watt displays Oak's constancy without seeming to be a stick-in-the-mud; Rebecca Brewer captures the mercurial contradictions of Bathsheba Everdene, an independent spirit who declares she has no need of a husband, yet when pursued by three suitors still makes the wrong choice. The storytelling moves purposefully at pace, yet in its overall eagerness to please, Heskins's production resembles Oak's sheepdog – unable to distinguish the difference between doing a thing and doing it too well.

Rating: 3/5

Widow accepts Hitchens' honorary prize, as Toby Harnden scoops prize with book the Ministry of Defence paid to pulp

That the 2012 Orwell book prize for political writing was won on Wednesday by Toby Harnden's Dead Men Risen, a book whose initial print run was pulped by the MoD, suggests a renewed appetite for trouble-making on the part of the prize's judges, in keeping with the presentation of a special memorial award to Christopher Hitchens's widow at the ceremony in the incongruous setting of the Church of England's Westminster HQ. A giant image of Orwell, a far more benign but still exacting Big Brother, gazed down at the sweltering guests from behind the podium.

Jean Seaton, director of the prize, had earlier noted that Siddhartha Deb's shortlisted The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India was censored in India, and that Julia Lovell's The Opium War, another finalist, "would certainly be censored if the Chinese authorities recognised how mercilessly it slays illusions" about the war, "the founding myth of modern China".

In the case of Dead Men Risen, the story of the Welsh Guards' campaign in Afghanistan, censorship took the bizarre form of the MoD paying Harnden's publisher Quercus £151,450 to destroy 24,000 copies, even though the book had earlier passed a four-month-long pre-publication review by the department.

A second edition was produced on the day the pulping took place, virtually unaltered, and Harnden paid tribute to Quercus, suggesting few other publishers would have displayed the same Orwellian commitment to "telling powerful people things they don't want to hear".

To the organisers' obvious regret, Hitchens won neither the Orwell book prize nor the journalism prize (which went this year to the Guardian's Amelia Gentleman), despite being the outstanding political writer of his generation. His brother Peter, in contrast, won the latter award in 2010, and began his tribute at the ceremony by telling an audience he assumed to be overwhelmingly left-leaning: "I feel your pain: you may have felt the wrong Hitchens won an Orwell prize."

The Mail on Sunday columnist also acknowledged the long-running feud between the siblings ("he and I were rivals all our lives, from the moment he pushed my pram down a hill"), but argued that they shared a belief in the need "to tell the truth in plain English, to refuse to be told what to say or what not to say".

After collecting Christopher Hitchens's award, his widow Carol Blue recalled that he had written a book called Why Orwell Matters, and quoted a passage from "the last essay he wrote". Completed in hospital in Houston in November, a month before his death, it was a foreword to Orwell's diaries.

We're exclusively revealing the trailer for fantasy teen novel The Gathering Dark by Leigh Bardugo. It's a bit epic! What do you think?

The book has been published in America with a different title, cover and trailer. Here's the US trailer - which do you prefer? Email us at childrens.books@guardian.co.uk and we'll publish your responses below.

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There's hilarious trouble up mill in this lovably daft DH Lawrence pastiche from the 80s

There wasn't much to laugh at in the 80s. Puffball skirts, briefly. Impressionist Mike Yarwood, if you were that way inclined. And yes, Wispas were a joke, but not in a good way. (Shut up, Wispa fans. If you aerate chocolate, the result is less chocolate. You're all fools. FOOLS.)

But there was – gloriously, unforgettably – Brass, which over the course of three series told the story of the feuding families of the utterly northern mining village of, well, Utterly. Self-made man and owner of the village mine, mill and munitions factory, Bradley is the head of the Hardacre clan, which comprises his three sons, Bentley (deceased), Austin and Morris; as well as two daughters, Charlotte (passionate about doing good works and, says her father, "innocent to the point of simplicity") and Isabel, whose bedpost is more notch than wood. Then there's his wife, Lady Patience, a wheelchair-user ever since her terrible tambourine accident.

On the other side of the colliery tracks is the Fairchild family. George, its nominal head, worships the ground his employer Bradley treads him into, while his magnificently-cleavaged wife Agnes, so poor-but-proud that she irons her clothes before washing them, rails with fury at all life throws at her. They have two sons. One is hardworking Jack, who has inherited his mother's socialist leanings, but is periodically diverted from bringing down capitalism by his secret and exhausting life as Isabel's sex-monkey. ("I love him hopelessly! Passionately! Recklessly! Frequently.") The other is poetry-writing Matt, who is determined, once he has made the final payments on the family pencil, to go to Cambridge despite his love for Charlotte H ("Thou are more lovely and more interesting/Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May but that's quite another thing") and his good job – "a job wi' a stool!" – at the mine works.

The winters being cold, television being uninvented and the demands of Lawrentian parody being what they are, most of one family ends up sleeping with most of the other to pass the time and/or relieve the strains occasioned by the latest mill, mine or munitions disaster caused by Bradley Hardacre's less-than-zealous approach to health and safety ("Everything possible is being done, short of risking damage to valuable equipment") until their lives and fates are inextricably entwined.

The pastiches – of BBC costume dramas, kitchen-sink plays, the gritty north of art, literature and legend – never let up, supplemented by plenty of visual gags (from Bradley's favourite dish of lobster and chips to Lady Patience delicately spooning her gin and tonic hors d'oeuvre into her mouth before falling gracefully face-first into her bowl). Innuendo – which, done right, is the lowest form of wit – abounds. "Oh Matt," sobs Charlotte as he bids her farewell. "I shall always wonder how many poems the lead in your pencil would have been good for!"

They all talk in great, long, high-flown, hyperbolic sentences and the whole thing is essentially one long jazz-riff of daftness with actors and writers all seeing just how far out they can go and still bring everything safely back. It's a joy. Or, as they would doubtless say in Utterly, it's awreet, if you like laffin'.

Next in our countdown of crosswords in film, TV, books and song: a crossword brings two shy solvers together

The era of PG Wodehouse was the era of the dawn of the crossword.

While his stories largely inhabit an abstract universe of cow-creamers and prize pigs, crosswords appear as a modern touch and offer something bordering on observational humour, as with Aunt Dahlia's inner thoughts in Much Obliged, Jeeves:

There was a time when this worthy housewife, tackling the Observer crossword puzzle, would snort and tear her hair and fill the air with strange oaths picked up from cronies on the hunting field, but consistent inability to solve more than about an eighth of the clues has brought a sort of dull resignation and today she merely sits and stares at it, knowing that however much she licks the end of her pencil little or no business will result.

Puzzles in Wodehouse, like those in the real world, feature words with conveniently placed vowels - the god RA, the prophet EMU and the prophet ELI - more often than everyday life tends to. The emu pops up time and again, either stumping characters or as part of a perfect simile; Reader Chastelordarcher nominated The Code of the Woosters:

'But I had a communication from Gussie, more or less indicating that you and he were p'fft.'

She looked at me like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd 'Emu' in the top right-hand corner.

'So that was why you came! You thought that there might still be hope? Oh, Bertie, I'm sorry... sorry... so sorry."

We also get some full clues, like those bothering Lord Uffenham in Something Fishy:

'Ever do crossword puzzles?'

'Sometimes.'

'Don't happen to know what the answer to "Tree gets mixed up with comic hat in scene of his triumphs" would be, do yer?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'Thought yer probably wouldn't. Well, what the hell?'

'But don't bother me now, my dear girl. I'm doing my crossword puzzle, and it's a stinker this morning. Run and ask Keggs what the dickens 'Adventurer goes in for outrageous road-speed' is supposed to signify.'

Answers below, by the way, and here's another clue and some criticism of our sister paper:

'Do you do the Observer crossword puzzle by any chance?'

'I solve it at breakfast on Sunday mornings.'

'Not the whole lot?'

'Oh yes.'

'Every clue?'

'I have never failed yet. I find it ridiculously simple.'

'Then what's all that song and dance about the measured tread of saints round St Paul's?'

'Oh, I guessed that immediately. The answer, of course, is pedometer. Dome, meaning St Paul's, comes in the middle and Peter, for St Peter, round it. Very simple.'

'Oh, very. Well, thank you. You have taken a great weight off my mind,' said Aunt Dahlia, and they parted in complete amity, a thing I wouldn't have thought possible when Ma McCorkadale was one of the parters.

(Shouldn't that then be PEDOMEETER?) Wodehouse himself preferred his puzzles on the "ridiculously easy" side. The MP Austen Chamberlain had written to the Times in 1934 boasting of finishing that paper's puzzle in 41 minutes and said that the Provost of Eton, better known as MR James...

...measures the time required for boiling his breakfast egg by that needed for the solution of your daily crossword - and he hates a hard-boiled egg.

The tale - now a commonplace among crossword fans - galled Wodehouse, who wrote his own letter:

Sir, on behalf of the great race of rabbits, those humble strivers who like myself have never yet succeeded in solving an entire Times crossword puzzle, I strongly resent these Austen Chamberlains and what not flaunting their skill in your columns. Rubbing salt in the wounds is what I call it. To a man who has been beating his head against the wall for twenty minutes over a single anagram it is g. and wormwood to read a statement like that one about the Provost of Eton and the eggs. In conclusion may I commend your public spirit in putting the good old emu back into circulation again as you did a few days ago? We of canaille know that the Sun-God Ra has apparently retired from active work - are intensely grateful for the occasional emu.

He gifted that same g. and wormwood to some of his characters, like Freddie Widgeon in Ice in the Bedroom to whom came "the feeling he had sometimes had when trying to solve a Times crossword puzzle, that his reason was tottering on its throne" and Gally Threepwood in Sticky Wicket at Blandings:

Gally left alone, lit another cigar and turned his attention to the Times crossword puzzle.

He found it, however, difficult to concentrate on it. This was not merely because these crossword puzzles had become so abstruse nowadays and he was basically a Sun-god-Ra and Large-Australian-bird-emu man.

Wodehouse features in our crossword top ten not only for detail, but also because of his positive portrayal of puzzles. Crosswords are typically social. Husband and wife may team up to solve, as in Summer Moonshine...

Lady Abbott lay on the settee in her boudoir with her shoes off - her habit when at rest. She was doing a crossword puzzle. Through the open window at her side, the cool evening air poured in, refreshing to a brain which had become a little heated as it sought to discover the identity of an Italian composer in nine letters beginning with p. She had just regretfully rejected Irving Berlin because, despite his other merits, too numerous to mention here, he had twelve letters, began with an i, and was not an Italian composer when there was a sound outside like a mighty rushing wind and Sir Buckstone came bursting in. [...]

He picked up the paper and scanned the crossword puzzle which his Toots had been trying to solve. [Bringing] to the problem the full force of his intellect, he took the pencil and in a firm hand wrote down the word 'Pagliacci.'

Each helping each, was the way Sir Buckstone looked at it.

...or a puzzle may bring shy lovers together. The crossword which makes number nine is nominated by reader Fishworld: one tackled by George Mulliner and Susan Blake in The Truth About George.

George was always looking in at the vicarage to ask her if she knew a word of seven letters meaning 'appertaining to the profession of plumbing,' and Susan was just as constant a caller at George's cosy little cottage - being frequently stumped, as girls will be, by words of eight letters signifying 'largely used in the manufacture of poppet-valves.'

The consequence was that one evening, just after she had helped him out of a tight place with the word 'disestablishmentarianism,' the boy suddenly awoke to the truth and realised that she was all the world to him - or, as he put it to himself from force of habit, precious, beloved, darling, much-loved, highly esteemed or valued.

A list cribbed from Richard Soule's Dictionary of English Synonymes and Synonymous or Parallel Expressions and a valuable antidote to the misconception that crosswords are a solitary activity. Last time, we looked at Brief Encounter, where crosswords nearly ended a marriage; kudos to Wodehouse for redressing the balance.

For The Truth About George, then:

Accuracy of portrayal of crosswords: 3/10
Positive attitude regarding crosswords: 9/10
Importance of crosswords in plot: 2/10

It's not too late to nominate other crosswords in fiction below. The solutions to the clues cited from Something Fishy are DESPERADO and THEATRE. And the reason for the low score on accuracy? A rare lapse from Wodehouse. What grid is large enough to have DISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM as an entry?

Hesperus Press are asking the public to nominate a novel for republication, with the winner's pitch used as an introduction. Post your suggestions below

Hesperus Press is a small independent publisher, quietly devoted to shining a light into the shadows cast by the literary canon to rescue those titles that have – often through no fault of their own – simply disappeared from sight. Thus have some of the more obscure works of writers such as Jane Austen (Sanditon), Henry Miller (Aller Retour New York), George Bernard Shaw (The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God; On War) and Ernest Hemingway (On Paris) been dragged out of the darkness, dusted off and placed back into the public domain where they belong (complete with new introductions from the likes of Colm Tóibín, Matthew Sweet, Fay Weldon and Mark Rylance).

Now, to celebrate its 10-year anniversary, Hesperus is asking members of the public to nominate a work of literature currently out of print and explain why it's worthy of republication. The winner will see their chosen work published this September with their pitch used as an introduction.

And guess what? Hesperus has agreed to accept entries posted on this site. So please post your own choice in the comments below. If you don't fancy entering the competition, that's fine: feel free to alert us all to the out-of-print books we should look out for anyway. If you intend to enter the completion, however, bear in mind you'll have to keep the word count below 500. If you'd prefer to keep your cards close to your chest and submit in private, then email your suggestion to info@hesperuspress.com. Full competition details can be found here.

(As an aside, and knowing Hesperus will be reading this piece, I wonder if they can do anything about getting John E Woods's translations of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain made available in paperback? As lovely as the Everyman hardback editions are – and they are – it seems a shame that most people will be coming to Mann's two masterpieces via the paperback editions with their inferior translations by HT Lowe-Porter. Here endeth the aside.)

So then, gamely flinging my own hat into the ring, I nominate William Trevor's 1966 novel The Love Department, which was last in print as a single title in the 80s and last seen in 2001, along with The Old Boys and The Boarding House, as part of the collection Three Early Novels – now also out of print.

I first stumbled across The Love Department a few years back in a secondhand book shop. I had yet to read any Trevor, and bought the book on a whim, Trevor being one of those authors whose name I recognised as someone I probably should read, without actually knowing anything about their work. Taken home, the book was promptly flipped through, shelved and forgotten. A few months later, while convalescing from an operation that had left me temporarily immobilised, and after trying and failing to read a number of works by my favourite authors, I found the simple prose and gentle (albeit black) humour of The Love Department was all my shattered concentration could deal with.

Set in the suburbs of south-west London (quirkily stylised a la Muriel Spark or a more upbeat Patrick Hamilton), the novel concerns one Edward Blakeston-Smith, a naive young man who, after fleeing some kind of monastery-cum-mental institution, is employed by an agony aunt to track down a serial seducer by the curious name of Septimus Tuam. (Which looks as if it should be an anagram, but, as far as I am able to tell, isn't.) Tuam is a kind of blandly satanic sociopath (think an introverted Mr Sloane) who is able to charm middle-aged married women into falling in love with him. Perhaps charm is too strong a word: the women, starved of romance from their husbands, seem ripe for seduction. The novel picks repeatedly at the social and private pretentions of the characters, revealing the fear of failure and loneliness that drives them from one pathos-drenched scene to the next.

Throughout the novel, the omniscient narrative voice maintains an ironic distance, slipping playfully among a fairly large cast of characters. This constantly shifting perspective gives the book an unsettling, almost dreamlike quality, which at the time I attributed to lack of sleep and too many painkillers. Rereading it two years on, however, I was pleasantly surprised to find these qualities still very much evident. Admittedly, The Love Department is not Trevor's finest work. The characterisation is slight, the structure a little haphazard, and it's perhaps 50 pages too long. But the story is engaging, the prose precise, the characters amusing, and the overall effect one of eccentric charm. As one of the characters muses at one point, "the streets of London are full of strangeness". The Love Department is a fine example of it.

First monarch to celebrate diamond jubilee tells of meetings with prime ministers, childbirth and love for Albert over 43,000 pages

The thoughts, sorrows, dreams, doubts, political opinions, gossip and passions of Queen Victoria, poured on to 43,000 pages of her private journals, have been launched online by her great-great-granddaughter Queen Elizabeth.

"It seems fitting that the subject of the first major public release of material from the royal archives is Queen Victoria, who was the first monarch to celebrate a diamond jubilee," the Queen writes in a message to mark the launch, which follows an eight-month digitisation project to celebrate her own jubilee by the royal archives, the Bodleian library in Oxford and the information company ProQuest.

The journals track Victoria's meetings with prime ministers, the births of her children – "Dr Snow administered 'that blessed Chloroform'" she wrote after Leopold in 1853 – war and peace, the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace and, in passages which are often a rip-roaring read, her overwhelming love for her husband. "It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert – who is beautiful," she wrote on 10 October 1839, and after they married four months later: "He clasped me in his arms, and we kissed each other again and again!"

Her desolation after his death in 1861 aged 42, probably of typhoid – said to be caused by the Windsor Castle drains – seeps from the pages: "I have been unable to write my journal since my beloved one left us, and oh with what a heavy broken heart I enter a new year without him."

Although countless biographers and historians have raided the journals, they have never been published in full, and have only been available by appointment at the library in Windsor Castle. Access to the site will be free permanently to all UK users, and to anyone in the world until the end of June. A libraries version will also be available worldwide.

The earliest volumes are in Victoria's handwriting, and later ones were transcribed by her private secretary and her daughter Beatrice – who heavily edited the journals she transcribed, and to the anguish of historians destroyed the originals.

They begin in 1832, when she was 13: "This book, Mama gave me that I might write the journal of my journey to Wales in it," and end in 1901, just 10 days before her death: "Had a good night and could take some breakfast better. Took an hour's drive at half-past two. It was very foggy, but the air was pleasant."

News of battles far away regularly arrives at her breakfast table: at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, on 5 February 1885 – "a fine day, my cold somewhat better" – she learns "dreadful news, Khartoum fallen, Gordon's fate uncertain. All greatly distressed."

She describes her own coronation in great detail, a day when she was woken at 4am by celebratory gun salutes from St James's Park, "and could not get much sleep afterwards from the noise of the people, bands &c". When finally dressed, and in the state coach on the way to Westminster Abbey, "the crowds of people exceeded what I have ever seen â€¦ multitudes, the millions of my loyal subjects who were assembled in every spot to witness the Procession. Their good humour and excessive loyalty was beyond everything."

She gives an equally comprehensive description of the last diamond jubilee, 22 June 1897, "a never to be forgotten day".

"No one ever, I believe has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those 6 miles of streets â€¦ The crowds were quite indescribable and their enthusiasm truly marvellous and deeply touching."

She would undoubtedly now have tweeted and blogged the occasion. She – like Albert – embraced new technology, including photography, film and voice recording. Before she left the palace, she wrote: "I touched an electric button by which I started a message which was telegraphed through the whole Empire."