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

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

Rating: 2/5

• Josh Brolin
• John Malkovich
• Action and adventure
• Science fiction and fantasy
• Comics

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

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

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

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

• Tony Blair
• Barack Obama
• John McCain
• US elections 2008
• US politics
• US national book awards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Tony Blair
• Labour
• Politics past
• Margaret Thatcher
• Gordon Brown
• Labour government 1997 - 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Publishing
• Gender
• Marketing & PR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Guardian children's fiction prize
• Children and teenagers
• Fiction
• History
• Awards and prizes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• China
• Chinese literature

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

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

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

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

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

• Art
• Tony Blair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Action and adventure
• Science fiction and fantasy
• Comics
• Jane Goldman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Tony Blair
• Winston Churchill
• Labour
• Conservatives
• Biography

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

Poll: Is Hawking right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Stephen Hawking
• Physics
• Religion
• Science and nature
• Creationism

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

Ben Jennings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Tony Blair
• Labour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Tony Blair
• Politics past
• Labour
• Gordon Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bombast and bravado

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

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

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

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

• Theatre
• Drama
• Keith Waterhouse

Laura Barton
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Torture, sex with Cherie and the royal family: it's a real rollercoaster with the former prime minister

Going up

Blood sports missing the good old days when you could tear small furry animals apart? Set your hounds on an emotionless Scotsman instead. Gone to ground!

Idealism As seen in George W Bush, a man of "genuine integrity" and "political courage". Now, which other famous statesman might want to be thought of that way?

Grrr . . . pillow talk "On that night I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct." This is an actual quote from the book, by the way.

Appalling premonitions In which, for example, John Smith dies unexpectedly and the dreamer replaces him as leader of the Labour party.

The contents of our stomachs Did we really want to picture Blair and Brown "like lovers desperate to get to love-making"?

Going down

Torture "I totally disagree with it," says Blair. So that's that cleared up.

One of the Milibands Ed? David? One brother has "clear leadership qualities", which presumably means the other doesn't. If only they weren't impossible to tell apart . . .

The royals The queen could be "a little haughty", apparently, while Princess Diana was "manipulative". Who'd have guessed?

Hilarious tabloid fantasies That story about Cherie sharing a shower with her friend Carole Caplin? Just a "fable".

• Tony Blair

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