Sex and violence pepper the adaptation of Stieg Larsson's bestselling crime novel, which might have been better served as a TV series, writes Peter Bradshaw

This is part of the mega-selling Millennium Trilogy of gruesome crime novels by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson. Originally (and pertinently) entitled Men Who Hate Women, this first story has now been adapted for the screen and finds its way to the UK having already become a European box office smash; the other two have also been filmed and their release here will presumably depend on how this is received. For what it's worth, I predict healthy returns. It is a forensic procedural with explicit violence, sex, sexual violence, violent sex and crime-scene photos of the sort that were once never shown, then just glimpsed and now blandly lingered over in every detail.

Michael Nyqvist plays Michael Blomkvist, a reporter facing an unjust prison sentence for criminal libel. Before his jail term starts, he is hired by a wealthy industrialist to solve the mystery of a niece who disappeared 40 years before, and who, poignantly, once babysat Blomkvist as a boy. He uncovers a string of hate crimes, and teams up with a super-sexy badass computer hacker with emotional issues called Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace), the eponymous tattooed girl. This film is probably too long, and it's only after the first hour that the narrative engines are properly revved, but director Niels Arden Oplev really socks it over. A must for the existing fanbase: others might have preferred it in two or three TV episodes.

Rating: 3/5

• Crime
• World cinema
• Stieg Larsson
• Thriller
• Film adaptations

Peter Bradshaw
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What is it about Yeats that is so attractive to rock stars, and why does Auden have the crowd moshing at the Forum? Graeme Thomson meets the musicians turning poetry into pop

One day in 2005, Mike Scott decamped to his music room armed only with a long-cherished dream and a copy of WB Yeats's greatest hits, a brick-like anthology of the late poet's collected works. For a fortnight, the leader of the Waterboys sat at his piano and ploughed methodically through the book, pushing and prodding at the words on each page until some began to offer a glimmer of a song.

"If the first line of any poem suggested a tune in my head, I'd persevere with it, and if it didn't I'd pass on to something else," says Scott. "I started at page one and worked through to page 600-and-something, and then I started again in case I missed any. I must have done that nine or 10 times, to give the opportunity for each line to sing to me. At the end of the first two weeks I had about 10 songs." He has since doubled that number, and the result is An Appointment With Mr Yeats, a series of concerts (and, all going to plan, a studio album) in which the Waterboys recontextualise the words of Ireland's most venerated poet by setting them to rock music.

Scott has form when it comes to Yeats: as early as 1986 he was dropping The Four Ages of Man into the Waterboys' live sets, and he later recorded The Stolen Child for Fisherman's Blues and Love and Death for Dream Harder, both of which will be revisited in the new show. However, he's far from the only rock-seer in thrall to the Irishman. Yeats's words have inspired numerous musicians, including Van Morrison (Crazy Jane on God), Joni Mitchell (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, adapted from The Second Coming) and Bono (Mad as the Mist and Snow). A patchy compilation album of Yeats songs, Now and in Time to Be, was released in 1997, featuring Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore, the Cranberries and, yes, the Waterboys, alongside several lesser-known acts. Even Carla Bruni tackled Before the World Was Made and Those Dancing Days Are Gone on No Promises, her 2007 album, which tended to treat the words of great poets as though they had been torn from the Yellow Pages.

Just what is it about Yeats that is so attractive to musicians? His vision is both mystical and unflinching, and he adopted shifting stances – nationalist, liberal, nihilist, radical, establishment pillar – in a manner that would be familiar to any pop star, but there's more to it than that. "There's a depth and a weightiness to his work that combines with his wonderful ear for the sound and colour of words," Scott says. "Fortunately, he put a lot of his poems into meter and rhyme, and that's what suggests the music to me. Most of the ones I've done are the ones that scan, and most of the tunes came quickly."

Scott, who declares himself an "archivist" of Yeats adaptations, is a hard man to impress. Now and in Time to Be was, he feels, "a missed opportunity – there were too many slapdash interpretations," and he's similarly dismissive of most of the hundreds of other songs set to the poet's words. "I think, 'Oh my God, what I'm doing is so much better!'" he says. "I'm a competitive bastard." He cites the several dozen different existing versions of Song of Wandering Aengus as an example. "Most of them are very pretty and dainty, what some people think fairy music should be, but it shouldn't," he says. "With very few exceptions, they all fail at the most basic hurdle: they don't sound as if the singer has 'a fire in their head', which is the first line of the lyric."

Featuring a 13-piece lineup performing over five nights at Dublin's Abbey theatre, the Irish institution Yeats co-founded in 1904, Scott describes the Waterboys show as "a radical statement". In his hands News for the Delphic Oracle becomes a twisted, sinister waltz, somewhere between Tom Waits and Kurt Weill. Set to music during last summer's Iranian protests, Let the Earth Bear Witness – an amalgam of words taken from Cathleen Ni Houlihan and The Blood Bond – is a protest song with palpable modern resonance. Even The Lake Isle of Innisfree – "the chocolate-box poem, the one they all got in school" – becomes a blues. "Now, that's blasphemous," he laughs. "I love that. I think putting Yeats to rock'n'roll and doing it for 20 songs is radical. It's changing his context absolutely."

The Blue Aeroplanes, the Bristolian art-rock collective who have influenced like-minded bands from REM to Art Brut – and who have a new album imminent – have also made something of a speciality out of adapting poetry to music. On albums such as Spitting Out Miracles and Swagger, the words of WH Auden, Louis MacNeice and Sylvia Plath were spun over a riot of tangled folk-rock. Singer Gerard Langley has often pondered which poems fit with music and which do not.

"There's something innate in the poem that suggests it will work," he says. "I can go through an entire book of poems that I like and only a couple will fit. It's the rhythms. The reason that you could do the Beat poets with jazz is that they were already incorporating those rhythms into the poems. With older stuff it's slightly more difficult, but some of them – MacNeice and Yeats – were using rhythms from traditional songs anyway. Auden's Miss Gee was written as a cabaret tune." He sighs wistfully. "I did always like the sight of a couple of thousand people at the Forum moshing to Auden."

Poking fun at poetry slams and "stuff that's too redolent of arts centres", Langley is well aware of the stigma attached to the combination of music and poetry, a nightmare vision that tends to revolve around 60s explorers such as the Fugs earnestly declaiming the words of Matthew Arnold over bongos and freeform guitar. You end up either with a performance that's indulgent, pretentious and overrespectful, or else something à la Bruni that fails to connect with the words. Ideally, says Langley, the listener should barely be aware that they're hearing poetry at all.

"A lot of poems sung over music don't work because they're too poemy," he says. "Rather than words 'on top' of something, I'm trying to make it sound like songs. Our version of Sylvia Plath's The Applicant worked very well. The poem is structurally quite simple, but it seems more complex than it is because I fit the words into different parts of the tune for emphasis; then people start hearing it differently. We sent out advance copies to journalists and nobody spotted it was by Plath. In fact, I was criticised for my 'new man lyricism!'"

Idlewild's Roddy Woomble has worked with Scottish poet Edwin Morgan and curated Ballads of the Book, an entire album of collaborations between Scottish musicians and writers. He emphasises that, above all, the process should be fun. "There's a high seriousness associated with poetry, but it doesn't have to be that way," he says. "We didn't feel the weight of having to sing these sacred verses; the intention was to make a good album. Beyond the fact that there were poets involved, it had to be something you'd want to put on in the car."

For Scott, the trick is to tune into the intent of the poem but not to be intimidated by what it represents. Yeats died in 1939, meaning that under the 70-year rule his work has only just fallen out of copyright. This made life easier because, although the Yeats estate granted him permission for the project, Scott undertook some judicious shuffling – the bridge of White Birds, for instance, is taken from Yeats's play The Shadowy Waters – which may have tested their resolve to preserve the integrity of the poet's work.

"Part of the creative process is to change things in the poems to make them work as songs," he says. "There are 20 songs in the show and seven or eight are untouched, but the rest have got subtle changes. Sometimes I've used a verse from another poem, or I've changed a word that might be confusing, or perhaps the rhyme doesn't quite work. I worked with a very clear brief: I might change something for the sake of the form, but I'd never change something that affected the meaning or the intention of the poet."

Perhaps these nuances explain why poetry and music tend to remain wary bedfellows, despite Scott's grand plan and many other examples. Former PIL bassist Jah Wobble turned William Blake's The Tyger into a dub reggae song and has recorded two albums of poetry set to music, The Celtic Poets and The Inspiration of William Blake. Blake "chose me", says Wobble of a poet whose visionary status has made him susceptible to rock adoration (Mark E Smith and Patti Smith are both fans). "When you do something like this you feel you're part of a lineage, that something is being passed on that's bigger than you are," Wobble adds. More recently, Rufus Wainwright has set three Shakespeare sonnets (10, 20 and 43) to music on his new album, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu.

Aside from the creative riches on offer, there are expedient reasons for plundering poetry. With copyright control rarely an issue, it offers an entire world of words, often gratis; it's also a sure-fire means of defeating writer's block. "When I haven't got enough lyrics of my own, I'm always looking around for things I might want to do," says Langley. "That was originally one of the reasons for doing it." Scott agrees: "Lyrics are always the thing that takes most time with me, and here I had a bye to the next round!"

Wobble laments a rich seam of inspiration largely left untapped. "I want drama, and poetry is fantastic for that," he says. "It's a dramatic colour and I'm surprised musicians don't use it more, tying everything together, playing with connections and combinations. You could make an outstanding record using Shakespeare, because there's so many eternal truths there. Look what [film director] Akira Kurosawa did with him. You take the essence of what he wrote and use it."

Scott agrees that musicians shouldn't be afraid to bend poetry to meet their own purposes. Despite his affection for Yeats, he claims the Abbey shows aren't an exercise in reverence or nostalgia. They're about making the words sing in new and exhilarating ways. "I may be in awe of Yeats's skill, but I'm not in awe of his reputation," he says. "It's my job as a musical writer to treat the lyrics like I'd treat my own – to be ruthless with them, and unglamoured. My only responsibility is to make it as great as I can, and not to compromise. I can't be intimidated."

The Waterboys perform An Appointment With Mr Yeats at the Abbey theatre, Dublin, on 15, 16, 18, 19 and 20 March, and at the Grand Canal theatre, Dublin, on 7 November

• Pop and rock
• Poetry
• WH Auden
• WB Yeats
• Carla Bruni-Sarkozy

Graeme Thomson
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Abdulrahman Zeitoun is the real-life hero of Dave Eggers's new book. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina he paddled from house to house in a canoe, offering help to his neighbours. For his trouble, he was arrested as a suspected terrorist

Saturday afternoon and the Zeitoun household is bustling with activity, as you quickly get the impression it always is. Kathy Zeitoun, dressed in a blue silk shirt and matching hijab, is fluttering around making spiced pumpkin-flavoured coffee and answering the constantly ringing phone. Noises emanating from four of her five children bubble up like broth from the back room where they are watching Kung Fu Panda on a giant flat-screen TV. Kathy seats me in the neat and orderly living room, which is dominated by cream leather sofas and a watercolour of a street scene from her husband's native Syria. Beside it is a framed 3D model of the Qur'an.

Gradually, out of this domestic pleasure dome, telltale signs emerge of the calamity that struck the Zeitouns almost five years ago. An outside wall of the house is stained with a faint but still clearly discernible line at about shoulder height, a record etched in paint of where the flood waters settled.

"Most of the time I don't think about what happened at all," Kathy says, as she pours the coffee. "Until I step out on to the street – then it all comes back to me."

In recent days Kathy has been forced to think back a lot on the events leading up to and following 29 August 2005, when hurricane Katrina ripped through her city of New Orleans, breaching its levees and immersing much of it, including her home, in several feet of water. The reason for her current preoccupation is the publication of the new book by that one-man literary factory Dave Eggers, whose best-known previous work is the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

The book, entitled Zeitoun, is, as its name suggests, a very personal telling of a national tragedy. It explores what happens when the entire fabric of society collapses, plunging a city into a parallel universe where there is no justice, no government, no protection, no respect. It does so exclusively through the eyes of the Zeitouns. Eggers spent three years on and off interviewing the family, then translating their memories into his trademark vivid yet restrained prose.

At the centre of the book is Kathy's husband, Abdulrahman, or Zeitoun as he is universally known, a New Orleans building contractor who has attained almost mythical status. Not only is he the dominant character in the 339 pages of Eggers's book, but in the US press he has been dubbed an "all-American hero" for the phlegmatic way he conducted himself in the midst of catastrophe.

That said, when I arrive at his house he is nowhere to be seen. He turns up an hour and a half late, which Kathy insists is wholly true to form and actually not that bad: he kept her waiting for two hours on their wedding day. He could have turned up 10 hours late and still you'd forgive him, just as soon as you felt his firm handshake and the embrace of his warm smile. "Zeitoun," he says in self-introduction, as though there were any doubt.

He comes into the room straight from a building site with his trousers splattered in mud. "I really don't feel we deserve all this attention," he says in a thick Middle-Eastern accent. "I only did what I had been brought up to do."

What he did was to stay in New Orleans when the hurricane struck, driven by a conviction that that is where he belonged. While Kathy and the kids joined the mass evacuation from the city, he hunkered down at home; and when the levees broke and the flood water poured in, he put to use a battered old canoe he owned to navigate the streets of his neighbourhood, now turned into canals.

Zeitoun paddling through New Orleans in his canoe may well become one of the enduring images of Katrina. A line drawing of him in the boat is printed on the cover of Eggers's book, and the film director Jonathan Demme plans to make an animated movie of his story next year.

Zeitoun takes us on a guided tour of the route that he negotiated in his canoe in the days after the storm. He begins by pointing to a pillar at the front of his house. "That's where I kept the canoe tied, like you'd tie up your horse."

We set off by car along the maze of streets around his neighbourhood. On every street corner he has a tale to tell. The first stop we make is at a house of grey clapboard standing on stilts. In the hurricane, the flood waters reached almost up to its windows. As he paddled by, Zeitoun explains, he heard a voice faintly crying "Help!". He swam to the front door and inside found a woman in her 70s hovering above him. In one of the most memorable phrases of the book, Eggers writes: "Her patterned dress was spread out on the surface of the water like a great floating flower."

"She was inside the house holding on to the bookshelf with water up to her shoulder," Zeitoun recalls, as we stand outside the house. "She must have been in the water for about 24 hours by then."

Zeitoun helped the woman reach safety in a fishing boat, which was no small feat given that she weighed 90kg (14st). His construction skills and great strength proved invaluable as he levered her on a ladder out to the vessel.

Our tour continues and we pass the house of a local Baptist church pastor and his wife whom the Zeitouns had known for years and who similarly cried out for help. Further on, we come to the residence of a man who was stranded and to whom Zeitoun brought food and water every day while he still had his canoe and his liberty.

All in all, Zeitoun reckons he must have helped to save or rescue more than 10 neighbours. "The way I thought of it was, anything you can do to help. God left me here for a reason. I did what I was brought up to do – to help people."

At this point, our journey begins its descent to a much darker place. Zeitoun points out the spot where he saw a human body floating in the filthy water. Then we arrive at Claiborne Avenue where the weirdness truly began. It was 6 September, six days after the hurricane, and he was in the house – his own property, which he rents out – along with a Syrian friend, Nasser Dayoob, his tenant Todd Gambino and Ronnie, a white man Zeitoun didn't know but who had asked to stay in the house for shelter. Zeitoun was on the phone to his brother in Syria when six unidentified police officers and National Guardsmen burst through the front door dressed in military fatigues and bullet-proof vests and carrying M16s and pistols. Zeitoun explained he was the landlord, but the only response was a demand from one of the National Guardsmen for his identity card.

"All he did was look at my ID," Zeitoun says, "and that was enough. Nothing else. No other questions. The moment he saw my name he said, 'Get into the boat!'"

We get back into the car and retrace the route of that boat ride, stopping at the Greyhound bus station near the city centre. Today it's back to a semblance of normality, with its familiar canine logo and silver buses lined in rows. But when Zeitoun was carted off there, he and his three companions found themselves surrounded by 80 or so men with assault rifles and dogs, a mixture of National Guardsmen, prison wardens and soldiers, some of whom had recently been serving in Iraq and who seemed to approach the situation in New Orleans with a war-zone mentality. The closest thing it reminded him of was Guantánamo.

'You guys are al-Qaida,' said one soldier. 'Taliban,' said another
He takes us to see a concrete compound at the back of the bus station and describes the network of chain-fence pens that had been erected overnight to convert the area into a makeshift detention centre. Zeitoun and his companions were flung into one such cage, with armed soldiers standing guard over them on the roof.

"Why are we here?" they asked a passing soldier. "You guys are al-Qaida," came the reply. Another soldier said as he passed: "Taliban."

It was like a dagger blow for Zeitoun, for himself personally and for his vision of America, the country where he had come to live as a young merchant seaman from Syria and which he had always believed was a land of fairness and opportunity. He had come initially in search of work, never expecting to stay, but he then met Kathy, a local Louisiana woman who had converted to Islam four years previously. They had built a life together, grown their construction business and had children. And now here he was being called a terrorist. "I felt very bad. It was very hurtful. These guys wanted revenge on us, no matter what."

He was kept penned up at the bus station for three days and nights, and interviewed by officers from homeland security who seemed to think they had caught a big fish. He says now that whenever he drives by the Greyhound station – or Camp Greyhound as it was dubbed – dark thoughts enter his mind.

What dark thoughts? "Being called those terrible names. The memory of people refusing to help. Imagine you see a doctor and you shout at him, 'Can you help me?', because your foot is infected and hurting badly, and he's wearing a green medical gown and a stethoscope around his neck, and he says, 'I'm not a doctor,' and walks on. How would you feel?"

While Zeitoun was incarcerated, first at Camp Greyhound and then in a maximum-security prison, Kathy was, as she puts it, "battling her own demons". One of the gross injustices against them both was that Zeitoun was allowed no phone call, which left her in mounting despair. For two weeks she had no word from her husband, concluding in the end that he must be dead. Then, on 19 September, she learned of his detention from a missionary who called her after having seen Zeitoun in prison.

She dashed back to the city from Texas, where she had been staying with friends. The nadir came for her when she tried to find out the address of the courthouse where he was due to appear, charged with looting. Court officials told her they couldn't divulge such information as it was private.

"I cracked open at that point," she tells me. "How could the address of a courthouse be private? I cried harder then than I did at any other time. I felt like I was a little kid again – with no say-so, no rights, no voice. I felt lost."

Zeitoun was detained for almost a month before he was released on $75,000 (£50,000) bail for having looted his own house. The others fared worse: Dayoob, Gambino and Ronnie spent five, six and eight months in prison respectively, despite Zeitoun's efforts to prise them out. Eventually, the charges against all four of them were dropped.

Their experiences were just a blip in the civil rights catastrophe that was Katrina. Camp Greyhound held a total of 1,200 detainees in the aftermath of the hurricane, most of whom were African-Americans and all of whom suffered the indignity of having their right to habeas corpus removed.

As they approach the fifth anniversary of those events, the Zeitouns have managed with striking success to put their lives back together. The children are starting to sleep in their own beds again having for years insisted on cramming into their parents' for security.

Kathy has been diagnosed with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including memory loss and dizziness. "Katrina was a great reality slap. I was naive before – I felt I had things under control. But I've come to the conclusion that I don't control anything. I'm in control of nothing," she says.

Zeitoun still gets angry about the way he was treated, particularly as an American Muslim. "Muslim is a very simple word. Translated into English it means peace or believers. So why have these two nice, beautiful words been changed in people's minds to 'terrorist'?" he asks.

Despite that, he refuses to be bitter and vengeful. Instead, he dedicates his time to rebuilding the city, which is what he was doing when he was so late for our meeting. So far he has renovated a museum, some schools and about 250 houses damaged in the floods.

He says he is more disciplined now about his religious observance, making sure he at least is punctual for his five daily prayer sessions. He is also extra careful to follow all the civil rules – he doesn't speed or cut through red lights or park where he shouldn't. "I don't want to give these guys the chance to do the same thing to me again."

He has never even thought of abandoning the US. He refuses to bear a grudge, and says, for him, it remains a great country – you don't judge 300 million people on the behaviour of a few bad guys. Nor will he contemplate quitting New Orleans. "This is my home, my city. My life is here now," he says.

To prove the point to himself, perhaps, he plans to buy another boat; his canoe went missing following his arrest. This time, though, he wants a bigger model that would allow him to rescue people more easily.

But surely that suggests that he fears another Katrina, I ask him.

"It happened before," he says. "It can happen again."

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers is published by Hamish Hamilton in hardback on 15 March, £18.99.

• Hurricane Katrina
• Dave Eggers
• United States
• Race issues
• Global terrorism

Ed Pilkington
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Virginia Woolf's house, Gertrude Stein's flat – feminist pilgrimages are a great way to connect with history. So when Vera Groskop said girls were boring, her mother decided it was time for her first trip

Despite my best efforts, my three-year-old daughter Vera hasn't exactly been celebrating her girlhood of late. In fact, influenced by her six-year-old brother, she can frequently be heard muttering, "Girls are boring. I want to do boys' things." I can see her point. Her brother's life is full of Star Wars, pirates, football and other action-packed phenomena. Vera gets Hello Kitty. She clearly finds this unsatisfying, and the situation is coming to a head. "I am not a girl, Mummy, I am a boy," she told me recently. "My name is Peter."

But it's good to be a girl, I tell her. Being a girl is fun. There are women's successes to be celebrated. There is joy in the female condition. How can I prove this though? In our home city, London, there is just not that much physical evidence of women's greatness. The Alison Lapper statue in Trafalgar Square was taken down in 2007. There are nine male statues in Parliament Square – and no female ones. London's first public statue of a black woman, Bronze Woman by Aleix Barbat, in Stockwell Memorial Garden, did not appear until 2008. Germaine Greer has frequently complained that women are underrepresented in public monuments, noting that one of the only recent sculptures of a woman is of the actor Diana Dors at the Shaw Ridge leisure complex in Swindon. Now, I like Diana Dors. But this is pathetic.

I was not about to frogmarch Vera to Swindon, but I loved the idea of an adventure, exploring women's hidden imprint on our streets. So I decided it was time for her first feminist pilgrimage. My mother-in-law reeled: "That poor child." But I knew how to sell it to Vera. "Would you like to come and find out what lots of important ladies did, and then we'll have cake?" "Yes," she replied seriously. "I would like cake."

Rachel Kolsky, a London tourist guide, has run women's walking tours since 2005. "They open people's eyes to the hidden history of an area," she says. "There is a great women's story on every corner." Vera and I set off on a three-hour walk around the East End of London, starting at the Royal London Hospital, the focal point of the Wonderful Women of Whitechapel and Spitalfields Tour. Here, Kolsky tells a story about Eva Luckes, the famous hospital matron, whose successes included the containment of a typhoid epidemic. The hospital's inner courtyard has a magnificent statue of Queen Alexandra, who was instrumental in bringing a new treatment for tuberculosis to the hospital. "Look at that strong, proud lady, Vera!" I say. "You said I could have cake," she says. "I'm cold."

Then Vera starts to cry, bringing our adventure to a sudden end. This is the problem with Kolsky's brilliant London tours: in order to showcase women's buried history, they cover a lot of ground. Great for an adult, but slightly too ambitious for a three-year-old.

I am not deterred though. Quite the opposite. As we head home I am hatching plans for future feminist pilgrimages. In the UK, we can follow in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and the Brontës. Or, next time we are passing the Houses of Parliament, we could check out the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, one of London's few female landmarks, in Victoria Gardens. Then there's a trail of Pankhurst family blue plaques to be followed in London, from 50 Clarendon Road in Holland Park to 120 Cheyne Walk in Kensington.

Further afield there is Gertrude Stein's apartment in Paris at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Now a private home, this address was once host to weekly salons and packed with paintings by Renoir, Gauguin and Cézanne; Picasso was a regular dinner guest. You may only be able to walk past these days, but you can still reminisce fondly on key passages in Stein's classic work The Auto- biography of Alice B Toklas. Or, in the same city, you could visit Simone de Beauvoir's grave – next to Sartre's – at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

In New York there is a lengthy Dorothy Parker trail leading from the Ansonia at 2108 Broadway (one of New York's most famous apartment blocks: Parker lived around the corner), to the 1925 birthplace of the New Yorker magazine at West 47th Street, where Parker worked, and on for cocktails at the Algonquin Hotel. Then there are all the great feminist museums: the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art, for instance, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, which includes a gallery devoted to Judy Chicago's "vaginas on plates" sculpture, The Dinner Party.

Maybe I will even start a "Sylvia Plath does New York" fund for when Vera turns 16. We will stay at the Barbizon Hotel at 63rd and Lexington – which was once women-only – wearing dresses with matching bags, as Plath did. We'll lunch near the one-time offices of Mademoiselle at 575 Madison Avenue where Plath was an intern. Or we'll criss-cross Massachusetts in a turquoise 1966 Thunderbird Convertible à la Thelma and Louise in honour of Louisa May Alcott, tattered copies of my favourite childhood book, Little Women, in tow. More likely though, we might just go to Stockwell when the weather warms up and take a look at that Bronze Woman, holding her baby triumphantly aloft. As long as there's an ice-cream van nearby, I'm sure Vera will be up for it.

For anyone who wants to explore women's lives and history, here are some other great ideas for feminist pilgrimages.

Bath: Jane Austen

Austen lived in Bath from 1801 to 1806. The Jane Austen Centre at 40 Gay Street is gearing up for September's Austen Festival which features "the opportunity to dress throughout the week in 18th-century Regency costume". You can have "tea with Mr Darcy" (a £10.50 high tea with cucumber sandwiches, scones and cream) all year round. Those keen for an Elizabeth Bennett-style constitutional can download a free audio walking tour "In the footsteps of Jane Austen" at visitbath.co.uk. There is also a "Jane for the day" suggested timetable: "12.45pm: Visit the Assembly Rooms: in Jane's day, guests assembled for balls, to drink tea, play cards, listen to music or just to talk and flirt. 3pm: Stroll around the streets Jane would have known."

Sussex: Virginia Woolf

"It is not so much a house as a phenomenon." So wrote Quentin Bell of Charleston, the country home between Eastbourne and Lewes that was used by the writers, artists and thinkers known as the Bloomsbury group in the early 20th century. Virginia and Leonard Woolf originally spotted this late-17th-century Sussex farmhouse, situated at the foot of the South Downs, and coaxed Virginia's sister, Vanessa Bell, to move there in 1916. It reopens for the summer on 31 March, with special tours on Fridays.

The Woolfs' own country home was Monk's House near Lewes, East Sussex (nationaltrust.org.uk). This property is occupied by tenants so is open only for short visits on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons between April and October. But there is the ideal pilgrimage on Saturday 26 June: an eight-mile walk "In the Footsteps of Virginia Woolf", from Monk's House to Charleston, with lunch at local stately home Firle Place (£25). To book tickets, call Charleston on 01323 811626 (charleston.org.uk).

Washington: Michelle Obama

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (on the National Mall, 14th Street and Constitution Avenue) has hundreds of exhibits commemorating the women's reform movement. The museum's First Ladies' Collection celebrates the influence of presidents' wives and has been one of the most popular exhibitions for the last 100 years, including archive material, diaries, memorabilia and costumes. This week, the white chiffon Jason Wu gown Michelle Obama wore to the inaugural balls went on show for the first time.

For another tribute to Obama, head to her favourite takeout joint, Good Stuff Eatery at 303 Pennsylvania Avenue SE in Washington DC for a "Prez Obama" burger or to Ben's Chilli Bowl at 1213 U Street NW for the Obamas' favourite half-smoke chilli dog. Nearby Busboys and Poets (2021 14th Street), a cafe and bookshop, hosts feminist events and has a huge feminist book collection.

Amsterdam: Anne Frank

"Now our Secret Annexe has truly become secret . . . Mr Kugler thought it would be better to have a bookcase built in front of the entrance to our hiding place. It swings out on its hinges and opens like a door." The canal house at 163 Prinsengracht was the hiding place of the young Jewish girl Anne Frank and her family during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, and there are numerous tours of the city that include the house, where you can visit the annexe where Frank wrote her secret diary. The house opens at 9am, and it is best to visit early to avoid queues (annefrank.org).

Paris: Simone de Beauvoir

As the French travel bible Guide du Routard notes, "In the winter Simone de Beauvoir came always first thing in the morning to the [Café] Flore to have a seat near the stove. Sartre recreated the atmosphere of an English club. Everybody listened to jazz, read poems or played little acts." Pay homage to the great feminist philosopher over a café au lait at Café Flore, before downloading a walking tour from St Germain to the Louvre at girlsguidetoparis.com for $1.98 (£1.30). This takes in 60 Rue de Seine where de Beauvoir once lived, and while you are strolling, remember: one is not born a woman, one becomes one.

• Wonderful Women of Whitechapel and Spitalfields starts at 11am on 13 March. Tickets can be booked through the Women's Library on 020-7320 2222. Battling Belles of Bow, 11am on Saturday 5 June, follows in the footsteps of Sylvia Pankhurst. For more information on other tours, email rachel@smallcakes.co.uk or visit goeastlondon.co.uk

• Women
• Feminism
• Jane Austen
• Virginia Woolf
• Michelle Obama
• Simone de Beauvoir

Viv Groskop
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An exiled authority on Hispanic culture, he homed in on identity

David Vilaseca, who has died aged 46, after being run over by a skip lorry as he rode his bicycle near his home at London Bridge, was a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, who specialised in Hispanic studies and critical theory. He wrote two major books and a string of brilliant articles over the course of some 20 years.

As an authority on Spanish and Catalan culture, he produced original and innovative studies of a number of writers, mostly gay, and exiles from their native land or language. Himself a proud and openly gay man who had made his life in London rather than his native Barcelona, David clearly had a personal interest in such figures. But as a master in the demanding school of poststructuralist thought, especially psychoanalysis and queer theory, he was an impeccable scholar. His central theme was that identity was unstable and the limits between self and other difficult, if not impossible, to draw. It was a theme he would also explore in a prizewinning novel.

David took his first degree in philology in 1987 at Barcelona's Autonomous University before studying for an MA at Bloomington, Indiana, in 1989. I supervised his PhD, awarded at Queen Mary, University of London, in just three years (1992), in spite of the fact that he had a full teaching load as a language assistant. He then returned to teach at his home university. Finding the British system more receptive to his research, he came back to a lectureship at Southampton University in 1994 before moving to Royal Holloway as senior lecturer in 2000 with rapid promotion to professor of Hispanic studies and critical theory in 2003.

Salvador Dalí, whose autobiography was written in several, indecipherable hands and in a macaronic mix of languages, was clearly a perfect match for David's deconstructive approach. His first book, published in 1995, was The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí's Autobiographical Writings. Where previous scholars had attempted to discover the "true" Dalí behind the multiple masks, David took seriously the elusiveness of identity in a subject who wrote gnomically: "There are four Dalís and the best is the fifth." Crucially, this sense of self was built on Dalí's vehement rejection of homosexuality, and of Federico García Lorca, the gay poet who loved him. The painter could thus at one moment write jokingly to Lorca as a rent boy, offering his services for a few pesetas, and at another insist dogmatically: "Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. I am not a homosexual."

Bizarre episodes in Dalí's autobiography suddenly made sense in David's subtle and sensitive readings. In one tragicomic scene, Dalí struggles with a razor blade to cut out a tick that he believes has attached itself to his back, only to discover that it is a mole, part of his own body. Self and other, inside and outside, thus prove perilously difficult to separate.

While David's first book had on its cover a youthful Dalí, proudly posing in a turban, the second, Hindsight and the Real: Subjectivity in Gay Hispanic Autobiography (2003), boasted Johnny Depp in full drag from the film version of Before Night Falls, the autobiography of the Cuban exile Reinaldo Arenas.

Typically, David's accounts of Spanish, Catalan and Hispanic writers could prove unsettling to scholars and activists alike. Thus, he showed convincingly that Arenas actively constructed an image of himself as a person with HIV/Aids, even as that identity was imposed upon him; and that the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo came to identify himself as a homosexual only when told as much by his mentor, Jean Genet. This was a fine example of the "hindsight" of David's title, the way in which retrospectively we build narratives of ourselves, telling tales that are never simple or single.

It was perhaps a surprise that such a private person as David should publish a novel that was clearly autobiographical in origin. L'Aprenentatge de la Soledat (The Apprenticeship of Solitude), composed in diary format, is the story of a gay Catalan living in the London which David loved. While it would be naive to take the novel as a personal revelation (David worked for years on stylistic revisions of his text), it charts with disconcerting objectivity love and sex in the capital. Lengthy and controversial, it marked David's return to the Catalan language and won him the 2007 Octubre prize for Catalan fiction.

David wrote that, as in the continuing relationship between patient and psychoanalyst, Dalí's autobiography was "part of a love story which has clearly not come to an end". This is also true of his own writing. A third academic book, Negotiating the Event, will be published this autumn.

David is survived by his mother, Marina, his sister, Marta, and the many friends who loved him.

• David Vilaseca, Hispanic scholar, born 6 February 1964; died 9 February 2010

• Spain
• Salvador Dalí

Paul Julian Smith
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Danny Huston stars in another intelligent film transposing Tolstoy to LA. By Peter Bradshaw

British-born director Bernard Rose, known as a horror specialist for his 1992 shocker Candyman, is showing some stunning form with his modern adaptations of Tolstoy. After a conventional account of Anna Karenina, Rose brought off a brilliant version of The Death Of Ivan Ilych in 2000; set in modern Hollywood, and entitled Ivansxtc, it starred Danny Huston as Ivan, the agent and Tinseltown power-player, confronting the awful truth about his approaching death. Now Rose has adapted Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata, again starring Huston, again set in contemporary Los Angeles. The result is bold, brilliant and exhilarating: an intimately horrible, sexually explicit and black-comic portrait of a toxic marriage that is closer to the spirit of the original than any number of costume dramas. It is not merely a study of jealousy and obsession, but a profoundly pessimistic and nihilistic rejection of romantic love and sex itself – which, in a world without God, is the ultimate blasphemy.

Huston plays Edgar, a very rich man in early middle age, whose worldly charm and sensuality attract a woman he meets at a party: this is Abby (Elizabeth Röhm), a beautiful and talented classical pianist, who is already in a relationship. Their passionate, clandestine affair leads years later to marriage, but Abby is discontented, having now given up music for children. To appease her, Edgar induces his private charitable foundation to host a benefit concert, so his wife will play Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata to a moneyed private audience, but she must therefore practise long hours with a handsome violinist: Aiden (Matthew Yang King).

Instantly, Edgar conceives a fanatical jealousy – after all, did Abby not once cheat on that former boyfriend to be with him? Yet he is neurotically compelled to let Abby be alone with the handsome newcomer, to prove to himself that he is not threatened, and so creates the scab he's picking at. Abby is entirely innocent, but exasperated and sexually disaffected with Edgar, and also insists on maintaining her affectionate friendship with Aiden, just to prove to herself that she is a free agent. And so this neurotic, poisoned situation metastises in Edgar's mind.

In his novella, Tolstoy has a line about the supposed joys of the honeymoon and conjugal bliss being like a fairground con-trick whose victims are too ashamed to admit they've been duped and so too ashamed to warn others – and thus the scam continues for eternity. In Rose's movie, it is monogamous intimacy itself that is vilified through Edgar's crazed worldview. His wife's essential unknowability – in fact, the unknowability and uncontrollability of everything outside his head – drives  him mad.

The despair and contempt also includes Beethoven and all classical music, which Edgar secretly loathes: the famous duet, so far from being a sublime meeting of spirits, is a clenched, ritualistic confrontation in tune with the violence and pornography of Edgar's private hell. Rose's Kreutzer Sonata looks a little like Haneke's The Piano Teacher, and bears comparison with Chantal Akerman's version of Proust's The Captive – but is freer and more uninhibited. My only reservation is with Rose's use of voiceover narration, which is, perhaps, a little pedantic. But it doesn't stop this from being a superbly creative adaptation.

Rating: 4/5

• Drama
• Leo Tolstoy

Peter Bradshaw
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This week's podcast meets The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo AKA Swedish actor Noomi Rapace, talks LA and Tolstoy with Danny Huston, and reviews Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island and Paul Greengrass's Green Zone.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Swedish author Stieg Larsson's literary sensation about a crack computer hacker who teams up with a disgraced journalist to solve a 40-year-old murder, has sold over 1m books in the UK alone. Now the film is set to make a star of Noomi Rapace, who plays its sultry, charismatic title character. The actor tells Jason Solomons about transforming herself physically for the role (Thai boxing came in handy) and discusses the new wave of Swedish films breaking out in the wake of Let the Right One In.

Xan Brooks then joins in to run the rule over the week's big releases: the pacy-despite-its-length Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; Scorsese's overheated Hitchcockian pastiche Shutter Island; and Paul Greengrass's Green Zone, which stars Matt Damon on the hunt for WMDs in the aftermath of the Iraq war.

And finally, actor Danny Huston is on the line from Los Angeles to talk about The Kreutzer Sonata, his latest low-budget film with Ivansxtc director Bernard Rose and based on a novella by Tolstoy. The actor, son of John and brother of Anjelica Huston, shares why the novella works so well transposed to modern-day LA and how his legendary father would have really enjoyed low-budget digital film-making.

Jason SolomonsIain ChambersObserver

Book looks back at life and death of Nusch Éluard, French model and artist painted by Picasso and photographed by Man Ray

She was the quiet woman of Surrealist Paris and an enigmatic muse that inspired some of the greatest art of the 1930s and 40s.

But Nusch Éluard, a beautiful model who sat for Picasso and posed for Man Ray, has been largely overlooked by history since her death in 1946.

In a bid to restore Éluard to her rightful place in the Parisian artistic pantheon, a French writer has this week published the first official biography of a woman thought to have played a crucial, if subtle, role in the flowering of one of the 20th century's boldest movements.

For Chantal Vieuille, author of Nusch: Portrait d'une muse du Surréalisme, Éluard deserves to be remembered not only for the impact she had on the men around her but also for her liberated approach. "She incarnated an ideal femininity because she was very free," said Vieuille at the book's launch in Paris.

Born in 1906 as Maria Benz in Mulhouse, she moved to Paris in 1928 and worked as hypnotist's helper to earn a living. In 1930, while wandering through central Paris, she was approached the Surrealist poets René Char, and Paul Éluard – whom she married four years later.

Éluard was one of the most beloved figures of the Surrealists. As wife of Paul Éluard she became the muse of Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, René Magritte and Joan Miró. Her role was not limited to the inspiration of others: she is believed to have made Surrealist collages while battling with insomnia – works described by Timothy Baum, a New York-based art dealer, as "exquisite".

According to Baum, who was a friend of May Ray, her death of a stroke at 40 was a hammer-blow to the group.

• Art
• France

Lizzy Davies
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My purchasing habits are out of control, so I've decided to renounce the charms of Amazon and concentrate on stuff I've already bought

Inspired by Bibi van der Zee's powers of self-denial, I've decided to get all Puritan on my literary ass. I'm not talking about giving up books for a week: that would be weird; I'd have to talk to people. No, what I'm going to do is put an end to buying the little blighters.

We all know how it is these days. The faultline between desire and action has faded to a smudge. I'm not even sure I still bother going to Amazon. It's as if some dastardly sales whizz has infiltrated my brain, hooking my dopaminergic neurones straight up to PayPal. I read about a book. Mmmm... interesting, I think. And two days later it's sitting by my bed.

It last happened last week. I was enjoying the Kapuściński controversy and before I'd even bothered to finish the article I'd spent eight quid. The worst thing, is I'm really excited about my latest acquisition: Kapuściński's book on Haile Selassie. I recently read The Soccer War and loved it. But when will I get to it? What about Travels with Herodotus, which has been patiently awaiting my courtesy? And The Shah of Shahs, which I bought in Foyles in November? And these are merely my Kapuściński whims.

The oniomania has got to stop. I hereby impose a six-month moratorium on book-buying. (I was thinking of a year but I couldn't quite face it.) And now for the fun bit: there's a box in my room filled with unread purchases and I am systematically going to give them my attention. These represent only a fraction of the total (I'm currently "between" abodes, and most of my library is doing time in a depot in Norwood.) So this short list will have to do for now ...

• The Enchanter by Vladimir Nabokov. Reflexively bought on Amazon while reading about The Orginal of Laura several weeks ago. The pre-Lolita "throb". Another pederast and russet-haired colt. I wonder what will happen.

• The Secret History by Donna Tartt. My friends all told me to read it. My girlfriend told me to read it. I was passing a bookshop and I bought it. Then I didn't read it.

• The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. I spent most of last year living in Lisbon, a gleefully self-referential literary city, strewn with homages to the dapper lusophone ventriloquist. Every day, I walked past the café at which he wrote. Every day, his book glowered at me from on high in our apartment. I think I might have to read it in a pub.

• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Also bought in preparation for my year abroad. I am going away, I said to myself one afternoon while browsing in Bloomsbury. I will have time to read big novels like this. It's a wonder I haven't read it sooner. It didn't even make my suitcase.

• A Jew Must Die by Jacques Chessex. Bought after a talk at a bookshop in north-west London a fortnight ago, mostly on account of the cheery title. It did win the Prix Goncourt though.

• Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos. An ex-girlfriend bade me read it, romantically enough, when we were strolling through Versailles. I think I may even have bought it later that day at Shakespeare & Co. Then I saw the John Malkovich film. And Cruel Intentions. And then I forgot about it.

• Walden by Henry David Thoreau. I have no idea how or when or why this ended up in my box. I suspect it might annoy me. But I've been carting it from place to place for years, so I think I should probably give it a go.

• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. I have never read any Ernest Hemingway, I remarked to myself, alarmed, at a bookshop in Brixton a couple of years ago. How can I never have read any Ernest Hemingway? I have still never read any Ernest Hemingway.

• Operation Shylock by Philip Roth. I bought this during a mad spat of impulse buying while researching for a book. That's the problem with research: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read. And then the more you buy.

• Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. I always mean to read more science books. In fact, I always mean to read less fiction and more fact. The thing about fact is, even if it's boring it tends to make the people who read it less so. And Jared Diamond isn't boring. And any book that claims to answer the most "obvious", "important" and "difficult" questions about the whole of human history gets my vote.

NB: In light of the subject matter, and the numerous links that appear on this page, I would be interested to know if anyone has impulse bought any books during the course of this article.

• Booksellers

Toby Lichtig
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Every writer of reportage ought to learn from the Kapuscinski controversy. Creative non-fiction is a slippery slope

Had he lived a few years longer, Ryszard Kapuscinski might well have won the Nobel prize for literature. Although these things are shrouded in Vatican-like secrecy, I bet that he was on the Swedish Academy's rolling shortlist. Journalists in many countries would then have hailed him as the first "non-fiction" writer to win it since Winston Churchill in 1953. Now a huge row has broken out in his native Poland over a new book which suggests that his non-fiction was not so non-fictional, after all. This row has already blown round the world, because Kapuscinski's name is a global byword for a certain kind of literary-political reportage.

I have just read the book, which is called (in Polish) Kapuscinski Non-Fiction. Its author is the journalist Artur Domoslawski, to whom Kapuscinski had been model, mentor and friend, and it has been criticised on several grounds. These include his handling of the travelling writer's allegedly numerous love affairs, which I do find insensitive, and of his communist past and occasional contacts with the secret police, which I think Domoslawski handles well.

More broadly, the book is condemned as being a denunciation of a former mentor. Kapuscinski's widow calls it "patricide". This is not how I see it. I find that the author tries to be fair, allowing many different voices to speak. He captures the Ryszard I knew, starting with a brilliant evocation of his warm, nut-brown, disarming smile. Literally disarming in Ryszard's case, because that almost pantomime-humble smile got him through many a dangerous confrontation with armed men, in Africa and elsewhere. But this book is the protracted cry of a worried and even a disappointed disciple – one who, in his nearly three-year journey of investigation, found things that deeply disturbed him.

The heart of the matter, for Domoslawski, me, and probably the wider world, is the frontier-crossing between fact and fiction. Some of us have been worrying about this for years. In 2001, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy held a symposium on Witness Literature, delicately indicating that prizeworthy Literature, with a capital L, was not confined to fiction and poetry.

I gave a talk (now reprinted in my book Facts Are Subversive) in which I observed that "with Kapuscinski, we keep crossing from the Kenya of fact to the Tanzania of fiction, and back again, but the transition is nowhere explicitly signalled". In the same year, the anthropologist and writer John Ryle wrote a coruscating review essay in the Times Literary Supplement, documenting numerous inaccuracies, exaggerations and mythifications in Kapuscinski's writing on Africa. He argued that most of them tended towards what Ryle called the "tropical baroque", in which everything becomes more exotic, wild, savage, extreme and, dare we say, oriental. Now Domoslawski retraces some of the master's footsteps, to Addis Ababa, for instance, where Kapuscinski researched his famous book on the fall of Haile Selassie, The Emperor, or to Santa Cruz, Bolivia. He finds Kapuscinski's own witnesses complaining of inaccurate and fabulated material. There are numerous examples.

What Kapuscinski did is really no longer in doubt. The question is what we make of it. One school is represented by the American writer Lawrence Weschler, whom Domoslawski quotes as saying: "What does it matter which shelf we put The Emperor and Shah of Shahs on: fiction or non-fiction? They will always be terrific books." A schoolfriend of Kapuscinski says The Emperor is "the best Polish novel of the 20th century". And of course those books were also about Poland. They were read by Polish readers partly as allegories of their own situation, and they might have been blocked by the communist regime's censors had they not been firmly presented as non-fiction about far-off reactionary places.

A second school, which one might call "Ryszard's handwringing defenders", is well represented by Neal Ascherson, himself the author of superb reportage from Poland and elsewhere. Kapuscinski was a great storyteller, not a liar, he writes on the Guardian books blog, and there is an important difference between the news reporting and the books. But then he makes this, to me, very surprising statement: "Almost all journalists, except for a handful of saints, do on occasion sharpen up quotes or slightly shift around times and places to heighten effect. Perhaps they should not, but they – we – do." Really, Neal? And how much, pray, is "slightly"? And how far may one go in "sharpening up"? In the rest of his blog, however, Ascherson goes on to worry that Kapuscinski did not make it clear enough to the reader what he was doing.

The third school, to which I belong, says that even if there is not – as Ascherson vividly puts it – a "floodlit wire frontier", there is nonetheless a vitally important line, or frontier zone, that writers of non-fiction should strive never to cross. If we do cross it, we should put a different label on the resulting product. Domoslawski names one reason for this: simple fairness to readers. Readers need to know what they are getting. After all, at least some of the excitement of reading a writer like Kapuscinski comes from believing these things actually happened. He was there. He saw it with his own eyes. He nearly died getting the story. The rhetoric of his own writing often beats that drum.

The second reason goes deeper. There are, it seems to me, few more responsible callings for a human being armed with a pen than that of being a veracious witness to great and grave events. In introducing that 2001 Nobel symposium on Witness Literature, the then secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, suggested that "truth is initially nothing but that which a credible witness certifies". This may not work as a universal philosophical rule, but it certainly applies to what writer witnesses do, especially when they stand alone amid tragedy or triumph. To bear witness to genocide, war, revolution and human courage amid inhumanity is – forgive the pathos – a sacred trust.

Yes, in our selection of facts, images and quotations, in our characterisation of the real people we write about, writers of reportage do work in many ways like novelists. But in recognition of that responsibility to history, as well as the "non-fiction" promise we make to our readers, we must stick to the facts as best we can find them. We must not change the order of events even "slightly", nor "sharpen up" anything that appears between quotation marks. We all make mistakes. No one sees the whole picture, or can be truly objective. Everyone has a point of view. But if I say I saw that, then I saw that. It was not in a different street, at a different time, or told me by someone else over a drink at the hotel bar.

I see two ways forward. One, humorously suggested by Domoslawski himself in an post-publication interview, is that in bookshops there should be a shelf between fiction and non-fiction, with a new category marked simply "Kapuscinski". The other is to learn from Kapuscinski's marvellous work, but also from his transgressions – and hence to bear truer witness.

Timothy Garton Ash will be talking with Jon Snow at the Frontline Club in London on 16 March

• Ryszard Kapuściński
• Poland

Timothy Garton Ash
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As Disney rebrands Rapunzel as Tangled, we imagine what other children's stories and fairy tales could be made more appealing to boys

Disney is taking no chances. Book publishers have long since realised that anything that sounds too obviously girly is a complete no-no for the unfairer sex – hence JK Rowling's books weren't published under the name of Joanne Rowling. Hollywood has taken rather longer to make the connection. But after less-than-spectacular US box-office receipts for The Princess and the Frog, the studio has decided to rebrand its forthcoming cartoon in an effort to win the little chaps back. So Rapunzel has become Tangled – complete with an all-action male swashbuckling hero. It's worth a go, I suppose. Here are some other titles boys might like to see.

Malice in Wonderland

Freddy Krueger has a day out in Alton Towers and picks off a coachload of schoolchildren one-by-one in a gore schlock-horror fest before a grinning Cheshire cartoon cat and his trusty dormouse lieutenant come to the rescue.

Red Riding in Da Hood

A young Che Guevara pimps his BMX bike and heads off to the Bronx to take out a gang of neo-fascist hyenas who have been terrorising the local community of multicultural zebras.

You Beauty and the Beast

It's the last minute of extra time in the World Cup final, the score is 0-0 and the game is heading for penalties, when Wayne Rooney starts his run in his own half. He beats one German Hofmeister bear, then another, and another, before curling the ball into the left-hand corner.

GI Snow and the Seven Dwarfs

Matt Damon flies south to Colombia where he rounds up his cute band of seven undercover chihuahuas – Sneezy, Dopey, Edgy, Wired, Wasted, Psychotic and Sleepless – and destroys the world's largest cocaine factory.

• Walt Disney Company
• Animation
• Fairytales
• Film adaptations

John Crace
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Google and the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage have reached an agreement to digitise up to a million out-of-copyright works at the national libraries in Florence and Rome, including some by Galileo.

And it's just two weeks after an Italian court gave three Google executives suspended prison sentences over a video of bullying on YouTube that had been removed once the company was told about it.

Google is not only to work closely together with the Italian libraries, but also with the Italian ministry of culture – the first time that the search engine has had a government department a such a close partner on such a project. Google called it a "groundbreaking deal".

"The libraries will select the works to be digitised from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy's most famous poets and writers," says Google's strategic partner development manager, Gino Mattiuzzo, in a blogpost announcing the deal.

While the costs will be covered fully by Google, the company will pass the scans on. The books will be available to groups including the EU's Europeana project, which already has scanned 6 million digital items of cultural value.

"We believe today's announcement is an important step, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners," says Mattiuzzo.

Google has similar arrangements with Oxford University, Madrid's Complutense University, the Bavarian state museum and others.

However, it's not clear whether Google is creating the world's biggest library or the world's biggest bookshop. Some fear the search engine is exploiting cultural heritage as a cheap context for advertising.

Recently, a New York judge postponed a decision on whether the company should be allowed to display parts of books still in-copyright.

Google on the other hand claims good intentions: "We envision a future in which people will be able to search and access the world's books anywhere, anytime. After all, Antonio Beccadelli and Anastasius Germonius – like Shakespeare and Cervantes – are part of our human cultural history."

• Google
• Ebooks

Mercedes Bunz
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Let's play. Let's play with words. Let's start with a man and a room and see where it takes us. But is that room a hotel room, a bedroom, an office ...

And hello from my hotel room. I can't remember how many hotel rooms I have occupied since I last wrote to you, Best Beloveds, but they have been numerous and various and have served to confirm me in my belief that I should stick to the same chain if I can, because then I'll always be at home – in somewhere relatively cheap, neutral and suitable for typing. The beginnings and drafts of all my books have, frankly, spent more time in hotel rooms than even the most energetic Wag.

For those of you who read the previous blog, my cunning plan to divide my time between the play and the novel (while doing a bit of standup and a show in Bath) came somewhat loose on its hinges when the play won, became indecently insistent and ended up monopolising all the parts of last week, so that I didn't spend either flailing about a stage, or hurtling across railway platforms. The play is now with its intended recipient and he has agreed to take care of it – it's probably already peeing on his carpet, chewing his shirt collars and bleating endearingly when he puts it back into its box. For which I, of course, apologise. Very high-maintenance, plays.

And, as relative peace descends between meetings – I'm in London, which is where meetings happen, and muggings, obviously, which are just a kind of vigorous meeting … Anyway, I'm overdue for another chat with the novel. A new section is rattling about and needs to be expressed. But, before I start, I thought I'd look at the process of putting one word after another – the process that no one but the author really sees – the process that is difficult to examine properly, even in one-to-one sessions with students.

So. This won't end up in my novel, but let us say that I have the feeling there's a man about the place and that the place is a room. I wouldn't normally start with something that vague – it would generate an insane amount of rewriting – but this will at least demonstrate that, having written, we can scrabble around and see what the words suggest in the way of playmates they might need, and paths they might want to follow. With or without preparation, the picking and grinding and staring which will now ensue is inevitable – prior knowledge would simply make it more informed.

So.

So all over again.

A man and a room.

Right.

A man walks into a room.

We're off then. He's a man, definitely a man, not a lady, or a unicorn, or an urchin – not even urchin-like characteristics – unicorn-like, then? Does he seek out virgins? Not that I'm aware of. Was he at any time a lady? Nope.

A man walks into a room.

Sure it's not the man? Bit more definite – the man. That being the definite article and so forth. They're both rather boring, though. What about – our man? I quite, for no reason I can put my finger on, like our man. It has implications.

Our man walks into a room.

Present tense. Feels appropriate. Doing a lot in the present tense at the moment. Will we argue with the present tense? Not just now. I feel there is something – research, preparation – that tells me things will be revealed about our man and if he is in the present tense he will learn of them with us in real time and this seems a good thing. I will keep it for now.

Don't know about the a, though … The bounce in our man seems to render a room rather flat and translucent. He isn't a translucent chap. I don't think it's the room, either. I think it's his room.

Our man walks into his room.

Hmmm. Walks is, of course, appalling. Apart from the fact that we may just need the man in his room and may simply assume that he got there in one of the usual ways according to the laws of physics and no entering is necessary – walking is just tedious.

Hopping?

Yes, well, if you're not going to be helpful.

Limps.

Oooh, I quite like limps – he may have been to places and done things, our man. He may limp. I may hear the thump of that through a thin carpet on a wooden floor … But I'm mainly having a problem with into his – it is slightly difficult to say and therefore to think – it is gluey and unmelodious, somehow. Into his … I don't like it.

Our man is in his room.

Ah, now then – no mucking about getting there, don't need his life story – well, we may, but not at the present juncture. Yes.

Our man is in his room.

Sort of scans, that does. We need things to scan – presses them so much further and so much more easily into the dear readers' brains, and they notice them so much less. We need them not to notice, just to open up and let us be. Good. Possibly.

This is a very short sentence – is it a sentence? Are we doing the staccato thing, choppy entrance and then we'll settle down?

He stands.

Apparently we are.

His bottle of rye is in the desk drawer.

Yes, I knew we might wander off down some mean streets in a bit – shut up with your nonsense. He isn't thirsty, he isn't wearing a fedora, if you want to imagine he's Humphrey Bogart for a while, you're allowed to, because that may help. We like Humphrey Bogart. We have faith in him.

Our man is in his room. He stands.

Is he standing because he was sitting? Or has he been standing all this while? What need we imply?

The leather armchair his Aunt Maude gave him in 1976 squeaks beneath him as he rises in a way that reminds him of his fondness for rubber underwear.

I am going to give you such a slap in a minute. Expo-bloody-sition. Honestly.

He stands by the window.

Okay. Not enough, though.

He stands by the window and waits.

Not entirely unmelodious. Run that all by me again.

Our man is in his room. He stands by the window and waits.

That may do for now. And it may be that we're a bit choppy, because he's a bit tense, which is fine – he's our man – if he's tense, we all get tense.

The light of the sunrise highlights his broad cheekbones.

Right, I'm filling a sock with room service apples, taking you into the bathroom and hitting you with it until you either get a grip or die like the useless weasel you clearly are. Light and highlights? Because we love helpless and meaningless repetition? And highlights anyway? What height is the window – I was getting upper window myself – how is the bloody light striking him? I like that it's sunrise, but I'd prefer dawn, off the top of my head, and DON'T LET ME EVER CATCH YOU SLIPPING POINT OF VIEW LIKE THAT – WE'RE IN CLOSE THIRD. HE CAN'T SEE HIS OWN SODDING CHEEK BONES, CAN HE? WHAT, IS HE THINKING ABOUT HIS CHEEKS FOR SOME REASON? LOOKING AT HIS REFLECTION IN THE GLASS WHICH WOULDN'T EVEN WORK BECAUSE IT'S LIGHT OUTSIDE BECAUSE OF YOUR BLOODY SUNRISE – IT'S THE APPLE SOCK FOR YOU, MATEY, AND NO MISTAKE.

Our man is in his room. He stands by the window and waits and outside the sun is rising and he watches it. There is a slowness about it that he likes.

Maybe. We're less choppy – he seems rather more smooth and substantial here, but I don't like that second it. Its can get awfully woolly and, as established, repetition makes me tetchy. About it that – bit of a tongue twister.

There is a slowness to its progress.

Maybe.

There is a slowness in its progress.

Maybe

There is a slowness in the heat of it that he likes.

And again?

There is a slowness in the heat of it he likes.

We're not shaking the it, but it seems more excusable … Can't miss that beat though, I don't think. Once more from the top.

Our man is in his room. He stands by the window and waits and outside the sun is rising and he watches it. There is a slowness in the heat of it that he likes.

And is this a hotel room, or a bedroom, or an office room? Has he been up all night? Does he sleep usually? Is there someone with him? Are they asleep? Why does he like slowness? Does he have a limp? Is it possible to write that without hearing the silent comedy question – a limp what?

And on we would go, round and round and round until it's as good as we can manage. And then some more.

Welcome to the rest of my evening. Onwards.

• Fiction
• Words and language

AL Kennedy
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Below is a selection of items from the writer's archive, newly acquired by the Harry Ransom Centre, including his first ever poem, a first handwritten draft of Infinite Jest, a letter from the startled editor getting his head around the novel's vast scale, and one of his lists of 'VOCAB'

• David Foster Wallace

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Manuscripts, annotated books and juvenilia to be made available following the acquisition of the late David Foster Wallace's archive by the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Centre

Look at a selection of items from the archive here

The archive of the late David Foster Wallace - which includes everything from draft manuscripts to childhood poems - has been acquired by the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas in Austin. Scholars and fans will soon be able to explore the painstaking reading and writing that went into works including his vast novel of entertainment-addled America, Infinite Jest.

Wallace, whose reputation as one of contemporary America's most significant writers continues to grow, took his own life in 2008, aged 46.

As well as manuscripts for Wallace's books, stories and essays (with his meticulous edits marked in different coloured inks), the archive includes research materials, his own often heavily annotated library, and early work stretching back through his college and graduate school writings to a poem he wrote as a young child. This last, "Viking Poem", was composed at around the age of six, and shows Wallace experimenting with his signature as well as revealing early signs of the acute comic sensibility that would mark his later work. ("If you were to see a viking today" the poem advises, "It's best you should go some other way / because they'd kill you very well / and all your gold they'd certainly sell / For all these reasons stay away".)

A further curiosity of the archive are the lists - sometimes jotted in the endpapers of books, sometimes typed - of unusual "VOCAB" (as Wallace heads one such sheet). Perhaps unsurprisingly for an author with such a gymnastic style, he carefully marked down words such as "primipara" ("woman who's [sic] pregnant for the first time"), "tardive" ("adj – having symptoms that develop slowly or appear long after inception – used of disease"), and "sciolism" ("pretentious air of scholarship") for use at a later date.

Bonnie Nadell, Wallace's agent, who helped his widow organise the archive, said the papers were left in fairly chaotic condition, but "as messy as David was with how he kept his work, the actual writing is painstakingly careful ... We want readers to see how he thought, because how he thought was unique and beautiful and precise. Anyone looking through his drafts and even his books will see the level of thinking that went into every sentence and every page."

Don DeLillo – another of the many contemporary authors whose archives are now held at the Harry Ransom Centre, and with whom Wallace corresponded while he was writing Infinite Jest – commented: "The work of David Foster Wallace, so vitally and fearlessly attached to the culture around it, will be a source of exploration for generations to come,"

Publisher Little Brown has donated its editorial files relating to Wallace, dating back to 1993, to the collection. The files include materials for Wallace's posthumous novel, The Pale King, but these will not be added to the collection until the book's publication, scheduled for April 2011.

Michael Pietsch, Wallace's longtime editor, said: "David's letters are delightful to read in themselves, and we hope that scholars will benefit from finding his notes to his editors and copy editors in the same archive with his draft manuscripts, journals and other correspondence."

The Wallace materials are currently being processed and will be available to researchers and the public in autumn 2010. A small selection of items are being exhibited until April.

• David Foster Wallace
• Fiction

Lindesay Irvine
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From Petronius to John Steinbeck and Evelyn Waugh, the novelist considers books that have mastered the art of dialogue, ensuring that 'they always speak to us, not least between the lines'

Born in Chicago but educated in England, Frederic Raphael is probably best known as the author of Glittering Prizes, and its sequel Fame and Fortune, both of which he adapted into acclaimed TV and radio series starring Tom Conti as writer Adam Morris. This month, he publishes a third volume in this series, Final Demands, which finds Morris contending with middle age and its discontents and which he has also adapted for BBC Radio 4.

Raphael is also a prolific author of some 20 other novels, as well as history books, biographies and film screenplays. Last year he completed a strikingly contemporary translation of Petronius's Satyrica, (published by Carcanet, priced £12.99).

Buy Frederic Raphael books at the Guardian bookshop

"Dialogue brings a novel to life. It is possible to compose fiction without it, just as Georges Perec was able to write an entire book without using the vowel "e", but one had better be a genius to affect such forms of composition. And once is quite enough. It may also be possible to contrive great blocks of prose, in which landscapes are described and psychological states analysed as never before. But a writer who cannot make characters talk, and have their conversations require us to listen to them, is locked into airless formality.

"Dialogue tells us what people say and it hints at what they do not. It encourages readers to bring a book to life by enticing their participation in it. They then supply their own reading of how loudly or softly, truly or falsely, words are exchanged. When a writer allows his characters to talk among themselves, he grants them their freedom. If only because the subconscious can then chime in, his premeditated scheme never wholly dictates what someone will say.

"Dialogue in a novel is like stained glass, the surrounding prose is there to frame and support it. Even Marcel Proust, who certainly delivers paragraphs of dense prose, used dialogue brilliantly; and silence too. His greatest character, the Baron de Charlus, is arrogant, garrulous and caustic. But when an arriviste hostess finds the nerve to banish him from her house, his inability to find any kind of crushing retort signals the moment when the narrator, Marcel, is able to stand away from his mentor's shadow. Thenceforth he is free to depict him with merciless accuracy. Dialogue can be used in various ways and various registers, but a writer who masters its nuances will produce novels that always speak to us, not least between the lines."

1. Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

O'Hara was a keen observer, above all of the Pennsylvania Dutch inhabitants of the town he called Gibbsville (a permeable disguise for his birthplace, Pottsville). He could mimic local speech and vocabulary so that the reader can overhear it. The story of the life and death of Julian English is a masterpiece of erotic suggestion and narrative economy.

2. The Satyrica by Petronius Arbiter

Petronius, who lived during the reign of Nero, who ordered his suicide, wrote a sprawling picaresque novel of which only the chapters concerning the gross Trimalchio, a millionaire ex-slave, have survived in their entirety. Petronius was a master of elegance and of its low cousin, scorn. The adventures of Encolpius, his anti-hero, and his louche companions are salacious and farcical by turns, but they are brought to life by the often absurd and obscene chat which comes directly from the gutters of Roman life. As I discovered when translating Petronius, dead languages can still have raucous voices.

3. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

Lewis was nicknamed "Red", more for the colour of his hair and livid complexion than on account of his politics, but his capacity for catching the vocabulary and aggressive philistinism of middle-western America was as boundless in print as it was, we are told, in person. In company, he was a mimic who did not know when or how to stop; in print, he made accuracy into satire. Babbittry entered the American language as the style of salesmanship and humbug to which John Updike surely paid rhyming tribute in his creation "Rabbit" Angstrom, a salesman in the Lewis tradition.

4. A God and His Gifts by Ivy Compton-Burnett

The last novel published in Ivy's lifetime was one of the first I ever reviewed. I am glad that I recognised genius when I saw it; a limited genius perhaps, but there it was. Ivy's novels were always a tapestry of dialogue, formally phrased but full of hidden poisons and traps. Her milieu was the Edwardian upper middle-class, on the surface polite, savage underneath. She described very little, but lust, violence and greed all emerged from the seemingly prim dialogue. Melodrama was never more elegantly articulate.

5. A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch was a philosopher and a romantic, with a sensuous intelligence and a keen ear. Her novels contain slabs of rather too colourful landscape and gushing description, but her great strength lay in the clever edginess of her conversations. I wrote the movie script of A Severed Head and it was, I confess, an easy job: unlike most writers', much of her dialogue sounded good out loud. I remember, for instance, an unfaithful wife saying, "It's all or nothing" and the husband's answer: "Let me recommend nothing." Facile? You do it.

6. Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham

Maugham is regularly dismissed and as regularly resurrected. He had no grand opinion of his own work, but he learnt early on, when writing plays, that a capacity for amusing dialogue supplied the best means for capturing an audience. Cakes and Ale (the title comes from Twelfth Night) proves that the literary world of the 1930s, with its cliques and claques, is not very different from that dominated by today's Michaels and the ubiquitous Antonias. It is said that Hugh Walpole soon came to recognise his own voice, and character, in Alroy Kear and, no doubt, Thomas Hardy in Edward Driffield. What is a novel of manners without a serrated edge?

7. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

When I first opened Steinbeck's great novel about "the Okies" – migrant sharecroppers from the 1930s dust-bowl of Oklahoma – I found their dialogue, phonetically reproduced on the page, quite incomprehensible. But read it aloud and the voices of the Joad family come out fighting, as it were. The family's trek to golden California has plenty of cruel incident, but when I think of Rose of Sharon, for instance, I hear her name "Rosa-sharn" the way Tom Joad said it, and says it.

8. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

Most pundits now proclaim Brideshead Revisited as Waugh's enduring masterpiece. Its purple passages have their nostalgic glamour, but isn't there something lamingly absurd in all that well-spoken snobbery? Waugh does so love a Lord. The earlier Scoop is a satire on pre-war Fleet Street and has a savage larkiness that never visits Bridehead. What does one remember in particular? The line "Up to a point, Lord Copper", the nearest an employee dares come to disagreeing with his tyrannical (Northcliffian) boss.

9. The Golden Fruits by Natalie Sarraute

Sarraute was one of the "new novelists" who set out to renovate French fiction in the early 1950s. Her novel, like Cakes and Ale, is a satire on the literary world, this time in Paris, written almost entirely in dialogue. Its title refers to a novel which is only talked about in her text. It is first saluted as a masterpiece and then slowly picked to pieces by critics and envious friends of the author.

10. A Roman Marriage by Brian Glanville

The story of an English girl seduced and enchanted by an Italian lover is told with appropriate irony by a man who knows and loves Italy almost as well as England. His novel Along The Arno is early evidence of his ability to bring characters to life by reporting them, so to speak, with curt accuracy. A Roman Marriage is a comedy of incompatible manners, Anglo-Saxon and Latin. I confess, if it is a confession, that A Roman Marriage is dedicated to me. It is not a sign of corruption to speak well of one's friends, not least when their work deserves it.

© Volatic Ltd 2010

• Best books
• Fiction

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Doomsaying precludes the possibility of ingenious solutions – and indicates a morbid vanity that we must be the saviours

Isn't it welcome to have Ian McEwan as an advocate for a little optimism in the climate change debate? His hope, expressed in his new novel Solar, that humanity will prove ingenious enough to solve the problem through the skill of coming generations is a welcome change from those who portray our descendants as helpless victims of our "excess".

Their injunctions to "save the world for our children and grandchildren" fly in the face of history, which repeatedly shows how progress – from the wheel to the internet – transforms the world picture as time marches on. The doom brigade has its moments, such as the collapse of the classical world in Europe, the Black Death and the first world war, but they are exceptions to learn from. And we have learned.

Not to the extent of mastering clairvoyancy, however. Like miserabilism, a constant in human behaviour is the inability of Today to successfully imagine Tomorrow. The archive of prophecy and science fiction contains some good guesses, but in general the seers get it wrong. Which of my grandparents, addressing me in the 1950s, could possibly have foreseen today's IT? Which of my grandparents' grandparents had a notion of the bicycle or national parks?

This is true of scientists as much as of the more general type of wise person. Science is too often mistakenly treated in the way that history was by those 19th-century Germans who thought that one day the whole truth could be set down. Certainty is not absolute. Scientists are ambushed by novelty – see Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin, Einstein – as often as the rest of us.

None of this is to argue against the risks of global warming or prudence in facing them. It is to warn against vanity, in the form of the exaggerated belief that it is all down to our generation: here, now, hurry, rush. It's also an appeal against pessimism, because of the limitations glumness places on the very potential which, odds-on, will prove the planet's salvation.

A writer in the Economist's most recent green supplement made this point neatly by questioning assumptions (rather reminiscent of Catholic dogma in Galileo's day) that spending the world's limited resources on Tomorrow rather than Today is necessarily morally right. The Economist's writer said: "Since future generations will probably be much richer than we are, it makes no more sense for us to sacrifice our wellbeing for them than it would to expect 18th-century peasants to go without gruel so we can buy more computers."

That is the sort of sally that deserves a wide hearing. If we stall Today's wonderful spread of international knowledge, travel and general prosperity, we risk a future like Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, where unknown Miltons remain mute and inglorious and village Darwins never get further than their shacks.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change
• Ian McEwan

Martin Wainwright
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Should you be getting an e-reader for the planet's sake? I'd always thought not, but a new study has made me think again

The recent announcement that Foyles are soon to launch the bebook is further proof (as if any were needed) that the e-reader bandwagon is well and truly rolling. News that the New York Times book review will soon be available in e-reader format, meanwhile, also points the way to an increasingly interesting future for what we used to know as the "print industry".

The ability to buy something I wouldn't be able to get in a better format elsewhere (so long as the UK remains starved of the glory of the Sunday NYT delivery) even makes me think I might possibly find a use for an e-reader. Up until now, they've struck me as less pleasant than books, far more problematic in terms of copyright theft and – at least for personal use – rather decadent. They're a big computer that can only read books and so, I've always assumed, a waste of resources. But a bit of research has led me to question even that assumption.

I've only managed to find one report – on the Kindle (by The Cleantech Group) – but it backs up suggestions that so long as e-readers are used as book replacements rather than supplements, they soon start to pay back in carbon terms. The report states that a book uses up "approximately 7.46 kilograms of CO2 over its lifetime" and that the Kindle produces "roughly 168 kg" during its lifecycle, making it "a clear winner against the potential savings: 1,074 kg of CO2 if replacing three books a month for four years; and up to 26,098 kg of CO2 when used to the fullest capacity of the Kindle."

There are still problems. Crucially, the report states: "Amazon declined to provide information about its manufacturing process or carbon footprint" – so we're still really dealing with educated guesswork. I was also curious about whether the report has taken into account the role of books as "carbon sinks". My theory was that books last a long time before they are destroyed – often longer than their source trees ... And even when they aren't furnishing rooms they have a useful second life under the floor of motorways and similar.

When I contacted the author of the report, senior research analyst Emma Ritch, she said: "While some of the carbon stored in the forest will remain stored in paper, the majority will be emitted into the atmosphere. There is a significant amount of carbon stored in the soil, the roots of harvested trees, the usable saplings and other understory vegetation. These release massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere when they decay, or when they are burned as energy sources for the pulp mill."

So it seems I'm – literally – barking up the wrong tree. Even wood sourced from sustainable forests uses a lot of energy (not to mention water) when it is being processed, and yet more when transported afterwards. (Books are heavy, after all.) Ritch also made the point that textbooks are often updated – and so become obsolete – every couple of years, showing another clear advantage to ebook readers. There are also plusses for academics ploughing through multiple journals and probably even for professional book reviewers.

However, I parted company with Ritch's positive view of e-readers when she suggested a further advantage: "the consumer who purchases an ebook often has the rights to use it on five or more devices, meaning multiple users within a household would not have to purchase multiple physical versions of a book." I'd actually view that as a problem, as far as fiction goes. Five or more devices probably gives the ebook a lifespan of little more than 10 years if my experience with such machines is anything to go by – and that's if you don't share it. A book (so long as it stays together) can be shared with hundreds of people over hundreds of years.

I also have concerns about the supply side. There's no information available about the energy required to run Amazon's "whispernet" and it's hard to work out the amount involved in supplying other books for download. The internet is too often thought of as a cost-free resource in carbon terms – but it's recently been suggested that Google alone produces as much as some nation states. Ritch suggested a good comparison would be that "a physical book purchased by a person driving to the bookstore creates twice the emissions of a book purchased online." But of course, that depends on someone driving rather than walking to the shop.

Nevertheless, I'm part-way convinced. There are clear advantages to using e-readers in schools and academe. At home, I'm less sure – especially when you factor in side-issues such as the toxicity of the heavy metals used in ebook readers and their batteries. I also hesitate because the devices are so new we still know little about how they're used.

Here, I'm hoping an informal survey here might shed more light. So tell me: if you own an e-reader, how often do you use it? (Have you for instance topped off the 22.5 books The Cleantech Group require to break even with traditional books in carbon terms?) Are you buying fewer books? How long does your battery last? Have you had to replace it? Do these carbon savings seem realistic to you? And has that influenced your decision to buy one?

I'd also be curious to know if other ebook agnostics are likely to be converted by the idea that they could be more environmentally friendly. I know it makes me waver. But then again, won't an iPad be more useful? Even if that does mean my reading could be interrupted by emails … And you can't throw the thing across the room when whatever you're reading gets too annoying …

• Ebooks
• Amazon.com
• Carbon emissions
• Ethical and green living

Sam Jordison
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Arrrr all film pirates really from Bristol? The secret of a good review; Can scratched glasses be repaired or must they be replaced?

What was the regional accent of the stereotypical 17th- and 18th-century pirate?

I think you mean, in films, why are all pirates from Bristol? Simply, because they arrrrr!

Steven Edgar, Bristol

For many people, myself included, the archetypal pirates' accent was that popularised by Robert Newton, who appeared in more than 50 films, most notably as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, a role he reprised on TV in the mid-1950s.

Newton was born in Shaftesbury, Dorset, and spoke with a distinctive West Country accent. Aboard most English/British ships, there were significant numbers of Scots (William "Captain" Kidd), Irish (Walter Kennedy), and Welsh (Admiral Sir Henry Morgan) sailors. It seems, however, that the largest group of sailors came from the south-west of England (Edward Teach, AKA "Blackbeard" was a native of Bristol and Francis Drake was from Tavistock in Devon) than anywhere else, which is unsurprising, given the pre-eminence of Bristol as the main trading port with the West Indies. So Newton's accent may well have been historically accurate.

Nader Fekri, Hebden Bridge

The accents must have been diverse. Reference to Black Bart Roberts and The Book of Welsh Pirates and Buccaneers, both by Terry Breverton, shows the birth places of captured pirates in the early 18th century to include Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Greece, Ghent, Liverpool, Antigua, Bristol, Canterbury, Whitby, York, Devon, Cornwall, Wiltshire, Berwick, Jersey, the Isle of Man and London.

Additionally, substantial numbers of crew members were escaped slaves of African descent from Antigua, and seamen from Sierra Leone. All crew members were treated equally, regardless of race, and shared the spoils.

Lewis Burrell, Ty Sign, Risca, Gwent

It's probable that the pirate William Dampier, born in 1651 at East Coker, spoke with a Somerset accent, at least in his early years. He possessed remarkable intellect, and while engaged in questionable buccaneering activities he studied the animals, birds, botany and weather systems encountered on his travels. Later, as a more respectable captain of a Royal Navy ship, he circumnavigated three times and reached Australia before Captain Cook. His early home still stands in East Coker, and a plaque in the church reads: "To the memory of William Dampier, Buccaneer, Explorer, Hydrographer."

Mollie Vearncombe, Oadby, Leics

Why are bad reviews more fun to read than good ones?

Partly schadenfreude, partly the fact that the most successful artworks are those that are beyond the descriptive powers of language. (For the same reason, Dante's Inferno is a much better read than his Paradiso.) It's almost a definition of a great critic – a Shaw, Tynan or Kael – that s/he is as compelling when writing about artistic triumph as about disaster.

David Cottis, London SW15

Because the writer has much more fun writing them.

Chris du Feu, Beckingham, Notts

My optician swears my scratched glasses, with the non-scratch coating, can't be mended. Is this to force me to buy new lenses, or is it true?

Occasionally I have had shallow scratches polished out but usually new lenses are needed. You could ask your optician if they could be replaced under the manufacturer's guarantee, which varies between different types of coatings. One of our suppliers provides an anti-scratch/anti-glare coating that has a two-year unconditional warranty where lenses are replaced, no matter how many times they are damaged during that period.

We have only had to replace one set, and that was for a farmer whose specs looked as if they had been mangled by a combine harvester.

Chris O'Neill, Jack Brown Eyecare, Glasgow

Why does the Doctor always regenerate as a Time Lord, not a Time Lady?

In The Doctor's Daughter (series four) Jenny (played by Georgia Moffett, daughter of a previous Doctor, Peter Davison) is a clone of the Doctor, so surely regeneration into a Time Lady is perfectly plausible. And anyway, doesn't this mean that the Doctor is not the last of the Time Lords? Unfortunately, Jenny now seems to have disappeared to the farthest reaches of the space-time continuum, rather than featuring again, even in the farewell episodes – what has happened to her?

Carolyn Reid, Sandy, Beds

Any answers?

A new film, Centurion, suggests that a Roman legion (the 9th) was wiped out in Scotland in AD117. Did this really happen?

Brian Smith, Leeds

What is there in a song that makes someone like it? I love key changes, but no one else seems to – why?

Emma Wilkinson, Exeter, Devon

Who owns the moon and its resources?

John McGill, Cambridge

Post questions and answers to nq@guardian.co.uk. Please include name, address and phone number.

• History
• Television
• Doctor Who

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Everything you need to know about Stieg Larsson, the bestselling author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

▶ The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was originally published in Sweden as Men Who Hate Women, a title English-language publishers rightly thought read, Don't Buy This Book. It is the first of the Millennium trilogy, a series of contemporary Swedish thrillers featuring Lisbeth Salander, a semi-psychotic hacker, and Mikael Blomqvist, a leftwing investigative journalist. The film adaptation opens on Friday.

▶ Stieg Larsson conceived the Millennium books as a series of 10 novels, but he died of a heart attack, aged 50, before the first volume was even published. Because he was himself an investigative journalist, there were unsubstantiated rumours Larsson had been murdered. An outline manuscript of the fourth book is believed to exist, but his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, refuses to let it be published.

▶ Despite the edgy nature of the protagonists and its themes of violence against women and political corruption, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a surprisingly old-fashioned story of a large dysfunctional family set in a closed community. The writing is also old-fashioned: Larsson allows no "I" to go undotted nor "T" uncrossed as the story continues for another 60 pages after the main denouement.

▶ Because Larsson and Gabrielsson never married, his estate has been the subject of a long legal battle. Under Swedish law, Gabrielsson has no right to inheritance, despite being mother to Larsson's child, and she is locked in a dispute with Larsson's father and brother who copped the lot. A 1977 will, in which Larsson left all his assets to the Communist Workers League, has been deemed invalid as it was unsigned.

▶ The Millennium trilogy is published in the UK by Christopher MacLehose, the man who brought other Scandinavian writers, such as Henning Mankell and Peter Høeg, to a British audience. The trilogy was originally offered to the publishers Orion, who turned it down because they believed it was impossible to make a household name out of a dead thriller writer in just three books.

• Stieg Larsson
• Crime books
• Crime

John Crace
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