Guardian

David Cameron's comments about Pakistan exporting terrorism lead to cancellation of ISI talks with British officials

Diplomatic relations with Pakistan have suffered a further blow after its intelligence agency cancelled a visit to Britain in protest at remarks made by the prime minister David Cameron.

Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shujaa Pasha, head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), scrapped his talks on counter-terrorism co-operation with British security services next week after Cameron gave a speech in India suggesting that elements of the Pakistani state were involved in promoting the export of terrorism.

"The visit has been cancelled in reaction to the comments made by the British prime minister against Pakistan," an ISI spokesman told the Times. "Such irresponsible statements could affect our co-operation with Britain."

Cameron sparked outrage in Islamabad when he said: "We cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country is allowed to look both ways and is able, in any way, to promote the export of terror, whether to India, whether to Afghanistan, or to anywhere else in the world."

Neither Downing Street nor the Foreign Office would comment on the reported decision by the ISI, which also comes days before a UK visit by the Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari. He is expected to stay with Cameron at his country retreat, Chequers.

Last night, officials said that Zardari's visit was still expected to take place. "Our understanding is that the visit is on," a Foreign Office spokeswoman said.

Following Cameron's remarks, Pakistani politicians pointed to the country's offensive against militants on the border with Afghanistan and the many victims of terrorist bombs in Pakistan.

Former foreign Secretary David Miliband said the cancellation of the trip "is clearly bad news" for counter-terrorism, and he accused Cameron of alienating an important ally.

"Britain needs good relations with Pakistan, and Pakistan good relations with Britain," said Miliband, foreign affairs spokesman for the Labour Party.

Pakistan is regarded by the British security services as a key nation in the fight against terrorism. Former prime minister Gordon Brown said that 75% of terror plots under investigation in the UK were linked to Pakistan.

• Pakistan
• David Cameron
• Global terrorism
• India
• Afghanistan
• David Miliband

David Batty
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Chancellor Angela Merkel attends service at church in western city of Duisburg, where music festival crush killed 21 people

David Batty and agencies

A memorial service has been held in Germany for the 21 people crushed to death at the Love Parade techno music festival last weekend.

Hundreds of mourners, including the chancellor, Angela Merkel, attended a service of commemoration at Salvator church. Thousands more watched live coverage of the service on screens at a football stadium and a dozen other churches in the western city of Duisburg. Several TV stations also covered the service, and flags across the country flew at half mast.

The ceremony was led by Roman Catholic and Lutheran Protestant clerics representing Germany's two main denominations.

"The Love Parade was danced to death," Nikolaus Schneider, the head of the Rhineland Lutheran church assembly, said in his sermon. "In the middle of a celebration of lust for life, death showed its ugly face to all of us."

Franz-Josef Overbeck, the Catholic bishop of the neighbouring city of Essen, said: "Life can be so oppositional: one moment there is a party, the next moment we are lying helplessly on the ground.

"We want to stir up our life in secure ways, but don't have it under control."

After the sermons, a group of rescue workers who helped save people crushed in the crowded tunnel that was the sole entrance to the festival grounds in the city, lit 21 candles for the victims.

Anger about the incident, in which 500 people were injured, has been building in Duisburg in recent days with more than 250 people demanding the resignation of the city's mayor, Adolf Sauerland, at a protest on Thursday.

Many blame Sauerland and the city's authorities for failing to plan adequately for the event, which attracted an estimated 1.4 million people. Safety experts say the event was held on too small a site and criticised the organisers for providing only one entrance.

Revellers at the festival packed into a tunnel that was 100 metres long and 16 metres wide after police closed the grounds owing to overcrowding.

It quickly became hot and airless, and scores of people inside collapsed. Others fell an estimated nine metres from a ladder as they were trying to find another route out of the grounds. At least 10 people had to be resuscitated. Medical staff on the scene said many people had died from asphyxiation and back injuries.

The 21 people who died were aged 18 to 38, and included revellers from Spain, Australia, Italy, Bosnia, China and Holland as well as Germans.

A preliminary report by police investigators, published on Wednesday, accused the festival's organisers of major security breaches that may have led to the crush. But the report was criticised for failing to establish the responsibility of the city's authorities.

Safety experts had warned that the 230,000 square metres of party grounds, on the site of a disused railway depot on the outskirts of the Ruhr valley city, were large enough to hold only up to 500,000 revellers – a third of the number who actually turned up for the event.

The Love Parade, first held in Berlin in 1989, has attained a cult status around the world and spawned scores of copycat events from Leeds to Rio de Janeiro. But the head organiser, Rainer Schaller, has announced the discontinuation of the event after the tragic incident.

• Germany
• Festivals
• Angela Merkel

David Batty
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Eleven others wounded as warplanes target five sites across terrirory in biggest attack since three-week offensive in 2009

Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip have killed a Hamas commander and wounded 11 other people.

Warplanes fired missiles at five targets across Gaza, including Gaza City, last night for the first time since Israel's three-week offensive in the territory ended 18 months ago.

Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the territory, said the man killed was Issa Batran, 42, a commander of its military wing in central Gaza and a rocket maker. Eight of its supporters and three civilians were also injured.

The air raids came after a Palestinian rocket attack struck the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon on Friday, causing no casualties but damaging buildings and cars in the city.

The city's mayor said the attack was the most serious since the end of Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli offensive that left around 1,400 Palestinians dead, in January last year. Renegade militant groups have fired dozens of rockets and mortars into southern Israel since then, although most of those attack have been ineffective, with rockets mostly landing in open fields.

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, earlier said he took the rocket attack on Ashkelon, which lies seven miles north of Gaza, "very seriously". No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.

The cross-border violence has raised concerns of further escalation.

A Hamas spokesman said the group would avenge Batran's killing.

"Hamas will not be quiet over the blood of its martyrs," said Hamad al-Rakabi. "Israel is opening all the gates of fire. This blood will cascade into rage and fire."

The targets hit in last night's air strike included a military training camp in Gaza City, smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border and Batran's shack, on the outskirts of the Nusseirat refugee camp, according to Hamas security officials.

• Gaza
• Hamas
• Israel
• Binyamin Netanyahu
• Egypt

David Batty
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Official says masseuse and her attorneys were uncooperative, and witnesses could not remember anything unusual

Former vice president Al Gore has been cleared of allegations that he groped and assaulted a masseuse in a Portland hotel room in 2006.

After a four-week investigation that included interviews with Gore, the masseuse, her acquaintances and hotel staff, authorities said there was no basis for prosecution.

Senior deputy district attorney Don Rees cited "contradictory evidence, conflicting witness statements, credibility issues, lack of forensic evidence and denials by Mr Gore".

Rees also said the masseuse and her attorneys were uncooperative, witnesses could not remember anything unusual, and that the masseuse failed a polygraph examination and would not say whether she was paid by a tabloid newspaper for her story.

"Mr Gore unequivocally and emphatically denied this accusation when he first learnt of its existence three years ago," spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said. "He respects and appreciates the thorough and professional work of the Portland authorities and is pleased that this matter has now been resolved."

• Al Gore
• United States
• US politics

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Talks between ISI officials and UK security experts called off after David Cameron accused Pakistan of exporting terrorism

Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency has cancelled planned talks with British security experts in protest at David Cameron's comments that elements within the country are responsible for exporting terrorism abroad, it was reported last night.

ISI officers were due in London for discussions on counter-terrorism co-operation with British security services. But the talks have been scrapped after the prime minister's remarks while on a visit to India on Wednesday, the Times reported.

"The visit has been cancelled in reaction to the comments made by the British prime minister against Pakistan," an ISI spokesman was quoted as saying. "Such irresponsible statements could affect our co-operation with Britain."

Cameron sparked outrage in Islamabad when he said: "We cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country is allowed to look both ways and is able, in any way, to promote the export of terror, whether to India, whether to Afghanistan, or to anywhere else in the world."

The comments were made during a visit to Delhi.

Neither Downing Street nor the Foreign Office would comment on the reported decision by the ISI, which also comes days before a UK visit by the Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari. He is expected to stay with Cameron at his country retreat, Chequers.

Last night, officials said that Zardari's visit was still expected to take place. "Our understanding is that the visit is on," a Foreign Office spokeswoman said.

Following Cameron's remarks, Pakistani politicians pointed to the country's offensive against militants on the border with Afghanistan and the many victims of terrorist bombs in Pakistan.

Cameron defended his comments a day later, saying: "I don't think the British taxpayer wants me to go around the world saying what people want to hear."

• Pakistan
• Global terrorism
• UK security and terrorism
• Terrorism policy
• David Cameron

Amy Fallon
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Ian Huntley, the Soham murderer, is claiming £100,000 in damages after allegedly having his throat slashed by an inmate

Ian Huntley, the Soham murderer, is suing the prison service after he allegedly had his throat slashed with a razor blade by another inmate, it emerged last night.

Huntley, who is serving a life sentence for the 2002 Cambridgeshire murders of 10-year-old friends Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, was attacked on 21 March.

The former school caretaker claims he had his throat slashed by Damien Fowkes, who is serving life for knifepoint robbery, at high security Frankland Prison, Co Durham, and required hospital treatment.

Huntley is demanding almost £100,000 in damages – £20,000 for his injuries and a further £60,000 in punitive damages – one newspaper reported. It was also reported Huntley, 36, is expecting to claim up to £15,000 separately, through the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA).

The Ministry of Justice confirmed Huntley was taking legal action, alleging that the prison service failed in their duty of care towards him. His claims are based on his high-profile status in prison and previous attacks on him by other inmates.

"Ian Huntley is bringing a claim against the Ministry of Justice following an assault by another prisoner," a Ministry of Justice spokesman said. "The claim is currently being vigorously defended."

Earlier this year Jack Straw, then justice secretary, said the government had "absolutely no intention" of paying compensation to Huntley over the attack.

The comments, at Commons question time, came as it emerged that Huntley could be awarded up to £20,000 in compensation if he sued for negligence.

Despite spending much of his sentence in solitary confinement, Huntley has been attacked numerous times since being convicted of the murders in 2003.

In one incident he had boiling water thrown over him. In another he narrowly escaped being stabbed and was badly assaulted.

• Soham murders
• Prisons and probation
• Crime

Amy Fallon
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He may have put his bad-boy days behind him, but he still knows how to operate, both on the street and in the music business

The first thing that hits me is the stench of sweat. Then the heat. And finally the brutal grunts of men punching each other. An old-school martial arts gym in Kent, Keddle's is not the place you come to for a polite work-out. In one corner Tom "Kong" Watson beats hell out of a punchbag in preparation for his cage fight against Jordan's husband Alex Reid. In another, veteran Thai trainer Neng is whacking willing victims with a stick when not being kneed in the face.

Dizzee Rascal swaggers in – red shorts, white trainers, no top and fist bumps aplenty. After an intensive skip he wraps his hands, puts on his boxing gloves and steps into the ring. He's hardly Mr Six-Pack, but he looks fit and strong. He hits Neng as hard as he can, smack, kick, smack, kick, then he jumps on his knees and on to his shoulders, and there isn't a single grimace from the Thai master. The thing he loves about Neng, he says, is he didn't have the foggiest who Dizzee Rascal was when he met him, doesn't have much of a clue now, and probably cares even less. "Most people didn't clock me here at first. I go everywhere quiet – like a ninja. Always have done. Think big, move quiet." He likes his aphorisms.

A man who could pass for Phil Mitchell's harder brother gets in the ring with Dizzee, they start sparring and he smacks him splat in the nose. "Did you see that? I took a huge punch on the nose," Dizzee says. He's smiling like a happy drunk. "I'll be all right in a few minutes. I didn't want to come here just to pose."

He introduces his friends. More fist bumps. Most seem to be current or former world champions. Two years ago he moved from London to the Kent countryside, where it was easier to live anonymously. And this is where he now feels most relaxed. "It feels a bit like Bow. It's a good, positive place to be. Everybody here can have a tear-up, so if you come in with any attitude you're just going to have your arse handed to you. Knowhatamean?"

There was a time when Dizzee was drinking and smoking lots of weed. Not now, though. Fitness is his drug these days. He says if he wasn't doing all this he wouldn't be able to do his shows. "That's the difference between me and a lot of rappers. So many are unfit, just puffing all the time."

The sweat is pouring from his face over his shoulder and chest tattoos (one is a pair of manacled hands clasped in prayer; the other says "Fix up look sharp" – the name of his first top 20 hit), and down the cluster of scars close to his heart. They aren't the only scars – he shows me one on his arm, one on his back and one in his groin close to his femoral artery. He was 19 and had just won the Mercury prize for his first album, Boy In Da Corner, when he was stabbed six times while in the Cypriot holiday resort of Ayia Napa. Both the Mercury and the stabbing transformed his life, but you sense the latter had the more lasting impact.

Boy In Da Corner was an astonishing debut, a projectile vomiting of anger and violence, alienation and confusion. This was an answer to the US rap scene and became known as grime: not songs so much as soundscapes to urban life – Dizzee's staccato patter against a backdrop of police sirens, ringtones, radio static and video games.

How times have changed. With his fourth album, Tongue N' Cheek, released earlier this year, the icon of the underground became poptastic. Bonkers, Dance Wiv Me, Holiday, Dirtee Disco all reached number one – the first solo artist to have four chart-topping singles from the same album. This year, the 25-year-old was nominated again for the Mercury prize and named best male solo artist at the Brit awards.

Dizzee Rascal was born Dylan Kwabena Mills in 1985. His father died when he was two and he was brought up by his Ghanaian mother, Priscilla. As a boy, he was bright, mouthy and trouble. He got expelled from three schools. All he cared about was his music. He left school with a C-grade GCSE in English, but little else.

Showered and changed, Dizzee is ready for lunch. We head off for his silver Porsche and then to his favourite pasta place, Zizzi, in Bromley. I've been warned that he can be hard work – that he bores easily, hates interviews because he's said everything he's got to say in his music. So far he's been charming, but it is obvious he doesn't like being alone with journalists, so we are accompanied by his posse – publicist, road manager and two friends.

We're talking about his school days. It was his teachers who called him Rascal, because he was one. He began making music on a school computer. By 14, he was doing 1am-3am sets on pirate radio during the week. Wasn't he knackered when he got to school? "Yeah, that might be why I messed about a bit."

What was he expelled for? "Being disruptive, fighting, all sorts." Anything in particular? "All-round disruptive behaviour and violence." In the past he's mentioned stealing cars, robbing pizza delivery men and fighting teachers. "Even when I wasn't kicked out, I was excluded, so I was always out of school for a week or two."

How did his mother feel about it? "Sad, because she kept having to take time off work, and she was the only breadwinner, and it was affecting her."

With the benefit of hindsight, would he do things differently? "No, there's no need to. Everything worked out the way it was supposed to."

The restaurant has reserved a table for us at the back. Dizzee's excited about his favourite dish – a spicy sausage penne that has officially been taken off the menu but the restaurant is happy to do for him. But first there are starters. He looks disappointed when his mussels arrive. "It's a bit shy today. It's normally bigger than this, they must be cutting costs or something. Yeah, man."

Musician, businessman (his records are now released on his own label Dirty Stank), mentor (he has signed up two acts so far), Dizzee is now branching out further as a judge in a TV talent show to find a new pop star. Does it remind him of when he was starting out?

"I wasn't doing anything like this. I just came up with pirate radio and raves, and it was very gritty, it was a different thing." Back then there was no one to advise him, so he tried to watch groups like So Solid Crew and take stock of what they did right and what they didn't.

As a judge, he has found himself toughening up over the weeks. His nasty side is now coming out, but "only where it needs to be". What does he mean? "Sometimes people try to give me a bit of backchat and I won't stand for any of that shit. If I said someone was crap and they said, 'With all due respect, you're supposed to be developing talent' and all that, I'd say, 'That's all good and that, but with all due respect, that's crap.' And there's always a clown in the audience and you have to tell him to shut his mouth."

Dizzee says that he never expected to keep rapping about the same things throughout his career and, sure enough, his lyrics today are more likely to focus on his new freedoms, his wealth and achievements. But, he says, there's a consistency to it all. "You tell the same stories – sex, money, violence and social commentary – but in different ways, to different beats and soundtracks. When I was 16, 17, I saw it from the perspective of a young kid who felt trapped and suffocated on a council estate. Now I talk about it as a successful entertainer who's living the life, I guess. That's what the world's about – different perspectives."

I tell him I like the fact that I can now singalongadizzee, because however much I wanted to like Boy In Da Corner, I couldn't get into it. "Exactly, coz you couldn't relate and there weren't enough singalongs. I had to work my way to that as well. That's part of the growth and the success, being able to cross over and for it still to be good, which hasn't been done a lot in hip-hop in this country."

Of course, there are those who prefer his early work and accuse him of selling out. This makes him laugh. Sell out from what, he asks; why would he want to cling to the life he had? "People said that, having not been through a quarter of what I have. Obviously you'd get the fuck out, innit."

Anyway, he says, there was so much rubbish talked about grime and what it was, and what he represented. "Everyone called it grime, but I didn't. All it was was a mixture of all the stuff I was into. There is no such thing as grime. It's like hip-hop – journalists make it up. Grime is just a name that's from grimy areas and a lot of grimy shit happening, but as for the music, it's everything from reggae to drum and bass to Nirvana."

He says he was always an entertainer, a joker, but there was little to joke about back then. "I didn't make party music because the kind of things I was going through weren't really a party vibe. I didn't feel like partying."

Perhaps the biggest difference in today's Dizzee is that he seems so contented and outgoing. Early on, he was introverted, with a bleak vision of the world. Not surprising, he says. "I was high as fuck. Weeding all the time. It made me paranoid. And I was probably justified to be a bit paranoid at that time. It's an age where, for me, there was a lot of violence, and a lot of violence that never really happened either, just the threat of it. Even before I was stabbed I'd been in enough situations and then it was like, 'Oh, it's actually happened now'."

So was it a relief to get it over with? No, he says, it's just that friends had been stabbed, a couple of people had tried to stab him before, and there seemed an inevitability about it. "When it actually happens it feels a bit surreal, but it's done, innit. I didn't actually think I was going to die. The adrenaline, the shock, the rage, the walking around, I just wanted to get on my bike." And did he? "I did, and then somebody took me off it and put me on the back of their bike and took me to hospital. It was all a bit mad."

Did he know the people who stabbed him? "I knew of them, but I didn't know them. Right now I probably couldn't point them out to you." Why did they come for you? "One day it will come out, but actually it's old news. There's a lot to it. I didn't actually get stabbed for anything I did."

I had assumed the stabbing led him to the calmer Dizzee mark two. No, he says, anything but. He was angry, fearless and resentful. "Afterwards it makes you worse. Angrier, willing to be a lot more violent and more closed off." Was that him or the weed? "It was probably me as well."

Wherever he went, he says, there seemed to be the same mentality; everybody trying to outdo each other, and they didn't like him because he'd made a success of himself. "To an extent, everyone is jealous of everyone. There's a lot of people working hard and, especially with the youth, there's more of a crabs-in-the-bucket mentality. Where I come from, fighting settles a lot of things. Then I went to other areas, doing raves, and it's the same mentality, everyone against each other. It's very competitive and there's an underlying violence, and it kicks off a lot. It's not good seeing people die over nothing. So coming out of that, and being famous, has taken a lot of work to steer myself into things that really matter."

He seems in a good place now. How did he get there? "Focus, success, probably being a bit older. The things that mattered to me when I was younger don't matter now. Less to prove."

He says reading has also helped. What kind of books? He smiles. "I read how-to-get-rich books, like The Magic Of Thinking Big. It's the kind of shit that, unless you know some super millionaire who's got the time or gives a shit about you to give you advice, you're not going to get other than from a book." How rich does he want to be? "I want to be outrageously rich." Richer than Jay-Z? "Yeah!" he says, as if it's the daftest question he's ever been asked. Richer than Bill Gates? "Yeah, why not?" What will he spend it on? "There will be a whole new level of things to spend it on when you get there. Maybe a few islands. Some private jets."

Will he use the money to change the world? "Yeah, I do that already." He mentions Shout, the World Cup single he made with James Corden. "I decided to give this money to charity. My manager suggested Great Ormond Street, not Simon Cowell, as someone said. Simon Cowell didn't give his royalties to them. Just me and James." Well, you definitely owe it to yourself to outmillionaire Cowell, I say. "I've got no problem with Simon Cowell, I actually quite rate him. You learn a lot from him."

In 2008, just after Barack Obama became US president, Dizzee appeared on Newsnight in a debate with Baroness Amos to discuss the likelihood of a black prime minister in Britain. Jeremy Paxman, addressing him as Mr Rascal, asked if he considered himself British. "Course I'm British, man, you know me," he replied. "I'm here, man, I'm good. It don't matter what colour you are, it matters what colour your heart is, man, and your intentions. I think a black man, purple man, Martian man can run the country, whatever, man, as long as he does right by the people." Dizzee outsmarted both Paxman and Amos. I remind him that he suggested he might run for prime minister one day.

"Here we go," he says, looking at his mates, and suddenly sounding narky. Would he turn up at Downing Street if David Cameron invited him? "I don't know. I'm just eating my food, and at this point I'm not a politician." I mention the time Tony Blair invited Noel Gallagher to Downing Street to celebrate "Cool Britannia" – wasn't that an example of politicians using artists to further their own aims? "You just said they did, didn't you? Well, if you're saying it, that's your opinion. So in your opinion, do you think I should give a shit?"

His friends laugh.

"Probably not," I say.

"Right, there you go, then."

If he went into politics, does he think he would be on the right or left? "I don't know about left, right, I don't know about any policies, I don't give a shit. I'm just concerned about people being treated right."

The main course arrives and restores his humour. "We're going to start a campaign to have it put back on the menu, man," he says. Demos for penne with sausage outside the restaurant? "No, you're going to put it in your paper and tell them I want to put it back on. This is bangin' innit. Oooh! Spicy. Feelin' the heatwave."

His phone rings. "Hello. Hello. Hello, who's speakin'? Oh, what's going on, mate? Long time. I thought you was dead or something. I'm in a restaurant. Ring me back. Right, mate." He puts his phone down. "That was Calvin Harris." Harris is one of many artists Rascal has collaborated with, including Lily Allen, the Arctic Monkeys and Florence Welch. "Everything I do is a collaboration," he says. "Whether it's with the engineer or whoever, I come up with something I couldn't come up with on my own." Has he got a favourite collaborator? "No, the fella I like working with most is [his manager/songwriter] Cage, that's just the most natural. Working with Florence, she's one of the nicest people I've ever met. Working with Lily was quite good as well." Have any collaborations not worked out? He stops to think. "Nah. There's no one I've done a collaboration with where I think, fuck, I'll never do that again, I just want to be round the best and everyone I work with is the best at what they do."

The amazing thing about today's Dizzee Rascal is how at ease the once surly delinquent seems in all sorts of company, be it the toughies at the gym, working the crowd at Glastonbury, winning a Brit in a tux, or joshing with Prince Harry (and threatening to punch him in the face in the process).

Does he get frightened before going out in front of 80,000 people at Glastonbury? "Not really. People probably won't see it even if I was. Where I come from you try not to show fear." One of his favourite expressions is "Never hate, never fear".

When he's not working, he says, he just likes to chill. What does that involve? "Ain't much going on. Might have a couple of girls round. I should probably find more hobbies. But for now I'm cool." Is there a prospective Mrs Rascal in his life? Nah, he says – women go in cycles. "For the most part, there are a few women about, yeah." Would he fancy having kids? "Yeah! But I still consider myself a bit of a kid and there's some shit I need to do beforehand. It just wouldn't be practical if I had kids, or it would make me a bit of a cunt."

There is one special woman in his life. Does his mother call him Dizzee? He grins. "No, she calls me Dylan. Dizzee is an MC name, innit. Growing up, MC Dylan didn't have that ring to it, did it?" Does he see his mother often? He looks shocked. "I don't see her loads... part of that would be because I'm a man, innit." Is she proud of him? "Yeah, course she is. I don't think she's upset – 'You successful bastard!'"

The waiter comes to clear the plates and asks Rascal how it was. "Yeah, really good, man. I'll have another apple juice, thanks."

Look, he says, he's not naive, he knows there will be those who want to use him and those who want to do him down. "If someone's got a chance to better themselves and it means fucking you over, well, fucking you over might be a good option. I tell everybody all the time, don't be fooled by the concrete, it's a jungle out there. People ain't stopped being bad, they're just better at hiding how bad they are." On the plus side, they're not likely to do it in the way they did six years ago. "If people are trying to fuck me over, I'm a little less worried about it because at least they are less likely to stab me; they are just going to do some shit." If it happens, move on. If it doesn't, all the better. In the meantime, there's so much music and love and money to be made, and he doesn't plan to let anybody get in the way.

The bill comes. The publicist and I put our cards on the table but Dizzee hands them back to us. The meal's on him, he insists. "It's been a good day, love you all, respect." And with that he's gone.

• Must Be The Music is on Sky 1 HD every Sunday from 8 August.

• Dizzee Rascal
• Rap

Simon Hattenstone
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The Bookseller of Kabul propelled Åsne Seierstad to global literary renown – and then to court. Did she exploit her subjects' privacy and trust in her portrayal of Afghan family life? And what does the case mean for journalism?

In three weeks, Åsne Seierstad will give birth to her second child. Substantial rebuilding work is being done to her house in Oslo and her young son is driving her neighbours to despair every morning with his new drum kit. But all of this is nothing to the storm Norway's most successful author has gone through in the past few days.

Last week, Seierstad learned that she had lost the first legal stage of a literary tussle over her representation of the real-life subject of her bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul, which has fascinated her readers around the world for almost a decade. "Even though I'm in the middle of this and it's boiling right now, I can see that it's a fascinating situation and an important debate about who can and should, write what – and in what way," she says

Seierstad was a war correspondent before she exchanged the front lines to write the book that made her name, and which could now ruin it.

Provoking controversy almost from publication, The Bookseller of Kabul is a compelling portrait of an Afghan bookseller, a local hero who risked his life to save the literary heritage of his country and publicly argued for women's rights and liberal ideals. But, in the course of the book, the eponymous hero is revealed by Seierstad to be a tyrant who mercilessly oppressed his own family, enslaving his wives and refusing education to his sons.

It quickly became the bestselling nonfiction book in Norwegian history. It was translated into 29 languages and topped the international bestseller charts. Tim Judah, reviewing it in the Observer, called it "compulsive, repulsive and frightening". "If this is what life is like in the family of Afghanistan's answer to Tim Waterstone, there is clearly no hope for Afghanistan," he added. Another reviewer said it was "an emotive indictment of a horrible society".

But then, the central character stepped out from its pages and repudiated the book. Instead of staying quietly put where she left him, in Kabul, Shah Muhammad Rais bought a business-class flight from the Afghan capital to Norway, hired a lawyer and launched a counter-publicity trail through the Norwegian media, appearing on television and the front pages of newspapers, accusing Seierstad of treachery.

He claimed that her depiction of his family was inaccurate and invasive; that she had humiliated and destroyed them, forcing his first wife to move to Canada to live with her brother. The book had also, he said, dishonoured Afghanistan. The man who had risked his life to prevent his library being burned by the communists, the mujahideen and the Taliban insisted that Seierstad's account of him and his family was so slanderous that every copy should be destroyed.

For almost eight years, the row has played itself out in public and last month, Seierstad found herself in the witness box for three days, defending her book and her journalistic integrity.

She was confident she would win. "It is hard as a journalist to be judged like this," she says. "I can insist to everyone that it is just three small, concrete points that the judge has found against me, but it will always be written about me now that I have been judged for breaking privacy and had my accuracy questioned, and that's not a good thing as a journalist." (Those points were that Rais's wife hadn't wanted to marry him; that she hadn't been terrified of wanting a girl; and that Seierstad didn't do enough to make sure the wife's thoughts were correctly presented.)

She and her publisher Cappelen Damm must now pay 250,000 Norwegian kroner (£26,000) to the second wife for invasion of privacy and for failing to ensure her quotes were accurate. He is claiming that seven other members of his family are poised to make similar claims against the author.

The second wave of litigation, however, will have to wait. Seierstad is appealing against the judgment. She plans to take it to Norway's supreme court and all the way to the European court of human rights if necessary.

"If I lose, then I have to accept that my way of writing books is not the way society says it's OK to write," she says. "I will get a loan and pay the money the court asks for. But I will not lay down my writing and I still say this was an important book to write. The family is the single most important institution in Afghan culture. It is described in the country's constitution as the 'fundamental pillar of society'. Family law – decided by the men in the household – is more important than government legislation: [President Hamid] Karzai might insist that women can work but that doesn't mean anything if a father forbids his daughter from going to school. If we can't understand the Afghan family, we can't understand Afghanistan."

Born in Norway in 1970, Seierstad studied Russian, Spanish and the history of philosophy at Oslo University. After graduating, she spent a year in Russia, where her father was working as a political scientist. In 1993, she moved to Moscow full-time to study politics. Keen to gain access and speak to Russian government officials, she posed as a journalist and her career took off.

Seierstad asked Rais, whom she met during her time in Afghanistan, if she could come and live with his family and write an intimate portrait of their lives. For five months, she probed, delved and peeled back the secrets of the family. There was nothing she didn't ask and nowhere she didn't go: into the men's world of commerce and conversation; into the women's world of the hammam, where burqas and inhibitions are shed.

It is a fascinating portrait: a family's dirty linen hung out for public gaze. Seierstad absented herself from its pages: in the book, the omnipotent storyteller is never present. Having lived with the family for so long and questioned them so closely, she says she felt justified writing from inside the head of each character, attributing thoughts and feelings to them without the filter of her own voice – as if she were writing a novel. In previous interviews, Seierstad has made much of the fact that the most important lesson that her parents taught her was to care for others less fortunate than herself, and has cited the writer and traveller Ryszard Kapuscinsk as a hero owing to the respect he always showed his subjects.

I ask whether it was kind of her to draw out these women's most intimate sexual secrets and private emotions, and reveal them to the world. "What's unkind in it?" Seierstad says, surprised. "My project, my only goal, was to understand what was going on inside one of these families. I was there as a journalist, invited into their home to find out about Afghanistan. Should I, when I know something is not right, like the way the bookseller treated his wives, say it's not important? Yes, it is important and I have to find out."

But was it right to accept Rais's hospitality for almost half a year and then tear him apart in public? She may have been invited into the family home by Rais, but did the women in the house – one of whom was 16 and had barely left the backyard of her father's home before marrying the aging Rais – truly understand what would happen to their secrets after they were scribbled down in a writer's notepad?

"They say now that they didn't say certain things or that they are humiliated by having them written about, but who is really saying that?" Seierstad says. "It is Rais who is leading this campaign against me for reasons of money or of honour, I have no idea, but because these women are dependent on him, they have no choice but to say what he says. It's important for us to know Afghanistan. It is a country where we waged a war and to understand people you have to dig deeper and there's nothing unkind in that."

Yet Seierstad admits that, at times, she did go too far. In the first edition of the book, published in a limited run in the UK and now out of print, there is an astonishingly intimate description of one of the women in the household at the hammam. In two passages, Seierstad writes about the breasts, belly and genitals of this woman – a woman who since reaching adulthood has never left her house without wearing a burqa.

"I removed that section because Rais asked me to," says Seierstad. "But this book went through several editors and we all overlooked that problematic word, genitals. We realised it was a mistake only after Rais focussed on it, and I apologised to him and to his mother for it."

That she put it in at all, is perhaps evidence of a lack of sympathy for her subjects' privacy. In the past, Seierstad has claimed that the book is not a criticism of the Islamic way of life – but that it "just reveals a lot about it". This, I suggest, is disingenuous – and dangerous. Her outrage at the way women are treated in the book crackles on every page, but because she has written herself out of the narrative, her highly subjective account could be accused as masquerading as an objective report.

There is a long pause. "I agree now that it is not possible to write a neutral story," she says. "I don't criticise the society with my words in the book but I agree, it's there in the text anyway. It's not an open critique but it is a critique."

Despite standing her ground, Seierstad says that she needs to be more rigorous: "If I write a book in future, I may decide to take the precaution of going back to every person I interview, reading their quotes back to them and asking them to sign a letter, saying it is accurate," she says. "Journalism is moving into a different world where we are held to almost impossible standards. In everything I write, ever again, I need to make sure I am 100% accurate. A journalist can get away with this sort of controversy once, but I can't survive it again."

This article was corrected on 31 July 2010. We said that Åsne Seierstad had been asked to make a payment to the first wife. This has been corrected

• Åsne Seierstad
• Afghanistan
• Cultural trips
• Norway

Amelia Hill
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For Catalans, bullfighting is a barbaric and alien tradition. Their region's decision to ban it is less about animal rights than a gesture of anti-Spanish defiance

The banning of bull-fighting in Catalonia by the regional parliament on Wednesday satisfies a deep need in the Catalan soul. Killing off bullfighting offers Catalans a lovely and easy revenge for various humiliations heaped on them by Madrid in recent times; it also fulfils their deep anxiety to be understood and appreciated throughout the world as a separate nation, a place with a different identity and a different sensibility from the rest of Spain. Most Catalans loathe bullfighting, they view it as part of a strange, dark, foreign, Iberian spirit which has sought to encroach upon the modern, European spirit to which they feel allegiance.

When I came to Barcelona first in 1975, I found that Catalans would wince at the very word bullfighting and seemed genuinely upset that such a cruel sport took place in their city. For them, the corrida belonged to a world foisted on Catalonia by Franco at the end of a civil war. This was a world which also included a police force and an army which no Catalan would join, and forms of dancing, singing and religiosity which were utterly alien to Catalans, who pride themselves on working hard, remaining anti-clerical and enjoying classical music.

It was only when I came to write a book about Barcelona that I thought I should go one summer Sunday and attend a bullfight. I remember I didn't last long. I knew nothing about the rules and intricacies of the sport so all I saw were crowds of well-fed, well-dressed people baying for blood, roaring and cheering at the sight of pain and demanding more of it as picadors on horses and a matador in a brilliant costume ritually tormented and tortured a bull. What was interesting was how present and real the bull felt to me, how close the animal's pain and puzzlement was. Indeed, the bull, simply because of what it was going through, the ferocious rage and hurt it exuded, filled the ring with its aura much more than any of its killers did. So when it lay down and died and got dragged away, the scene was genuinely dramatic and powerful.

The crowd loved it. It was a useful experience learning that people in groups, without laws or limits set to govern their appetites, will have a great time watching some dumb and beautiful animal, who has no chance of escape, being cut open with swords and other sharp instruments. They can call it sport, they can call it tradition, they can write about its beauty, its poetry and its intricacy, they can invoke Hemingway and write about skill and ritual; for me that day the bullfight was a celebration of cruelty, of mob rule, of death, of picking on something weaker then you and amusing yourself at its expense. It was vile and it was disturbing.

I remember leaving early and walking back down through Barcelona. It was late afternoon. I chanced to pass through the Placa de Sant Jaume, one of the main squares of the city, and there in the corner were groups of Catalans dancing sardanes, the national dance. There was a group of musicians playing for them. I stood and watched. The dance is done by forming a circle and joining hands, the music rises and the steps change almost imperceptibly. At the beginning little energy is expended; this means that very old people can join. Then gradually it lifts, and there is a beautiful, elegant edge to the way the dancers operate, as well as a subtle and discreet restraint. Led by one among them, they slowly let the steps rise and the spirit lift.

That day I was grateful to them for releasing such gentle and graceful energy. There was something so light and easy and civilised about how they gathered and related to each other. I was proud of the years I had spent in Catalonia and content, too, that I now joined the Catalans in feeling utter revulsion for bullfighting, knowing that its cultural significance had nothing to do with me.

Then friends who loved bullfighting assured me that I was a fool and had made a mistake. Going to a bullfight in Barcelona was, I was told, like listening to Irish traditional music in a London wine bar. I would have to go south for the real thing. Since I was writing a book about Catholic Europe, I found myself in Seville during Easter week. The city is beautiful, I loved the bars and I was intrigued by the zeal with which people carted their statues of the virgin around the streets. I enjoyed the resurrection, as far as I remember, and then on Easter Sunday I went to a bullfight.

I felt the same revulsion, the same hatred for the crowd, but this time it wasn't so simple. The religious ceremonies and the bullfight in Seville that Easter seemed to belong to an intact culture, one that I could not fully penetrate, but which everyone in the city took for granted, knew and loved. There was no point in telling people in Seville that you didn't like bullfighting, they would merely shrug and tell you that you didn't understand it and maybe you should think of going back home.

There are two ways of understanding this. The first is that Spain is a country filled with variety, and this is part of its pleasure for the outsider. The lack of sameness, the ways in which weather, food, architecture and language in, say, Galicia, are so far from the same things in Seville makes it a great country to travel in. The Basque country, Madrid, the villages of Asturias, are all like independent republics and this makes the country fascinating and intriguing.

The second way is how Catalans view things. They see Madrid not as different as much as dominating. They wonder why the first AVE (Spain's fast train), for example, was built to go from Madrid to Seville in 1992, but there is still no AVE from Barcelona to France, which is the direction Catalans want to go. They notice the gradual downgrading of Barcelona airport. They notice that, since Catalonia is one of the richest parts of Spain, their taxes are used to build up infrastructure elsewhere rather than in Catalonia. They cannot legislate on matters such as immigration, which affects them deeply. They feel discriminated against in many ways, both small and large.

Nonetheless, since the death of Franco in 1975 a great deal has been gained and consolidated in Catalonia. The language, which Franco had banned the public use of, has now become, to a large extent, the normal first language. The street names in Barcelona, for example, are in Catalan only. There are radio and television stations in Catalan. Education is conducted through Catalan. The survival of the language has been helped by the fact that it is spoken by the middle classes in the towns and cities as a first language. Although Catalans are fiercely proud of their identity and their heritage, anyone who comes to live in Catalonia can more or less be included in the nation by learning the language. This has happened to the children of immigrants who came from Spain's poorer regions. The current president of Catalonia, for example, was born in Córdoba in the south of Spain, and came to Catalonia at 16, and yet he has been absorbed into Catalan national life and is considered Catalan, even though, since there was a free vote, he actually voted against the ban on bullfighting on Wednesday.

One of the reasons why it has been easy to ban bullfighting is that tourists who come to Barcelona no longer want to see a bull being massacred. In a way, since the early 1990s a new sort of tourism in Spain has been invented by the Catalans. Tourists who come to Barcelona now don't go home with a bad sangria hangover, a fluency in roaring "olé!" and vicious sunburn. Instead, they visit the city's Gaudí buildings, they go to the Picasso museum and the Miro Foundation; they love the cool nightclubs and the wonderful restaurants. They walk the city and get to know its streets.

If you come from Madrid or Seville to the city, however, you feel sightly different. You notice that the Catalans, even though they are bilingual, don't like speaking Spanish to you. You watch how they have made it impossible to get a state job without fluency in Catalan. You watch with deep irritation their resentment against Madrid, their insistence that they are a nation rather than a region, their emphasising that they feel culturally closer to France, or Switzerland, or northern Italy than to Spain.

I have yet to meet someone from Madrid who does not shake their head in dislike, mild to wild, at the way in which Catalans conduct themselves.

Just as Catalans believe in hard work and sobriety, they have a real skill at making pacts and increasing the terms of their political autonomy incrementally. Unlike the Basques, they do not have a terrorist army, and there is a deep revulsion among Catalans for what Eta has done. They are pro-European and have also shown some flair in how their politicians deal with Madrid. The Catalan Socialist party, one of the two main parties in Catalonia, is allied to PSOE, the Spanish socialists, and this has given them a good deal of leeway and influence.

It was these connections that caused them, then, to seek a new estatut, or constitutional arrangement with Spain, which would give them greater power over matters such as taxation, language policy and the creation of infrastructure. For rightwing voters and politicians, the idea that Catalans wanted greater autonomy than other regions of Spain was an affront to the unity of Spain, a core belief for them. Thus the right wing sent the estatut to the highest constitutional court for consideration.

The court, in a long and detailed judgment earlier this month, ruled against the Catalans, and managed to add insult to injury by stating that there was only one nation in Spain, and that was the Spanish nation, and that Catalonia, as a historical entity, had only come into being as a result of the Spanish constitution of 1978.

This drove people crazy. When more than a million people marched through Barcelona on 10 July to protest against the court's decision, most of the flags being waved were Catalan independence flags; the decision has meant that even larger numbers of Catalans see complete independence from Spain as the only long-term solution. The Catalan general sense of grievance was not helped the next day when Spain won the World Cup, since the core players in the Spanish team were Catalans who played for Barça, the Barcelona football club, which Catalans feel represents the Catalan spirit in the world.

As I watched the game on television in the Catalan Pyrenees, there were Catalans in the room who wanted Spain to lose, who could not bear the idea of Spanish flags being waved in jubilation and the general Spanish triumphalism.

It was noted with some glee in the following weeks that certain members of the constitutional court who had ruled against Catalonia had been photographed attending bullfights, which are a normal part of life in many Spanish cities and are covered by the main Spanish newspaper El País as important cultural events. Banning bullfights on Catalan territory from the beginning of 2012 would be the beginning of Catalonia's sweet revenge. While the ban may have something to do with animal rights, it is seen here as a way of proclaiming national rights.

The ban was, of course, opposed by the rightwing parties. The newspapers on Thursday were deeply divided. The far rightwing La Gaceta on a front page editorial heaped insults on the politicians who had voted for the ban, singling out the man who is likely to become the next Catalan president as "a separatist who hates everything Spanish". The Catalan-language Avui, on the other hand, ran a headline proclaiming: "Goodbye Black Spain". El País on its editorial page showed a cartoon of a Spanish bull saying to a Catalan donkey, "Muchas gracias" and the donkey replying, in Catalan "De res", Catalan for "Not at all". At least someone, besides the Catalans, is happy: the bulls. If they were to join forces, perhaps they would get us a fast train line to France.

• Bullfighting
• Catalonia
• Spain

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Half the Sky has been described as 'a brutal awakening' and is a bestseller in the US. But can its accounts of violence and injustice to women in the developing world really come as such a surprise?

It's unusual for a book that takes its title and its epigraph – "Women hold up half the sky" – from Mao Zedong to receive such critical and popular acclaim in the US as Half the Sky, by Pulitzer-prizewinning American journalists Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. It's not until page 177 that we learn who actually said the words that figure on the dedication page simply as "Chinese proverb". Then it turns out that husband and wife team Kristof and WuDunn don't really believe them anyway, for the last words of the book urge us to "get on with it and speed up the day when women truly hold up half the sky."

Nothing in Half the Sky: How to Change the World is new or news, although it is sometimes made to appear so. In chapter 11 Kristof and WuDunn describe microcredit as a "revolution sweeping the developing world". The Grameen bank was pioneered in Bangladesh 44 years ago. It has been a proper bank since 1983, owned by more than 8 million borrowers, 97% of whom are women, with a loan collection rate of almost 98%. Kristof and WuDunn mention Muhammad Yunus, who won a Nobel prize for the idea in 2006, but only to describe the motivation of Roshaneh Zafar who set up the Pakistani version, Kashf, in 1996. Kashf has yet to reach its millionth client; meanwhile a variety of microfinance corporations followed the business plan of the Grameen bank and are now handling $25bn (£16bn) worth of loans. Kristof and WuDunn tend to pussyfoot around the reasons that the preferred clients for microcredit are female: firstly they suggest that poverty has greater impact on women; the business reason is that women's credit performance is better than men's; the moral reason that women don't spend the money on their own immediate gratification, but invest it in family, business and community.

Yet it would seem from the worldwide reaction to Half the Sky – since it was first published in the US in September it has sold over 200,000 hardback copies; the paperback has now been on the New York Times bestseller lists for seven weeks – that it has surprised people. Melinda Gates found it "a brutal awakening". Where can she have been? The jacket quote from Khaled Hosseini, bestselling author of The Kite Runner, nails what, to me at least, is worrisome about the book: for him it is "a savage indictment of gender inequality in the developing world". True: the developed world gets off scot-free.

We begin with the story of Cambodian Srey Rath, who went to Thailand to work, was forced into prostitution and traded to Malaysia, succeeded in escaping, was imprisoned under Malaysian anti-immigrant law, and released after a year only to be sold by the police to a trafficker who sold her on to a brothel in Thailand. The justification for prefacing Half the World with this story is that "Rath's saga offers a glimpse of the brutality inflicted routinely on women and girls in much of the world." Routinely? Though such cases are far too easy for journalists to find, the inference that they are routine indicts whole nations of criminal misogyny.

The trafficking of women from the European countries of Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldova and the Ukraine to other European countries, merits a sentence. We are never reminded that the US is a prime destination for trafficked individuals. Instead, the US appears as the potential saviour in practically all cases. When Rath finally escaped from the Thai brothel and returned to Cambodia she was put in touch with an American charity set up by a Newsweek journalist specifically to help trafficked girls; the charity gave her $400 to set herself up as a street trader.

The authors describe brutality towards women as "a malignancy that is slowly gaining recognition as one of the paramount human rights problems of this century." Raising awareness of brutality towards women is not a slow process; the problem is rather that the flash of outrage soon dissipates, to lie dormant until somebody or something triggers it again, while the vileness carries inexorably on, partly because the concerned public is unaware of its own misogyny.

Panic about trafficking has gripped the British on and off since the uproar about white-slaving in the 1880s, when ladies who "routinely" ill-treated their maids put on their hats and went to hear rousing denunciations of the evil foreigners who snatched beautiful young Englishwomen off the streets and sold them into prostitution. It is 100 years since the passing in the US of the White-Slave Traffic Act, usually called the Mann Act. When the UN general assembly adopted the convention for the suppression of the traffic in persons and of the exploitation of the prostitution of others in 1949, it was the culmination of a series of enactments designed to deal with what was perceived to be an international scourge. For Kristof and WuDunn the passing of the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 was "a milestone in raising awareness of international trafficking on the global agenda." As year on year the US fails to pay its UN dues, and most Americans are unaware of the existence of other hemispheres anyway, perhaps it was.

The book lays out "an agenda for the world's women focusing on three particular abuses: sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence, including honour killings and mass rape; and maternal mortality, which still needlessly claims one woman a minute". Gender-based violence here includes wife-beating in Asia, but not wife-killing in Britain or America. "Rape has become endemic in South Africa" we learn – as if rape had not coexisted with apartheid. The solution is apparently a gadget called Rapex, "a tube, with barbs inside", which a woman puts in her vagina before she goes on a date. The Kristof and WuDunn slant on this craziness is that "the Rapex is a reflection of the gender-based violence that is ubiquitous in much of the developing world."

Misogyny is as real in the US as anywhere else on earth. People who think charity begins at home will be driven to apoplexy by the authors' certainty that the US has the answers. Global figures for domestic violence are cited, but examples of women whose sexual experience began with a rape "or attempted rape" are drawn from Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa. The evidence about the involvement of women soldiers in sexual violence is taken not from Abu Ghraib, but from Sierra Leone's civil war, from Haiti and Rwanda. In contemplating these horrors Kristof and WuDunn sometimes become downright owlish in their capacity for incomprehension.

"Women have suffered grievously in the genocides of Rwanda and Darfur. Men too … In Darfur, after interviewing several women who had been raped when leaving their camps to get firewood, we asked the obvious question: 'If women are raped when they get firewood… why don't the men collect firewood?'"

Answers on a postcard – and let's not forget that immediately after the war the population of Rwanda was 70% female. In a later chapter the authors sing the praises of Rwanda for having the highest share of women members of parliament, without appearing to suspect that this may also be a consequence of genocide. With no sign of a shudder they intone that Rwanda is "one of the least corrupt, fastest growing and best governed countries in Africa". One of them? You have to wonder what the others are.

Kristof and WuDunn have done the usual Pulitzer thing of finding specific cases to illustrate general points: "Frankly," they write, "we hesitate to pile on the data, since even when numbers are persuasive, they are not galvanising. A growing collection of psychological studies show that statistics have a dulling effect, while it is individual stories that move people to act." Individual cases cannot prove that behaviours are routine or ubiquitous. The authors state with confidence that: "No group systematically abuses young women more cruelly than mothers-in-law." Mothers-in-law do not form a group; the group with whom they identify is their extended family. Sure, a vicious mother-in-law can drive a young wife to self-harm and suicide, but in village society a wise mother-in-law knows that, if she is to build a strong cohesive family, she needs to earn the love of her daughters-in-law. In the developed world she wouldn't have the option.

"So while the primary purpose of a new movement on behalf of women is to stop slavery and honour killings," they write, "another is to expose young Americans to life abroad so that they, too, can learn and grow and blossom – and then continue to tackle the problems as adults." Nothing in this book would suggest to young Americans that their lifestyle perpetuates the poverty that lies at the root of developing-world brutality towards women. Do they know who made their jeans? Do they realise that they haven't the option of buying American-made, because if they do the Asian sweatshop worker will be thrown out of work? International aid programmes are infested with people seeking their own salvation at other people's expense; if Kristof and WuDunn have their way there will be a whole lot more of them.

A number of explanations for the intractable rate of maternal mortality that continues to bedevil the world are suggested – but poverty is left out. Doctors Allan Rosenfield and Deborah Maine wrote their seminal article on maternal mortality for the Lancet in 1985; in 1999 Rosenfield received a $50m grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to set up a programme called Averting Maternal Death and Disability. If brilliance and application had been enough Rosenfield might have done it. But mothers are still dying, and for the same reason: poverty. Poverty leads to illiteracy, low status, poor nutrition, teenage pregnancy, poor physical development, lack of infrastructure, and lack of resources and expertise. Multimillion-dollar programmes enter the scenario much too late. Meanwhile, as western doctors win awards for setting up humanitarian programmes in third-world countries, we harvest the doctors who trained in those same countries, whose skills are better adapted to the needs of rich patients than to those of their own rural poor.

The chapter entitled "Family planning and the 'God gulf'" argues that "secular bleeding hearts and religious bleeding hearts will have to forge a common cause" if there is to be "a successful movement on behalf of women in poor countries". The discussion of this issue is dominated by American policy in regard to support of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and any other family planning organisations that can be found to have supported abortion programmes. Kristof and WuDunn have no objection to the involvement of religious organisations in international programmes – indeed they counsel getting the Pentecostalists on board because they already have so much influence in the developing world. As far as they are concerned, dealing with the agonies of women is a matter for charity, which they sometimes misname as philanthropy. The love of humanity has to be a better motive for intervention than the love of God, you would think. Or even feminism, a word that the authors use very oddly, usually to pillory an attitude they find fundamentally unreasonable.

They praise the small Campaign for Female Education charity (Camfed) which was set up by Ann Cotton to fund girls' education, first in Zimbabwe, and now in Zambia, Tanzania and Ghana, because of what it doesn't do. "We highlight Camfed partly because we believe an international women's organisation needs to focus less on holding conventions or lobbying for new laws, and more time in places like rural Zimbabwe, listening to communities and helping them get their girls into schools."

Without feminism it's difficult to imagine how an international women's movement could get off the ground. Anyone would think that there was a naughty international women's organisation that did nothing but have conventions and lobby for new laws. The equal rights amendment was never ratified in sainted America; American feminists might find that embarrassing, but they gave up lobbying about it long ago. Funnily enough, when it comes to discussing microcredit, Kristof and WuDunn decide that new laws and more women in parliament are exactly what is needed.

The authors have no critique of globalism to offer, nor do they appear to grasp how western economic power keeps the developing world too poor to develop. Astoundingly, they suggest that what women need is more sweatshops. "The factories prefer young women, perhaps because they're more docile and perhaps because their small fingers are more nimble for assembly or sewing. So the rise of manufacturing has generally raised the opportunities and the status of women. The implication is that instead of denouncing sweatshops, we in the west should be encouraging manufacturing in poor countries, particularly in Africa and the Muslim world."

One of the best parts of the book, unexpected given its own brief, is the short discussion of female genital-cutting and the success of a grassroots organisation called Tostan in changing attitudes.

The impulse behind Half the Sky is a good one. Anyone who has endured the talkfests of the UN for decade after weary decade, and seen massive aid projects miss their mark and collapse in a welter of bad faith, will echo the authors' certainty that it is now down to ordinary people to do practical things for other ordinary people. It is tempting to believe that with "our loose change we can loosen chains" and that the internet will make real help possible as it has never been before. The only really enviable privilege that the privileged have is the chance to do good. Kristof and WuDunn make it sound easy. It's practically impossible, but Half the Sky does make you want to try.

Half the Sky: How to Change the World is published by Virago on 5 August

• Women
• Human rights
• Gender
• United States
• Microcredit

Germaine Greer
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Travelling on your own lets you do exactly what you want when you want. Author and veteran solo traveller Jenny Diski shares her strategies.
See the rest of our experts' tips on holidaying solo

It's really simple: the great thing about travelling alone is that there is no one else with you. No one whose wishes and needs you have to consider when you want to spend the day at your hotel in bed reading excursion brochures or gloomy Thomas Bernhard. You want to stay in bed? You stay in bed. You want to lie at the edge of an ocean and let the surf play with your feet? You do that. You want to see the sights? Really? Do you really? Well, if you must, you can.

You travel alone, you do exactly as you want. This surely needs no further explanation. But, of course, I'm from what Margaret Thatcher (that well-known communitarian) called the Me generation. Being with other people on holiday makes me anxious. Are they comfortable, happy, restless, resentful, bored? On the whole, togetherness requires compromise and why would you want to compromise (more than already required by the location and budget) while travelling, as well as in your real, everyday life?

Nevertheless, I know that there are those who find the word "alone" distressing. That scene in Les Enfants du Paradis where the insufferable toddler enters the theatre box, in which the gloriously tragic Arletty watches her secret love on stage, and pipes: "Vous êtes toute seule, madame?" makes being toute seule a lifelong terrifying prospect. Well then, try "solo".

The difference between travelling solo and travelling alone is a state of mind. I've been travelling alone for decades, long before I could call myself a "travel writer" – not that I do call myself a travel writer. But the word could is essential here. It's true that, for different reasons in different places, people can be curious, suspicious even, of a woman (young, middle-aged or old) travelling alone. Yet tell them you're a writer and not only is everything explicable but people will stay and talk to you, telling you sometimes wonderful stories about their lives. Use the writer excuse with a different look on your face, and people will understandingly leave you alone.

In those circumstances where you might feel awkward – eating alone in a restaurant full of holiday couples and families, lizarding on a beach hoping for perfect peace, ordering a drink at a bar in a small town – only think of yourself as a writer on an assignment and the unease falls away. You are, after all, doing what a writer does: looking, thinking, playing with characters or ideas, and idling. Once you've explained yourself to yourself it does wonders for not worrying about what other people think. It makes all social unwillingness acceptable. You can talk, not talk; join, not join; everything's covered for other people and for you. You're travelling solo, not alone.

I've chilled out in the Caribbean, encircled America by train, cargo-shipped across the Atlantic and explored the Antarctic peninsula, all solo and at ease, using my laptop as a flag of peace and quiet. Even before I really did write travel stuff, I went to Greek islands in that blissful condition of being alone but free to talk to people if I wanted, by using the journalism excuse.

There are other ways to travel solo without raising eyebrows, as I did when I went with my three-year-old to Lake Como and was stared at with deep suspicion and disapproval by the other, mostly elderly, Italian guests in the hotel. Eventually, I made it a point to "find" myself sitting in the foyer next to the crossest-looking elderly lady and explained how sad and yet comforting it was to return here where my late husband and I had enjoyed such happy holidays. She broke into a relieved smile to discover I was a virtuous widow and not a disreputable single mother, as I was, and passed the news around, so that the rest of the vacation allowed me to "mourn" while basking in benevolent glances.

As a young woman in Greece, I found a polite but very firm "no, thank you" was sufficient to send young Greek men, who were both practical and fatalistic, off to try their luck elsewhere.

There are limits to easing your way alone in the world. None of these strategies would have worked in the train I took in my late teens from Rome to Assisi. It was full and I had no seat booked, so I spent the journey standing in the corridor in a tube-like crush with what seemed like an entire brigade of the Italian army. This was awkward and uncomfortable.

For several hours the young men, every one of them, stared unblinking at me with that deadly gaze poised between loathing and lust, until the train reached Assisi, where I fought my way through hands, mouths and groins to the exit. I hadn't thought of the journalism justification at that stage, but it really wouldn't have helped.

Jenny Diski's latest book is The Sixties

• Travelling solo

Jenny Diski
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Christopher Tayler on the experimental art of Tom McCarthy

This book is something you don't see every day: a novel steeped in both high modernism and continental philosophy that's being rolled out as a publishing event in the UK and US. Tom McCarthy, its author, is a 41-year-old Londoner who went to Dulwich College and studied English at Oxford when the literary theory boom was at its height. After spending time in Prague and Amsterdam, he surfaced in 1999 as the general secretary of the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde group co-masterminded by the philosopher Simon Critchley, and began to stage events at such venues as the ICA. His first novel, Remainder (2005), later described by Zadie Smith as "one of the great English novels of the past 10 years", was originally put out by a Paris-based art publisher, and though another novel, Men in Space (2007), and a book on Tintin soon followed, he was more of a figure on the gallery circuit than in the literary world until Remainder's reputation began to mushroom.

In articles, lectures and interviews, McCarthy speaks the language of post-humanism. His allegiance is to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, the French nouveau roman and post-structuralist modes of thought; with a few exceptions, such as William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, most English-language writing since modernism's heyday can be written off as naive, reactionary stuff. It's bracing and fun to see these views being aired in a stubbornly non-modernistic literary culture. But McCarthy's art world affiliations, and the rather arts-institutional intellectual currency he trades in, also raise the suspicion that his end product might turn out to be a bit pretentious, in the style of Deleuze-loving architecture theorists or Lacan-quoting gallery notes. This suspicion isn't totally off the mark, yet McCarthy is a talented and intelligent novelist; however pretension-prone the scene he's interested in might be, his writing is tight and lucid, and he has a functioning sense of humour.

C is a 1960s-style anti-novel that's fundamentally hostile to the notion of character and dramatises, or encodes, a set of ideas concerning subjectivity. On the face of it, though, it's a historical fantasy, sometimes witty and sometimes eerie, built around the early years of radio transmission. The central figure, Serge Carrefax, is born in 1898 on an estate named Versoie in southern England. His father, an eccentric inventor, oversees a school for deaf children; his mother, who is deaf and was once the father's pupil, manufactures silk. Serge and his older sister, Sophie, grow up surrounded by transmitters and insects; Serge gets the wireless bug, while Sophie develops an interest in natural history. Time passes, punctuated by their father's elaborate school plays, pageants based on Elizabethan translations of Ovid. Then, after her initiation into adult sexuality, Sophie starts channelling cryptic messages. With the first world war looming, she drinks a glass of cyanide.

Sophie's death and interment hang heavily over Serge's subsequent career in a way that's far from being conventionally novelistic. Though he's sent to a spa town in central Europe to be treated for "black bile", Serge doesn't do much in the way of emoting, being more interested in precise spatial perceptions and the feelings he gets from dialling through radio frequencies. Under the influence of his godfather, a jovially sinister cryptographer named Widsun, he heads off to the war as a wireless operator in spotter planes over the front – an experience he enjoys in a Futurist kind of way. Having acquired a taste for cocaine and heroin, he turns up next in interwar London, studying architecture and tangling with flappers and fraudulent spiritualists. Finally, in 1922 (a key year in the history of literary modernism), he's sent to Egypt to help set up a world-spanning imperial communications network, a task that takes him to an archaeological dig where McCarthy dispenses a few of the keys to what is, by this stage, an immense symbolic superstructure.

Needless to say, Serge isn't a rounded character. He himself has trouble getting to grips with perspective; at one point someone studies his features "as though trying to draw their flat inscrutability out into some kind of relief". Like the narrator of Remainder, he's projected as a blank everyman, with a blokey, quizzical attitude to high-flown statements. But while he isn't an arty or intellectual figure, everything around him bursts with both qualities, from the novel's multivalently punning nomenclature to the micro-organised threads of imagery and argument involving Greek myth, Renaissance verse, geometry, earth and insects (these last, as in Finnegans Wake, playing on "incest"). Though Serge holds the foreground, it's plain from early on that the novel is chiefly structured by the idea of transmission and reception, which serves as a metaphor for, among many other things, and very roughly speaking, an implied relationship between language, technology and subjectivity.

The near-Joycean scale and density of all this is truly impressive, as is McCarthy's ability to fold it into a cleanly constructed narrative, which has its boring stretches but also moments of humour and weird beauty. Yet its mind-blowingness as a reading experience depends on the reader's appetite for certain types of analysis. Armed with various concepts from Heidegger, Freud or Paul Virilio, say, it would be possible to unpick its implications more or less indefinitely, but there's a dispiriting feeling that the book has been reverse-engineered with an eye to achieving just that. On the other hand, Sophie's death, which is partly an allegory for lost philosophical certainties, can also be read as taking on an emotional weight that goes against the grain of the novel's ostensible scorn for squishy psychologising. "Will he turn out," McCarthy asked recently of the French writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint, "to have been deconstructing literary sentimentalism or sentimentalising literary deconstruction?" It's a sign of his writerly horse sense that this skilfully realised, ambitious, over-literary book finds the time to leave a similar question hanging.

• Fiction
• Tom McCarthy

Christopher Tayler
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Sue Wassef's son Pierre was arrested in Cairo in 2007 and charged with drug trafficking. Coerced into a confession, he is now serving 25 years in prison. His devastated mother can only sit and wait

One Wednesday evening, nearly three years ago, Sue Wassef had the sort of phone call every parent dreads. It came from the British embassy in Cairo. "It's regarding your sons. They've both been arrested."

"I remember the time exactly, because I was on my way to my ladies' darts evening. It was 8.45pm," says Sue. "I stopped breathing. I just asked, 'What for?' They said drugs, and all I could say was, 'Do they still have hanging?'

"I started to hyperventilate. I  couldn't breathe. I couldn't speak. My life stopped that evening." And Sue's life is still on hold, because although her younger son, Philippe, was released several days after his arrest, Pierre is still in prison in Egypt serving a 25-year sentence.

Sue runs a large pub in north London. She is a warm, personable and energetic woman. She looks outwardly cheery and robust, sitting in the sun outside the pub, but she frequently cries when she talks about Pierre, and keeping going is clearly a great struggle. Both sons were born in England – Pierre is 30 and has a partner here, Kelly, and three young children. In 2005, their father, who is Eyptian, had a heart attack and both boys went over to Cairo to look after him. They helped on the family farm and worked as mechanics to help pay their father's hospital bills.

"Pierre is very close to his dad, although we are divorced," says Sue. "He loved living in Egypt. Kelly and the children had been over there and stayed on his father's farm. They loved their grandpa, who bought them a donkey. They loved the animals on the farm."

Pierre and Kelly had planned to move to Egypt to live there while their children were still small because they loved it so much.

While her sons were in Egypt, looking after their father, Sue rang them twice a day. On the day of their arrest, she had begun to worry. "I'd been unable to get through to them the night before and all that day, and I'd had a twinge of worry. They know what I'm like. I ring all the time, but I thought if anything was wrong their dad would have phoned me.

"Pierre had asked the embassy to let me know. He didn't want his father told, in case he had another heart attack. I didn't sleep that night. I don't think I've had a proper night's sleep since it happened." The campaigning human rights organisation Fair Trials International (FTI) has taken up Pierre's case and has many concerns about his treatment and conviction. They consider him "especially vulnerable as a foreigner who doesn't speak Arabic", and believe his "confession" was obtained through mental and physical coercion. He was "beaten, handcuffed to a stairwell and denied food, water, access to toilet facilities and sleep for approximately two days".

Frightened for the safety of his younger brother, who he had been forced to watch being beaten and threatened with the death sentence or 25 years in prison, Pierre confessed to the importation and sale of large quantities of cocaine. He was refused a solicitor until he had done so. According to FTI, "Pierre could not understand the papers he was made to sign … because his interpreter was blind [and he has had only] intermittent or no interpretation at all during his court hearings. Police accounts of the arrest differ wildly."

No drugs were found on the brothers or in their car. Pierre has withdrawn his confession, but there was widespread newspaper and television coverage of his arrest as an "international narcotics dealer" before his conviction, which FTI suggests denied him the presumpion of innocence.

It is agonising for Sue to be so far away from her son. She feels frightened, helpless and physically sick much of the time. But she has to keep the pub running in order to send money to her sons every week. The family spent £22,000 on Pierre's trial; he is hoping to appeal against his sentence, and Sue now needs to find £14,000 for the appeal. "I flew over about 10 days after his arrest. He was being held on remand at the police station, which had no facilities at all – no food, no bedding. His father and brother had to take him everything and were able to see him for four minutes a day. The conditions were horrendous. I cried and cried. I wouldn't put a dog in there. People were screaming and shouting, trying to get in to their family members, bringing them food. You don't know what people are saying. It's very intimidating. Pierre was in his cell 24/7, but the police were quite kind to him. The chief police officer could see it wasn't fair. He would let Pierre come out for three or four minutes and I could give him a kiss and a cuddle. This was my hardest time. At this stage he was upset and nervous, but at the back of his mind I'm sure he was thinking, 'This isn't happening. It's all a big mistake. I'm going to get out.'"

His family and solicitor also thought Pierre was innocent and would be released, but at his first trial, three months after his arrest, he was sentenced in absentia while he was present, but downstairs in custody. "That's illegal," says Sue. "You can't be sentenced in your absence if you're there. I was relieved to know that the solicitor registered this and Pierre was allowed a retrial, which is quite unusual."

Sue insists that her boys "have never been arrested or involved in drugs, ever". But Pierre was found guilty of trafficking, dealing and being a user. "He's none of those. Trafficking is a hangable offence. But according to Egyptian law, to traffic drugs you have to bring them across the border. Pierre hadn't left the country for two years."

The retrial took place two years later. "The solicitor listed all the police mistakes for two hours, then asked for a recess, then continued for another seven hours," says Sue. "He produced evidence that police documents had been doctored, witness statements ignored, no warrants were in place at the time of their arrest. When he had finished, all the other solicitors in court shook his hand. All the other prisoners wanted to be his client. He was so brilliant. But it made no difference. Pierre got 25 years again."

A few weeks ago Pierre was moved to a high-security prison on the desert road between Cairo and Alexandria. Having never seen it, Sue imagines the worst. "I want help. I don't want to wait for the embassy to tell me something's happened to my son and there'll be an investigation. In the remand prison, everyone was fantastic to him. The prisoners looked after each other. They shared food. There'd never be a prisoner who didn't eat.

"But the conditions in the desert prison are much tougher. He's sharing a cell with more than 20 people. I can't imagine what the heat's like. I'm terrified he'll get hepatitis. He's got problems with his teeth. Several are broken and infected. He's in considerable pain but it's difficult to get him medical help. His brother has been taking in antibiotics. You have to take everything in: antiseptic cream, medical wipes, disinfectant. We've asked the embassy to get him a dentist. I'm worried about his state of mind.

"I can't imagine how he must feel – in another country, in a strange prison system where you can't communicate properly. He still can't speak much Arabic and no one in the new prison speaks English. He must feel so cut off, so isolated. The only contact he now has with his family is through Philippe, who is allowed to speak to him for a few minutes when he takes in his food. He hardly knows how Kelly and his children are; his brother can't tell him much in the brief time allowed together. A lifelong friend of his has died in a motorbike accident since he's been in there. We didn't dare tell him. We thought it might push him over the edge.

"Prisoners wear white on remand and navy when they've been convicted. Pierre has told his dad that what really distressed him was seeing the area for people sentenced to death. They have to wear red. It worries me. What sort of psychological damage is being done?"

Pierre's incarceration is taking its toll on Sue, too. "Sometimes I don't feel I get any rest at all. I'm not with my partner any more, I work seven days a week, every night. I'm taking diazepam. Sometimes I go to bed really late but I still can't sleep. I sit down to a Sunday roast and I can't eat it because he's not having it. It takes over your whole life. You end up feeling guilty if you do anything nice. Every night I'm lying in my really comfortable bed thinking of him on the floor. I think about him all the time – in the bath, eating, sleeping – or trying to. He loves Only Fools and Horses. I can't watch it.

"He's a big lad – 6ft 2ins. He's very funny, witty, chatty – people love to be with him. He and Kelly have been together since he was 16. He loves his kids and was always playing with them, taking them out. Every penny he had he spent on his children.

"He can adapt himself to whoever he's with. Without a doubt, that's what has carried him through. I'm still ringing his brother two or three times a day. I go into panic mode if he doesn't answer.

"Pierre's children don't know what's happened to him. We haven't told them yet. We've said he's working in the desert and there's no satellite signal out there. But the oldest boy, Josh, is 11 now and he's not really wearing it. Kelly is a really good mother, but it's a nightmare for her.

"I took the children to a farm and Josh said, 'You know what, Nan, I see an aeroplane and I think, is my dad on that? One day he'll be on one of them, won't he?' I mustn't cry in front of him."

At the end of June, when I first met Sue, she had just had news that Pierre would at last see a dentist and that embassy staff would be allowed to take in a mobile phone so he could speak to his family. He was allowed 10 minutes to speak to Kelly and his oldest son.

FTI say they are hoping Pierre is given "a fair hearing on appeal and that the horrendous ordeal that he and his family are going through soon comes to an end." The British embassy, meanwhile, will "continue to provide consular assistance and remain in contact with the family".

fairtrials.net. If you wish to express your concern, write to Alistair Burt, parliamentary under-secretary of state for the Middle East and North Africa

• Family
• International criminal justice
• Prisons and probation

Michele Hanson
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In pubs and arts venues up and down the country traditional book readings are being replaced by a combination of cabaret, comedy and club nights. The results, Alex Clark discovers, are great fun

'This is my Fight Club," says Todd Zuniga, the editor of American creative writing magazine Opium and the inventor of Literary Death Match, who is already confusing me with his appearance: strikingly fresh-faced, he tells me he is 35; exuding hipness, he is nonetheless wearing a slightly grotesque white jacket with Miami Vice-style rolled-up sleeves. It transpires that his outfit is in keeping with the evening's 80s theme, chosen to honour Bret Easton Ellis's new novel Imperial Bedrooms. With Ellis in town – he has earlier in the week appeared at the Festival Hall before a sell-out audience – all the whispers in the room are of whether he'll grace tonight's event with his presence.

If, at around 10pm, Ellis did slip quietly into the basement of Concrete, a former industrial space reclaimed for the pleasure of the hedonistic twenty- and thirtysomethings who throng to London's Shoreditch on a nightly basis, he might not have immediately recognised the spectacle before him as a bookish sort of gathering. Literary Death Match was reaching its climax. In the couple of hours before, four writers – Milly McMahon, Clare Pollard, Lee Rourke and Nikesh Shukla – had read their work in strictly timed seven-minute segments, and found themselves the subject of an instant critique from a panel of judges. Among the highlights had been a somewhat painful account of a virginity long in the losing and, from Shukla's forthcoming novel Coconut Unlimited, which tells the story of a group of teenage Asian wannabe rappers in Harrow, the author's crowd-delighting version of Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype".

Now Rourke and Pollard were slugging it out to claim the title; but that involved neither earnest declarations of literary intention nor intricate comparisons of imagery. Instead, in what amounted to a gameshow finale, audience members flung themselves at the stage to the tune of 80s pop songs to declare their allegiance. By the time Rourke, author of the novel The Canal, finally won through, the scene resembled something like Mike Reid's Runaround mashed up with The Late Review. "I usually read in little bookshops in front of about 20 people," Rourke told me. "I guess LDM brings literature to those who wouldn't necessarily step into a little bookshop to hear an author read."

But if the face that Literary Death Match presents to the public is determinedly chaotic and endearingly amateurish, then its rise demonstrates a rather steelier business acumen. Launched in 2006 in New York, it has now enjoyed 97 outings in 23 cities, spreading from Los Angeles, Denver, San Francisco and Dallas to London, Oxford and Paris, where Zuniga now lives. In August, it will take to the Edinburgh stage for the first time, and make a return visit to Beijing's Bookworm bookshop, the scene of the first international Death Match last year. It's no surprise to hear that Zuniga, who originally saw it as a way to promote Opium, now envisages it attracting corporate sponsorship.

Any potential literary angels, however, may note that they are arriving in a bustling marketplace. Up and down the country, particularly in the previously unfashionable areas of densely populated cities, in the spare spaces of pubs, clubs and restaurants, in arts centres and at micro-festivals, a new breed of literary event is flourishing. Often influenced by trends wafting in from the other side of the Atlantic, for example, celebrated New York storytelling event the Moth, and drawing heavily on the relaxed, interactive ethos of comedy nights and bring-your-ukelele music sessions, they are youthful, energetic, imaginative and defiantly lo-fi – and a world away from their rather more strait-laced cousin, the book reading. Just as literary festivals have begun to tend towards the small and to become tailored to their surroundings – the inaugural Stoke Newington Literary Festival, this May, was designed by organiser Liz Vater to pay tribute to the north London enclave's history of radical thinking and included a powerful audience with Tony Benn – so too have standalone events started to reflect the preference for spontaneity and ad hoc amusement of their audiences.

During the course of my evening at Literary Death Match, I was told of at least half a dozen other literary performance series that are currently thriving; indeed, Damian Barr's Shoreditch House Literary Salon was in full flow next door at exactly the same time. Perhaps the quirkiest event mentioned, organised by the poet Tim Wells, involves (self-declared) Fat Men Reading Poetry, with a pair of scales on the stage dictating the running order. Shukla, a fan of the Death Match's "silliness, bonhomie and good nature", himself runs a literary pub quiz called the Complete Works, because "I have this secret desire to be a quizmaster and because I want people to enjoy themselves. Also, the competitive element means you get people coming along for the quiz and then seeing readings by ace writers like Stuart Evers or Gavin Bower and going out and finding their work." One of his favourite evenings, he adds, is Book Club Boutique, created by Salena Godden and Rachel Rayner, which now has a monthly residency at the House of St Barnabas in Soho. Shukla explains: "It has a stellar network of writers, poets and musicians who are all thick as thieves . . . It's great when the performers look like they're having fun. And the audience is definitely having fun."

The Book Club Boutique provides an interesting glimpse into the phenomenon of the new literary event. Describing itself as revolving around "books, booze and boogie-woogie", as "London's hippest literary salon" and as a book event that takes place in "a speakeasy environment", it blends the traditional reading with cabaret, featuring a house band and frequent trips to carefully selected festivals such as Latitude, Camp Bestival, Port Eliot and the Standon Calling music festival in Hertfordshire. It makes collaborations with campaigning organisations such as Burlesque Against Breast Cancer, UK Feminista and First Story, the charity founded by the writer William Fiennes, and produces a fanzine called Yours Generally. In short, it is a perfect example of the new wave of artistic cottage industry: participatory events with a homespun feel that owe their success not only to the enthusiasm of their creators but also to their committed use of social networking tools. Contributing recently to a BBC World Service item about the influence of the new media on the world of literature and publishing, Godden noted that, when she performed her first gig 20 years ago, publicity consisted of photocopying fliers and sticking them together with Sellotape; now it means ensuring a constant flow of new and tantalising information on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Literary Death Match, the Book Club Boutique and other series – most notably Homework, a "Night of Literary Miscellany" that takes place in the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club in east London, and To Hell With the Lighthouse, the live offshoot of independent press To Hell With Publishing, which also produces limited editions, new fiction and a literary journal – have doubtless flourished because of a perception of them as clever outsiders: witty, iconoclastic and unfettered from the constraints of the traditional, and largely corporate, publishing agenda. If they are beneath the radar of the capital's mainstream live arts offering, then that is where they want to be. In Homework's case, it started out as an improvised night organised by writing collective Aisle 16, designed to encourage its members to produce new work and share it with others. Over time, explains poet and novelist Joe Dunthorne, one of Aisle 16's key members, the night grew in popularity and they began to invite special guests, among them Jon Ronson, Kate Nash and Kevin Eldon. Sometimes, particular nights went down so well that Aisle 16 developed them into touring shows – for example, Found in Translation, a piece about the group's quest to join the experimental French writing movement Oulipo. The appeal to the audience, says Dunthorne, is that "they get to see (for a fiver) a live literature show that can take in poetry, video, songs, stories, animation, comedy, 'multi-vox', slide shows, mini-lectures, performed by writers who are great at writing, but also great at communicating their work."

It's easy to identify the advantages to the performers at these sorts of events: a chance to put their work before the public, to foster word-of-mouth recommendations, to boost, by however small a margin, book sales, and an opportunity to hook up with other writers and take a night off from staring at the computer screen. But what, precisely, has made audiences so receptive right now? Inundated with entertainment opportunities, probably already in possession of a number of books on their "to read" pile, able to access recommendations, reviews and footage of live performances in the comfort of their own homes, what attracts them to a literary cabaret?

One answer lies, perhaps, in the unexpectedly widespread rise of the do-it-yourself book club. One minute, you had heard a distant rumour of a few friends-of-friends who met over a glass of wine and a frittata in a knocked-through sitting room to mull over the finer points of the new Colm Tóibín or Margaret Atwood; the next, you were no one if you weren't part of one. Publishers started producing reading guides to help proceedings along; people either swotted furiously for them or conceded that they were largely a genteel cover for a good old-fashioned knees-up; and suddenly they were both a mainstay of a certain kind of British life and an invaluable asset to the precarious business of selling books. When Richard & Judy got in on the act in 2004, and sent the sales figures of writers such as Joseph O'Connor, Alice Sebold and Jodi Picoult sky-high, book clubs also underwent a social expansion. They were no longer the preserve of the chattering classes; they were for everybody who enjoyed a good story and wanted to talk about it.

Add to that the more general democratisation of cultural criticism, and a picture begins to emerge. Conventional book readings – still the backbone of large, established venues, literary festivals and bookshops – have maintained their popularity, providing readers with a familiar setting in which to come face to face with a favourite author, ask questions, have a book signed. At the Southbank Centre, for example, the London Literature Festival has recently run to packed houses for 18 days; its programme also included a live StorySlam, dramatisations of classic texts and a "Litweeter" Festival, curated by the Southbank Centre and Shukla. But readings still carry with them the stamp of a cultural hierarchy: the author, occupying a privileged space before his or her appreciative audience, usually with an intermediary asking the questions on the readers' behalf; the respectful queue at the book-signing table; the rapid disappearance of the central figure after the last copy has been signed. For audiences eager to experience closer and less formal contact with a writer and – perhaps even more importantly – to feel part of a literary moment, that isn't quite enough.

And book readings don't usually place the same emphasis on fun. At their best, they can be magical events, affording a unique insight into a writer's work and craft and prompting the reader to return to their books renewed, informed and inspired. But when they are not quite at their best, they can also tend towards the dry. In those circumstances, it's unsurprising that the audience feels there is little chance for escape or diversion. Rosie Boycott, the journalist and writer who earlier this year launched a series of storytelling events called 5x15, told me that the idea came to her when she found herself stuck in a less than scintillating talk that lasted for over an hour. As a riposte, she devised an evening in which the reading is banned. Instead, five writers give a quarter-of-an-hour talk based on their work. At first, notes weren't allowed, but Boycott and her team relented; however, performers who exceed the time limit will find themselves yanked from the stage mid-flow, no matter whether they are in sight of their punchline or not.

At the event I attended earlier this summer at the Tabernacle, a former evangelical church in west London that is now a community arts centre, Boycott's decision to programme without a specific agenda in mind was much in evidence: Fatima Bhutto, Andrew O'Hagan, Yotam Ottolenghi, Frances Stonor Saunders and Maureen Lipman – a memoirist, a novelist, a chef, a historian and a comic actor – shared the bill, with a musical interlude of "politically incorrect" songs from the writer Terence Blacker. Given its location – Holland Park and Notting Hill are barely a stone's throw away – it's perhaps unsurprising that the audience was a slightly older and better-heeled group than the punters most likely to attend a Literary Death Match or make their way to the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club. Indeed, when 5x15 ventured beyond these shores in June, it landed in Paris, as part of bookshop Shakespeare & Co's summer festival. "This gig," as Lipman remarked during the 15 minutes that she spent telling jokes and performing one of a series of comic monologues that she's currently writing, "is like a cross between the Comedy Store and the Women's Institute." If the assembled company, packed in like sardines, tucking into plates of antipasti and sipping dry white wine, took that as a slur on their credentials as sophisticated cultural consumers, they weren't letting on.

A week or so later, I returned to the Tabernacle for a far more long-established event. The novelist Patrick Neate's Bookslam, a combination of "high-end literature and low-end pop reggae" and "the first/best/only literary nightclub", was one of the first events to try to expand the brief for writers in performance. Over the six years that it's been running, with Angela Robertson and Elliot Jack joining Neate, it's grown from an intimate gathering of a hundred or so to a consistently well-subscribed organisation that now spins off podcasts, has its own YouTube channel and this year hosted a celebratory summer barbecue. Performers have included William Boyd, AL Kennedy, Dave Eggers, Hari Kunzru, Nick Hornby and, most recently, Zadie Smith. What's noticeable is that, despite its familial feel – Neate takes to the stage to compère without feeling the need to introduce himself or indulge in scene-setting formalities – it steers clear of some of the more pyrotechnic inventions of newer arrivals. In other words, even though readings are shortish and punctuated by live music, they are still essentially readings. It's just that they are readings during which the audience, seated around tables rather than in serried ranks, feel as though they won't be shot if they nip to the bar.

For some, though, even more participation is the order of the day. Storyteller Mary J Lockwood, who is about to take her show, Mary's Extraordinary Story Club, to Edinburgh, began the Story Slam in her home town of Lancaster a year ago, subsequently running a regular event in London. One of her first moves was to make contact with Bill Hillmann, who started Chicago's Windy City Story Slam at the beginning of 2008 and has now seen attendances grow from an initial crowd of seven to 900. Recently, Lockwood invited Hillmann to bring a team over for an International Story Slam, in which two teams of five storytellers, one American and one British, would do battle; amusingly enough, they were playing by British rules, which demand that randomly selected members of the public rate each performer by holding up a scorecard, rather than, as in Chicago, simply going by the decibel level. In other words, the vibe is more Strictly Come Dancing than Spartacus: Blood and Sand. For those inspired by what they saw, there was the promise of an open-mic slot to finish.

Lockwood is keen to promote a supportive atmosphere, and even includes tips for slammers on her website (including having your last line in your head to avoid meandering and not fretting if you leave something out). When people ask her what demographic she's aiming for, she says she can't narrow it down because everyone, she believes, loves stories. Slammers' ages have ranged from 16 to 80. At the International Slam, I think I've hit on something when I note how heavily biased the audience is towards women; in fact, the men are just waiting until the last moment to unveil themselves. Unsurprisingly, the performances – given that the storytellers are not allowed to use notes – tend towards the raw and unstructured; they also occasionally blur the distinction between oral literature and stand-up comedy. But they are also fresh, free-wheeling and enthusiastically delivered as part of an ensemble evening of light-hearted and unpretentious entertainment.

And entertainment is where it's at – and the more inclusive, the better. The perception of literature and literary life as a citadel with the public kept firmly behind the gates is not merely passé, it's positively antithetical to a new generation of readers aware of the power that their interest represents to a medium in danger of cultural marginalisation. Craig Taylor, editor of the online literary magazine Five Dials, has even identified that emblem of closed-door literary life, the launch party, as a forum for involving his readers, inviting subscribers along to an event – from Paris to Montreal – each time he's ready to press the "send" button. "At Five Dials we want to invite as many people as possible into the tent for the launches," he explains, "then have fun and send out the issue and have faith that subscribers and attendees will read the magazine later when they're sitting in a comfortable chair. People seem increasingly to want to be at these livelier literary events because they like the kind of people who attend. They don't want to hear hours of readings. They want to drink and dance and flirt and talk and listen to short, interesting readings and then go back to the other stuff. It's fine if you're going to have a debate or a reading or a long discussion with two writers sitting in two chairs, but please, please, please remember there has to be some element of theatre."

There is one problem posed by the increased focus on a writer's capacity for performance. What of the writers who can't, or don't want to? Those for whom the words on the page are the thing, not their talent for doing a turn? In the past few years, the incursions into what writers might have optimistically thought of as their private space have multiplied, with publishing's shakier finances dictating that authors find themselves on the road, or in front of a class of creative writing students, rather more frequently than before. If, in addition, we'd like them to become fully fledged variety acts, we may have to take the consequences in the quality of the prose on offer – and we might have to search all the harder for those who prefer to stay in their studies.

Yet my experiences in the salons and at the stand-up recitals of the new literary scene suggest that, despite the occasional piece of irritating modishness, the hyperbole with which some events are trumpeted and the odd ropy performance, there is an energy and invention on offer that the established scene and its practitioners might do well to allow to rub off on them. Which is not to say that readers won't continue to enjoy the hushed reverence of a traditional reading, nor its still unparalleled ability to focus the audience on a text; they just might like to see a flash of ankle as well.

'Books, booze and boogie-woogie'

LITERARY DEATH MATCH What: Knockabout, adversarial readings with a deliberately chaotic feel. When and where: Anywhere and everywhere. Coming up: Edinburgh (10 August), London (11 August), San Francisco (13 August), New York (19 August) and Beijing (31 August). Find out more: literarydeathmatch.com

SHOREDITCH HOUSE LITERARY SALON What: Hip evening promising that 'not since the Marquis de Sade has reading been this sexy'. When and where: Monthly at Shoreditch House, Ebor Street, London; plus weekends away, including a Reading Weekend with Louis de Bernières at Tilton House, East Sussex, 3-5 September. Find out more: Shoreditch House Literary Salon Facebook page.

THE BOOK CLUB BOUTIQUE What: Cabaret-style readings with a burlesque feel. When and where: Monthly at the House of St Barnabas, Greek Street, London; at the Standon Calling Festival, Hertfordshire, 6-9 August; and the Electric Picnic Festival in September. Find out more: Book Club Boutique's Facebook, Twitter and MySpace pages; standon-calling.com; electricpicnic.ie

HOMEWORK What: A night of 'literary miscellany' featuring poetry, prose and video. When and where: At the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club, Pollard Road, London. Season 3 runs from May-October; forthcoming events include How to Write Badly Well (25 August), The Last Barman Poet (20 September) and My Worst Gig (27 October). Find out more: aisle16.co.uk

TO HELL WITH THE LIGHTHOUSE What: A monthly literary 'party night' hosted by independent publisher To Hell with Publishing. When and where: The second Monday every month at Peter Parker's Rock'n'Roll Club, Denmark Street, London. Find out more: tohellwith.wordpress.com

BOOKSLAM What: Readings and music in a relaxed, informal setting. When and where: Usually on the last Thursday of the month at the Tabernacle, Powis Square, London; occasionally elsewhere and on other days. Podcast also available. Find out more: bookslam.com

5x15 What: Five writers perform for 15 minutes each, with a musical interlude. When and where: Usually at the Tabernacle, Powis Square, London. Forthcoming events on 20 and 27 September (at the Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, London); and 18 October. Find out more: 5x15stories.com

THE STORY SLAM What: Storytellers compete to be named Slammer of the Night. When and where: Various locations throughout the country; Mary's Extraordinary Story Club is at the Edinburgh Festival, 5-29 August. Find out more: thestoryslam.co.uk; maryjlockwood.co.uk

THE FIRESTATION BOOK SWAP What: A chance for readers to exchange books, hosted by novelist Marie Phillips and publisher Scott Pack. When and where: Usually at the Old Firestation Arts Centre, St Leonard's Road, Windsor; at the London Review Bookshop, Bury Place, London, 5 August. Find out more: Via Facebook and Twitter; firestationartscentre.com; lrbshop.co.uk

THE BOOK CLUB What: Multi-arts venue featuring 'Thinking and Drinking' events. When and where: Frequent events in Leonard Street, London. Find out more: wearetbc.com

FIVE DIALS What: Literary magazine produced by publishers Hamish Hamilton. When and where: Online, via subscription; launched live at literary events throughout the world. Find out more: fivedials.com

Alex Clark
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For Tim Gautreaux, a Louisiana local whose family is immersed in the oil industry, the BP leak means the death of his whole community. And things can only get worse…

Those who live in Louisiana all their lives develop an understanding of disaster. We know a hurricane can turn over hundreds of offshore oil rigs in one pass and then come to land and do the same to our homes. Refineries explode, rigs blow up, pipelines burst, well pressures cause accidents that take fingers, feet, arms, legs and life itself.

There's hardly a family in the Gulf region that does not have a member involved in the oil industry. My father was a tugboat captain who handled barges of crude oil for the sprawling refineries, my brother sells oilfield equipment and technology, my nephew captains offshore supply vessels, my great-nephew operates a giant crane currently picking Katrina-smashed equipment from the Gulf floor. Cousins manage oil leases.

So, even though I am not an oil worker, the industry is part of my environment, my history, and when I saw images of the April Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire, I thought at once, "Wait a minute. Something's wrong. That rig is state-of-the-art, the size of a small factory, loaded with technology that rivals the space programme in complexity. Why is the fire so enormous?" And later, when the labyrinth of pipes and valves keeled over in a rumbling, hissing nimbus of flame, I was astounded, thinking, "Why didn't the blowout preventer shut down the well?" And days later, when it was revealed that the device was not functioning, a dark spill began to spread in my soul, a burgeoning realisation that nothing could stop a runaway well 5,000ft below the Gulf's surface. Nothing. A wide open fire hydrant blasting a plume of water out of a four-inch opening operates on a pressure of 50 pounds per square inch. The oil and gas venting from the rig's seven-inch pipe is propelled by at least 3,000 psi. Or more. And if the pipe beneath the blowout preventer fails? The reservoir pressures, I understand, are 11,000 psi. Unchecked, the subterranean caverns of oil would roar to the surface for years. BP has made a number of attempts to stop the fountain of oil and all have failed, except for the latest cap. But even this success poses many dangers, including a well rupture far below the ocean floor, initiated by the high pressure caused by the cap. No one knows what the result of such a failure would be, and this highlights the most frightening facet of the catastrophe: its unpredictability. The final solution is supposed to be the relief wells BP is drilling, and on the day I realised even these might not arrest the blowout, I decided to stop thinking about it all.

I drove into my south-east Louisiana town of Hammond to get something good to eat. At a seafood cafe I ordered Oysters Scampi. The TV was on above the bar, showing miles-long strands of red oil streaming across the face of the Gulf. I thought of the men killed in the explosion, how they spent their lives trying to avoid something like this. My oysters were large and plump; I ate the first fellow, then looked up at the oil. Locally, it's well known that 60% of the US's oysters come from Louisiana's coastal regions. The oyster beds would be killed by the oil and take years to regenerate. Longer, if the oil kept coming next year. And the next. The spill inside me widened as I realised that the shrimp fisheries would soon be closed, the commercial taking of red snapper, grouper and all their delectable cousins banned. I remembered that Louisiana supplies 73% of the nation's shrimp. My God, what about the charter boat industry and sport fishermen from Texas to Florida?

The nightly news told of oil coming ashore. Unlike its neighbour states, Louisiana has no shore, no sand beach except for a small spit called Grand Isle, no dunes, hills, cliffs. The entire Gulf border and its wide attendant marshes are exactly at sea level. The shore is mostly gritty mud held in place by tall, dense marsh grass. What is not water is grass, thousands of square miles of it. When the oil kills the grass, the shore will begin to melt away. This coastal marsh is home to millions of birds – pelicans, terns, egrets, great herons – and a rich variety of mammals and reptiles. It is threaded through by countless miles of narrow bayous, inlets and lagoons, all spawning areas for shrimp and succulent blue-claw crabs, nesting grounds for vast flocks of migratory geese and ducks – a hot and humid greenhouse teeming with life.

Louisiana is a relatively small state, but it contains 40-45% of the nation's coastal wetlands. The neighbour states of Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida have similar fertile and productive marshes, though such areas are much smaller.

The oil that began to show up, the so-called tar balls, were really reddish pancakes of axle grease; they began to appear on Grand Isle, then east, on the Alabama beaches, followed by a nasty invasion of the lovely green water and white sand shores of Pensacola and Santa Rosa Island. Heavy dark oil began to pool against the Louisiana marshes, coating wildlife with a greasy, glue-like batter – no one can ever know how many thousands of animals have died, how many carcasses are at the bottom of the quarter million square miles of the Gulf.

Next, every fisherman's greatest fear happened. The government had to close over 80,000 square miles of the Gulf to all fishing, and suddenly tens of thousands of fishermen were out of work, losing their identity and a way of life they and their ancestors have pursued for generations. The Cajuns have fished since they arrived in the 1700s; the Vietnamese, Croatians, African Americans, Native Americans, Islenos and plain American country boys who trawl and fish and process are all on the bank watching their livelihoods drown in oil. How much oil? Who will ever know? As of now, a safe final estimate, if the cap holds and the relief wells work, is 200m gallons. The oil washing up in July might have leaked in April. Locals are losing sleep about how much oil is looming underwater to bedevil us next year or for 10 years. Calls to counselling and crisis lines are through the roof. Fourteen million people depend on fishing and oilfield work for a living in the Gulf region. The fishermen can't pay rents and mortgages, utility bills, insurance, buy fuel for their boats, save for any kind of future; they stand in charity food lines on 100-degree days. The oilfield people are facing cutbacks because of the new ban on deepwater drilling; this is affecting shipbuilding, crewboat, supply and helicopter fleets, machine shops, pipe yards, supply houses, foundries and a hundred other businesses. The fishermen are hurting acutely at the moment, but the oil workers are worried for their futures as well, as the industry is facing a wind-down that could last for years. The news keeps getting more uncertain and, yes, things can get worse because hurricane season is now upon us and no one knows what havoc a big storm in the Gulf could cause. It could do anything from pushing a bow wave of killing oil over the estuaries to painting New Orleans with black rain.

I don't think people living outside the region understand what is happening. One so-called environmentalist suggested Gulf fishermen and oil workers should just get educated in green technology and work in solar panel factories. What are they supposed to do for 20 years until the technology is perfected and the factories built? Fishermen want to work as fishermen; the Gulf is 1,000 miles wide and they are independent members of a huge culture, not employees.

By the end of June I tried to limit my news intake. It was now clear the enormous Gulf tourism industry was on shaky ground because all the beaches from Panama City, Florida to Grand Isle, Louisiana were fouled or soon to be fouled, and the result was a freefall in hotel, condo and restaurant bookings, and trade in the thousands of gift shops, filling stations, convenience stores, bait-and-tackle shops… Each type of business was firing workers, cutting orders, falling into debt.

After a charter boat captain shot himself in the head, I turned off the television. But everywhere I went, neighbours, bank tellers, waitresses, university professors all fretted about the spill. Last year, one billion pounds of fish was harvested from the Gulf; now only a tiny fraction of that is being caught in the small areas still open, and chances are even that clean catch will be distrusted by buyers outside the region. How many years will it take for Gulf seafood's reputation for quality to return?

This disaster rides like a tumour on the back of the monster Katrina, a storm that in 2005 killed more than 1,800 people in the New Orleans area. Many residents of the region were finally getting their homes rebuilt, their boats and docks restored.

It is true a few hundred men have been hired by BP at low wages to shovel muck off the shores. Several motels have been rented to house workers and BP has been leaking out cheques to fishing families and charter boat operators (though there are tales of cheques never arriving). Hundreds of boats have been hired to go after the oil, but not a man in a thousand miles is glad about any of it.

Everyone has a sense of why the accident happened. Weeks before the explosion, it seems BP knew the blowout preventer was leaking and missing a crucial seal. About 10 hours before 11 men were burned up, employees report an argument broke out between the rig's BP manager, who wanted a speedy and cheap sealing of the well, and the driller and cementer, who demanded traditional, safe plugging methods. The company man overruled the experts. He wanted to save money, ignoring the first rule of industry economics: safety is never more expensive than an accident.

The clean-up bill is complex and will extend for years. In Florida, workers clean a beach at dusk; at sunrise it's covered again. The spill is slathering four states now. It could be blown over to Texas. It could show up in the marinas of Key West, or even Wilmington, North Carolina on the Atlantic, wherever the Gulf Stream carries it. The coming expense is not to be imagined. Lawsuits are spilling out with no judicial blowout preventer to slow them down. Injury and loss of livelihood suits, suits from hotels for loss of bookings, suits from restaurants, bars, stores, suits for mental anguish, even claims from municipalities for loss of taxes.

The future? There is a large, years-old black spot in my driveway where my old Jeep once leaked a quart of transmission oil. It's not fading away. The BP spill is likewise staining the coast's soil, and sinking into the psychological fabric of the Gulf. Beneath the sorrow lies suspicion and anger based on the notion that if this spill had occurred near a place like Boston harbour where a lot of wealthy, well-connected people live, every oil-skimmer in the hemisphere would have been brought in and every offer of foreign help accepted immediately, instead of 71 days after the spill began.

The locals have watched with disbelief some of BP's lunatic and expensive clean-up methods, such as wiping down each blade of marsh grass with paper towels. They have watched their own, more effective, home-grown efforts ridiculed and crushed by irrelevant Coast Guard regulations and "experts" who have never seen Louisiana's coast except perhaps through the windows of a plane.

In three to 10 years, maybe the lawsuits will be settled, maybe the sea grasses will grow back to hold the marshlands together, maybe the fish now trying to breathe clouds of undersea oil will somehow propagate, maybe trust in the world's best seafood will return. But a person's life is composed of minutes and is most fulfilled by working and bringing one's earnings to the family table. And who can give back even one ruined minute?

• Click on the link above to see an extended slideshow of Stuart Franklin's photographs.

• BP oil spill

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The floral dress is quintessential English summer wear, but it's a little bit twee, no? Thankfully, Erdem has come up with a modern alternative

A floral dress is the Pimm's of the fashion world: a perfect English summer's day, distilled in fashion form. And, like Pimm's and perfect English summer's days, it plays a bigger role in the summers of our imagination than it does in reality. In novels, women wear floral dresses a lot. In real life, I see denim skirts and vests (the half-pint of lager of the wardrobe; fashion code for goosebumps in a beer garden) with more frequency.

There is a new type of floral dress, though, which is less happy-skippy meadow and more modern, and more suited to days when cold Pimm's is likely to be thin on the ground. The king of this new dress is Erdem, who made his name when Sarah Brown and Samantha Cameron both began wearing his work. A typical Erdem floral print is a slightly blurred photo. The blur makes it obvious it's a digital image, which, oddly, makes it feel more modern than an in-focus one. The blurriness lends a slightly off-kilter edge, which offsets the perky charm of flowers. It's a full order of femininity. You can see why it's a shoo-in for a politician's wife.

The British high street is already all over the blurry floral tack, but this being the dregs of sale season, you may need to approach the trend with an open mind. In the absence of having a blurred floral print to hand, a loosely painted splashy floral will do the trick. A repeating pattern is best: computer-generated is good, you see. You're looking for a print that seems like you're looking at a 3D film without the glasses on. Pimm's is now optional.

• Jess wears dress, £745, by Erdem, from Liberty at www.liberty.co.uk. Shoes, £89, by Gap, www.gap.comeu. Bracelet, £300, by Erikson Beamon, www.eriksonbeamon.com.

Photographer: David Newby for the Guardian. Stylist: Aradia Crockett. Hair and make-up: Tania Courtney at Mandy Coakley.

• Dresses
• Women's shoes
• Fashion

Jess Cartner-Morley
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Criticism comes in wake of France's decision to expel illegal Roma immigrants and destroy hundreds of their encampments

The European Union was today accused of "turning a blind eye" as countries across Europe carried out a wave of expulsions and introduced new legislation targeting the Roma.

Human rights groups criticised the EU for failing to address the real issues driving Europe's largest ethnic minority to migrate in the first place and for choosing not to upbraid countries for breaking both domestic and EU laws in their treatment of them.

The criticism came after France announced it would round up and expel illegal Roma immigrants and destroy hundreds of their encampments.

Elsewhere, it emerged that the city of Copenhagen had requested Danish government assistance to deport up to 400 Roma, and that Swedish police had expelled Roma in breach of its own and EU laws.

In Belgium a caravan of 700 Roma has been chased out of Flanders and forced to set up camp in French-speaking Wallonia in the south.

Italy, which in 2008 declared a state of emergency due to the presence of Roma, and evicted thousands of them, mainly to Romania and Bulgaria, is continuing to implement the policy to this day.

Germany is in the process of repatriating thousands of Roma children and adolescents to Kosovo, despite warnings they will face discrimination, appalling living conditions, lack of access to education as well as language problems, because many of them were born in Germany and do not speak Serbian or Albanian.

In eastern European countries that are EU members, such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria, accounts are rife of widespread discrimination against Roma, including physical attacks.

Amnesty International said the EU had "turned a blind eye" to what it called a "serious breach of human rights" towards Europe's Roma, who are roughly estimated to number about 16 million.

"There is a clear and systemic programme of EU governments targeting Roma," said Anneliese Baldaccini, a lawyer at Amnesty's EU office.

The Budapest-based European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), which monitors the situation of Roma in Europe, called on the EU to be "much more forthright" in pointing out to member states "the clear requirements of the free movement law".

"Poverty, discrimination and a whole host of things make life unbearable for Roma in their countries of origin," said the ERRC's executive director, Robert Kushen. "We would welcome strong EU involvement to address some of these issues," he said.

The campaign groups were responding to the European Commission's insistence this week that the issue was one for individual states to handle.

"When it comes to Roma and the possibility of expelling them, this is up to the member states to deal with – in this case France – and for them to decide how they are going to implement the law," said Matthew Newman, spokesman for the European justice commissioner, Viviane Reding.

French president Nicholas Sarkozy was this week accused of pursuing a "xenophobic" and "discriminatory" crackdown on the country's 400,000 Travellers, Gypsies and Roma – most of whom have French citizenship.

Interior minister Brice Hortefeux announced new measures including the dismantling of about 300 encampments and the "quasi-immediate" expulsion to Romania or Bulgaria of Roma with a criminal record.

Amnesty said the EU should penalise countries that have persistently failed to uphold the human rights of Roma. Among the harshest measures applicable under the charter of fundamental rights that came into force with the Lisbon treaty last year is the withdrawal of voting rights, or even expulsion from the union.

"The EU under the Lisbon Treaty...has the responsibility to address human rights within the 27 member states," said Amnesty's executive officer for legal affairs in the European Union, Susanna Mehtonen.

Campaign groups say the EU's failure to intervene calls into question its commitment to the Charter of Fundamental Rights that came into force with the passage of the Lisbon Treaty last year, and was heralded as a "new dawn" for human rights in Europe.

They have accused Brussels of cowardice when it comes to the Roma. While the commission has no competence to defend gay rights, either, it has frequently been ready to criticise homophobic legislation in eastern Europe – largely, it is believed, because gay rights are well established in western European countries, unlike the rights of Roma.

• Roma
• European Union
• Human rights
• Amnesty International
• France

Kate ConnollyLizzy Davies
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Francis Maude defends scope and speed of reforms with claim earlier governments have not pushed ahead vigorously enough

The coalition is trying to push through quicker and more vigorous reforms than attempted by either Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair in their first terms, Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister and senior Tory responsible for the party's transition into government, said today.

There has been criticism that David Cameron risks overloading the Whitehall machine, and storing up political trouble, by quickly pursuing radical reforms on so many fronts simultaneously.

But Maude, in a Guardian interview, said: "If you look at the last transitions of governments and the way they came in, I would say one of the things that Thatcher regretted was not pushing ahead vigorously enough, and quickly enough, in terms of reform. The big reforming Thatcher governments were not until 1983 and 1987.

"Similarly, the Blair government did not just waste its first 100 days – it wasted its first five years. By contrast we have prepared very carefully. So we are well equipped to hit the ground running"

A member of the cabinet's "star chamber" on spending, Maude defended plans for a vast efficiency drive, including redundancies in Whitehall, saying it was the best way to ultimately protect frontline public services.

He said he wanted to unleash a new wave of public sector entrepreneurs willing to take over public services as co-ops or mutuals. He also pointed to the 60,000 responses to the Treasury's call for suggestions on how to make government more efficient as proof that there is a thirst to take charge of public services.

Maude, seen as one of the first modernisers of the Tory party, positively embraced the coalition with the Liberal Democrats, saying: "For a government facing a national crisis, to be a broad-based government is a huge advantage."

He said the preparatory work he had undertaken for a majority Conservative government "had to be adapted for coalition purposes, but nonetheless we came in with a huge overlap between what we wanted to do and what the Lib Dems wanted to do. Obviously we had thought a lot more about it."

Referring to the dismissive putdown of the coalition attributed to the leading rightwing backbencher David Davis last week, Maude said: "If I look at the 'brokeback coalition' jibe there is a bit of a compliment in there – relationships are good and it is kind of working. There is a lot of trust and a lot of stuff gets sorted out because they [Cameron and Nick Clegg] talk to one another and they have a strong personal relationship."

Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, joined the call to keep up the pace of reform, saying: "The lesson you learn is that you only have limited time in government to make reform happen because after two years you often spend a lot of your time dealing with events. Time is very limited, and if you are going to make change, you have to make change early."

There has been concern in some Tory circles that the coalition, since its formation in May, has been pursuing too much radical change on too many fronts.

The issue was raised at a political cabinet earlier this month, but it is hard for Downing Street to contain cabinet ministers competing to produce radical agendas before the clouds of the autumn spending round dominate the landscape.

The former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown called on the government this week to slow the pace of reform, urging it to try pilot projects to test the ground before embarking on full-scale change.

Since the election, the government has announced plans to eradicate the structural deficit by the end of the parliament, reform welfare, put GP commissioning at the heart of NHS change, set up a wave of new academies and free schools, elect police commissioners to oversee police, impose radical reforms to the pay and conditions of public sector workers, and introduce the biggest wave of constitutional reform since the 1832 Great Reform Act, including a referendum next May on the alternative vote system.

In a sign that the government recognises that public opinion is in a fragile state, Cameron is to not planning to relax in early August, but will be undertaking two "PM directs" in the regions next week to try to reassure voters that the cuts programme is necessary and not part of an ideological drive to shrink the state.

The shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, who is due to launch a "Save our NHS" campaign tomorrow, said today that the Tories were making the major strategic mistake of reforming the structures of the NHS at a time when it was facing such financial challenge. "They will live to regret this. I think within a year or so, they will have a major crisis on their hands."

He said government had no full mandate for these reforms as they had not been in the coalition document, which proposed no further significant upheaval.

Maude rejected the charge that the NHS changes could be seen as a surprise. "I think the health reforms, such as GP commissioning, were all there. People should have read the words in the manifesto."

In the BMA's fullest response to the white paper, chairman Hamish Meldrum said doctors would engage with the proposals, but warned: "Many are concerned that it will increase the role of the market in healthcare and result in the increased participation of the commercial sector."

• Liberal-Conservative coalition
• Conservatives
• Francis Maude
• Margaret Thatcher
• David Cameron
• Public sector cuts

Patrick Wintour
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• Italian premier puts brave face on defection
• Parliamentary majority ebbs away in new crisis

Silvio Berlusconi's third term as Italian prime minister was in crisis today after one of his main allies and 33 MPs deserted him, stripping his party of its parliamentary majority.

The move by the supporters of Gianfranco Fini to set up a new group cuts the number of Freedom People party MPs to just above 300, short of the 316 required for a majority, meaning that on some controversial policy issues the prime minister may no longer have his way.

Fini, the former post-fascist turned liberal conservative who co-founded the Freedom People party with Berlusconi but who has fallen out with the prime minister, notably over ethics within the party, said his group would only vote with the government if measures proposed upheld the party's electoral promises and "the general interest".

Berlusconi and his aides were putting a brave face on the defection tonight, promising to retain in government ministers loyal to Fini, and thereby see out the administration's term through to 2013.

But the split was a serious blow to Berlusconi, who has been under siege since revelations last year that he hosted parties attended by a prostitute, and more recently by a wave of corruption scandals. "It's always difficult to say for how long artificial respiration can last, but the government is no more," said Pier Luigi Bersani of the opposition Democratic party. "He can't think it is August and everything will end up with wine and roses."

"Berlusconi emerges substantially weakened from this row," said Alessandro Campi, a professor of political science at Perugia university. "The government will have serious problems if it has to negotiate the passing of every law in the coming months." Fini has been in dispute with Berlusconi for months over issues ranging from immigration to the prime minister's attempt to restrict the use of police wiretaps and punish journalists who publish transcripts of them.

After Berlusconi issued a statement on Thursday describing Fini's views as "absolutely incompatible with the founding principles" of the party, Fini fought back in a hastily called press conference.

"Last night, in two and a half hours, without being able to give my views, I was effectively expelled from the party I helped found," he said. Explaining his rift with Berlusconi, Fini said the party's defence of scandal-hit members of the government "too often meant an expectation of impunity." Fini added that he was fighting for legality "in the fullest sense of the word, that is fighting crime as the government is meritoriously doing, but also public ethics, sense of state and playing by the rules." Fini also railed at Berlusconi's bid to force him to resign his post as speaker in the lower house.

Among the supporters of Fini who have joined the new parliamentary group, called Future and Freedom for Italy, are European Affairs minister Andrea Ronchi and deputy Giulia Buongiorno, a lawyer who gained notoriety defending former prime minister Giulio Andreotti against mafia charges and Italian student Raffaele Sollecito against charges of murdering British student Meredith Kercher.

As chairwoman of the lower house justice commission, Buongiorno has been instrumental in battling Berlusconi's wiretapping clampdown, which will now be voted on after the summer break.

"With the wiretap vote coming up in the autumn, Berlusconi has got a month to find 10 or so deputies," said James Walston, a political analyst at the American University of Rome. "He will be going on a shopping spree with the Union of Christian Democrats in his sights." The small UDC party is led by Pier Ferdinando Casini, a former Berlusconi ally.

Alessandro Campi traced the break-up between Fini and Berlusconi to a shouting match the two had at a conference in April, which culminated in Fini demanding "What will you do? Get rid of me?"

"Berlusconi probably never forgave Fini for challenging him in public," he said.

Berlusconi: The highs and lows

March 1994 Berlusconi's Freedom Alliance wins election. Falls after seven months.

June 2001 His Forza Italia party returns to power.

May-June 2003 Berlusconi put on trial on corruption charges but granted immunity from prosecution.

January 2004 Berlusconi's immunity ruled unconstitutional and trial resumes in April

December 2004 Berlusconi is cleared of corruption after a four-year trial.

April 2005 A resounding defeat in regional polls leads to the coalition's fall and Berlusconi's resignation, but after receiving a presidential mandate he forms a new government.

November 2006 Berlusconi collapses at a rally. He is fitted with a pacemaker.

April 2008 Berlusconi wins general election, securing a third term as premier.

May 2009 Berlusconi's second wife says she wants a divorce after revelations about his antics with other women including 18-year-old Naomi Letizia

June 2009 Tape recordings of Berlusconi and escort girl Patrizia D'Addario are released to the press.

October 2009 Constitutional court overturns a law which granted Berlusconi immunity while in office.  

December 2009 Berlusconi suffers two broken teeth and a fractured nose after being hit by a souvenir model of Milan's cathedral during a visit to the city.  

March 2010 Berlusconi's coalition does well in local elections, winning four areas from the opposition.

• Silvio Berlusconi
• Italy

Tom Kington
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Speranta Mihai amd Gheorghe Mihai plead guilty to child cruelty and benefit fraud for activities across south-east England

A Romanian couple who exploited their seven children as beggars and thieves in and around London have been jailed at Reading crown court for two and a half years for child cruelty.

Speranta Mihai, a Roma who lived in Slough and took her children, now aged between two and 16, begging and stealing across south-east England in a systematic operation, was sentenced by Mr Recorder Whittaker alongside her husband, Gheorghe Mihai, who pleaded guilty to child cruelty, benefit and tax fraud and money laundering.

The Mihais were arrested in a dawn raid by officers from Operation Golf, the Metropolitan police's investigation into what it believes is Europe's largest human trafficking ring. It is centering on the small Romanian town of Tandarei from which as many as 1,000 children have been trafficked across Europe for the purposes of benefit fraud, begging and theft.

In the year preceding his arrest, Gheorghe Mihai, 36, passed £47,000 through his bank accounts, including £35,000 in tax credits, housing and child benefit that he defrauded from the state.

When the police arrived, most of the children were found sleeping on the floor of the sparsely furnished house in the Berkshire town with little food.

Four required dental treatment and three suffered from infestations of headlice. One of the youngest children was later found to have scarring consistent with cigarette burns and another with a lesion. The injuries happened while the children were in their parents' care, the court was told.

The prosecution said the evidence added up to a general pattern of "neglect and cruelty" and that – despite defence denials that the children were trafficked from Romania for exploitation – the children had been brought to the UK expressly for that purpose.

Speranta Mihai, thought to be aged around 33, would take her children begging in Luton, Wembley, Southall, Soho, Hyde Park, Edgware Road and Oxford Street, as part of what the court heard was the Mihai "family business".

"It is an act of cruelty to bring children up in a life of crime," said Gareth Branston for the prosecution. "The Mihai family business is begging or stealing and that is the education they gave their children."

None of the children were in school and the couple were both convicted of child cruelty for failing to educate them. Speranta Mihai was convicted on a second count of child cruelty for "causing her children to be engaged in begging".

She was warned repeatedly by the authorities not to beg, but that turned out to be pointless, the prosecution said.

One day she was stopped by police at Edgware Road and placed on a train at Paddington back to Slough. Three hours later she was found begging with her children outside Bayswater underground station in London.

It was part of "a relentless pattern of movement to exploit their children as tools for begging and stealing", the prosecution said.

Members of the Mihai family were stopped by law enforcement agencies for begging and theft 99 times, following their arrival in the UK in 2007.

Their behaviour was consistent with "complex grooming and behaviour patterns that keep children locked in a cycle of exploitation", according to a statement read out in court from child trafficking expert, Christine Beddoe, the chief executive of ECPAT UK, the anti-trafficking charity.

The children are now in local authority care.

Officers from Operation Golf said the traffickers' own estimates suggest each child can earn as much as £100,000 a year in the UK. In recent years, as many as 100 lavish new homes have sprung up alongside the shacks and mud tracks of the Roma enclave in Tandarei, eastern Romania, thought to have been built with the proceeds of child exploitation.

In April, officers from Operation Golf made 18 arrests in Tandarei during dawn raids with Romanian police and senior members of a gang suspected of having trafficked 272 children, many to the UK. They found dozens of guns, including AK-47s, pump-action shotguns and rifles, travel documents, thousands of pounds in £50 denominations, and bundles of euros and local currency.

• Crime
• Child protection
• Human trafficking
• Romania

Robert Booth
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