Demanding artist, selfish (her words) seeks an intelligent man with good sense of humour, probably not for sex because she’s going through the menopause and has lost the urge, but definitely for laughs and companionship.

“I want love,” says Tracey Emin. “I want to spend my life with someone and do nice things and go on adventures, read books and have nice food and celebrate things. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in the bedroom like some people who just go to bed and never get out again.”

Emin is approaching 50 and she is worried about the possibility of a lonely, gentle descent to death. “I am going through the menopause and I have been for ages,” she says. “It is a nightmare, an absolute nightmare. It’s horrible. And I don’t look like that kind of person; you don’t put menopause on top of my head, it doesn’t associate with me.”

Emin is talking as she finishes the installation of a show that she regards as one of the most important of her career, because it is in her home town of Margate.

The works going on public display from today are almost all new or never previously exhibited. They explore themes of love and eroticism, but overwhelmingly, they mark a farewell to the old Emin – the wild child, the one that got drunk all the time, the sex, the bed, the tent. Her “animal” lust has gone. Now there is the new Emin.

“People don’t talk about it, but the menopause, for me, makes you feel slightly dead, so you have to start using the other things – using your mind more, read more, you have to be more enlightened, you have to take on new things, think of new ideas, discover new things, start looking at the stars, understand astronomy … just wake yourself up, otherwise it’s a gentle decline.

“For women, it is the beginning of dying. It is a sign. I’ve got to start using my brain more – I’ve got to be more ethereal and more enlightened.”

Emin is 48. In 2008 she told Piers Morgan she wanted to adopt children – an idea she scoffs at now. “I have friends who have adopted, and they had to radically change their life, their homes, the way they dressed – everything, to get through the adoption agencies. I am not going to change anything.”

She’s not even sure she’d make a good mother. “I’d make a good friend, not mother. I’m too selfish. I think a lot of mothers are selfish and they end up having children, but I don’t want to put some small tiny person through that. I don’t want to be Joan Crawford.

“I would really like the idea of someone small and cute to dress up, we all do, but that’s not what it’s about, is it? I don’t want a mini-me.”

The truth is she has now made a conscious decision not to have children, and finds herself something of a role model for other similarly minded women. “I’m never going to have children, I’m never going to be a grandmother, I’m probably never going to get married. I’m nearly 50, and it is not happening. I’ve got too much on the other side now, and I understand that.”

But being childless can be difficult. “You’re treated like a witch. And I’m not a witch, it is just that I have chosen to do things in another way. It is not by accident.”

There are some stunningly beautiful works in her latest show, and much to get hearts singing, especially in the first room, which features a series of blue drawings bathed in exceptional light. “This room is about not being alone, and there’s a nice feeling in this room. It’s uplifting.”

We look at some drawings of her in bed with a friend reading Daphne du Maurier short stories to her. “It was such a nice, cosy thing. No sex, just a really good story.” Emin suddenly seems downbeat. “I’ve thought I experienced love, and now I’m nearly 50 I’m saying, have I? Maybe I haven’t. Maybe I don’t know what love is. Maybe what I thought was love was a kind of greed, or desire, or something? I think there’s different kinds of love – that’s where I’m at at the moment. But I don’t think I’ve experienced love.”

Emin came closest in her five-year relationship with fellow YBA (the so-called Young British Artists who emerged in the late 1980s) Mat Collishaw, which ended 10 years ago (they are still good friends). In 2010 she split up with boyfriend Scott Douglas, and her closest relationship now, she says, is with her cat, Docket.

“When you have a really good friend and they’re reading you a book in bed and it’s all cosy and all snuggly, that can be love, too. It doesn’t have to be hardcore. There’s different kinds of love, and I’d never experienced that kind of totally platonic love. All the love I’ve experienced has always been a kind of deal, and now, as I get older, I realise that there’s this other love out there.”

At the other side of the room we look at some works she has never shown before, from when she was in Australia in 2007. “I was in Sydney on my own for two months, trying to work out why I felt so ill. I went on this complete health thing – I stopped drinking, I cycled every day, I walked about 10km every day, I swam every day, went on a really strict diet. My legs and arms went completely skinny, but my stomach was just getting bigger and bigger, because I was ill, and didn’t understand why. What I was trying to do with these drawings was try and make myself feel sexy again, but it was difficult. It was almost there, but wasn’t.”

What was her illness? “I had a tapeworm.”

We move on to works she did in Carrara, Tuscany, when she was looking at marble with a friend. “It was the first time I’d been really happy in a long time. You know when you wake up and you feel good? I realised then I’d been low for a long time.”

One is a simple drawing of a heart, which Emin now wants to make in pink alabaster. “I’m sure the first alabaster heart will be a disaster, I’d have to keep working at it, but it’s about me being driven by myself,” she says. “Whether people like my work or not, I want to show people I can do things. I look at this show and I’m enthusiastic. It makes me want to do things.”

Emin’s path to art superstardom began when she opened The Shop in Bethnal Green with YBA Sarah Lucas in 1993, cashing in on Damien Hirst’s new fame by selling ashtrays with his face on. People began to sit up and take notice with works such as her tent (Everyone I Ever Slept With, from 1963 to 1995) that was bought by Charles Saatchi and shown at the Royal Academy’s Sensation show in 1997 – the same year that she so memorably appeared on a late-night Channel 4 discussion show completely hammered. Two years later, Emin was shortlisted for the Turner prize, exhibiting her unmade bed complete with stains, condoms and dirty underwear.

Unlike some other YBAs, her success has endured. She represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2007, staged an enormously successful mid-career retrospective at London’s Hayward gallery last year, and not long after that was voted by her peers as Eranda professor of drawing at the Royal Academy, the first woman to occupy the role.

Critics generally warm to her these days. Reviewing the Hayward show, Rachel Campbell-Johnston of the Times wrote: “I would love to hate Tracey Emin,” but she left “a convert”. The Guardian’s Adrian Searle called her art touching and surprising and said “the cumulative effect is extremely powerful”.

She may shake her head at the suggestion, but Emin, once “Mad Trace from Margate”, is now firmly part of the establishment. She’s even a Tory. “I like David Cameron because I think he is fair compared to a lot of politicians in history,” she says. “He’s in the centre. Probably more centre than someone in Labour, not mentioning any names, who’s actually Opus Dei – that is extreme right-wing thinking.”

She is baffled by all the political fighting that goes on. One work in the show, The Vanishing Lake, is a rusting metal bath with a scrunched-up union flag in it, and is a comment on Britain – “politically, socially, morally”. The flag is a scar. “I don’t understand why people don’t pull together. I don’t understand why there’s so much disunity. I don’t understand why people can’t just say: ‘It’s a mess, let’s pull together.’ Why is everyone so angry with each other on everything? It’s so easy – if everyone relaxed and said we should work together, rather than against each other.”

The Margate show is at Turner Contemporary, the David Chipperfield-designed gallery that opened in April last year and is helping to spearhead the town’s desperately needed regeneration. Emin has been a staunch supporter, and she was the obvious choice for a major show in Olympic year (the exhibition is part of the London 2012 festival). It is clearly a big deal for her, and she’s written an open letter to Margate, asking people to come. “I do feel really positive about this show, because even if people don’t like it, I like it. And that is the most important thing. I didn’t know that I would, because there’s so much new work, and I thought I was setting myself up for a fall, but I’ve done it. I wanted to do something exceptional because it is Margate.

“I’m always anxious with a show, but more so with this one. I’ve been tearing myself to pieces … chronic nerves.”

Reassuringly, there is a bed in the show. Or a Heal’s mattress at least – quite astonishingly stained – on which Emin has placed a bronzed dead branch. The mattress saw service between 2000 and 2003, and is called Dead Sea. But how did it get into such a state? “I’m not going to go into the gory details. Believe me, it was all naturally made. It wasn’t all on my own, I can assure you.

“It goes back to that thing of being over.” She’s talking about sex again. “It’s over. This explains it very well. It was there, but it’s gone.”

And though she’s one of the most successful and feted artists of her generation, is rich and has beautiful houses in east London and the south of France, where she spends around four months a year, it’s still not easy finding a man. “I don’t think it helps,” Emin says. “Any woman who is successful and top of their game will tell you that it is not attractive to men.”

She says she has not had many close relationships in recent years, and her friends “have seriously stopped” any attempts at matchmaking. “I say to them, ‘Would you give him a blow job? No you wouldn’t, so don’t expect me to.’”

A flash of the old Emin – full-on, confrontational, up yours. Now she simply wants people to come to her show and enjoy it. “A lot of my shows generally make people feel worse,” she says. “I’d like it if people came and left feeling better.”

She Lay Down Deep Beneath the Sea: Tracey Emin at Turner Contemporary opens today, until 23 September. Details: turnercontemporary.org

I’m going to begin by addressing four unpleasant questions that novelists often get asked. These questions are apparently the price we have to pay for the pleasure of appearing in public. They’re maddening not just because we hear them so often but also because, with one exception, they’re difficult to answer and, therefore, very much worth asking.

The first of these perennial questions is: Who are your influences?

Sometimes the person asking this question merely wants some book recommendations, but all too often the question seems to be intended seriously. And part of what annoys me about it is that it’s always asked in the present tense: who are my influences? The fact is, at this point in my life, I’m mostly influenced by my own past writing. If I were still labouring in the shadow of, say, EM Forster, I would certainly be at pains to pretend that I wasn’t. According to Harold Bloom, whose clever theory of literary influence helped him make a career of distinguishing “weak” writers from “strong” writers, I wouldn’t even be conscious of the degree to which I was still labouring in EM Forster’s shadow. Only Harold Bloom would be fully conscious of that.

Direct influence makes sense only with very young writers, who, in the course of figuring out how to write, first try copying the styles and attitudes and methods of their favourite authors. I personally was very influenced, at the age of 21, by CS Lewis, Isaac Asimov, Louise Fitzhugh, Herbert Marcuse, PG Wodehouse, Karl Kraus, my then-fianceé, and The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. For a while, in my early 20s, I put a lot of effort into copying the sentence rhythms and comic dialogue of Don DeLillo; I was also very taken with the strenuously vivid and all-knowing prose of Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon. But to me these various “influences” seem not much more meaningful than the fact that, when I was 15, my favourite music group was the Moody Blues. A writer has to begin somewhere, but where exactly he or she begins is almost random.

It would be somewhat more meaningful to say that I was influenced by Franz Kafka. By this I mean that it was Kafka’s novel The Trial, as taught by the best literature professor I ever had, that opened my eyes to the greatness of what literature can do, and made me want to try to create some myself. Kafka’s brilliantly ambiguous rendering of Josef K, who is at once a sympathetic and unjustly persecuted Everyman and a self-pitying and guilt-denying criminal, was my portal to the possibilities of fiction as a vehicle of self-investigation: as a method of engagement with the difficulties and paradoxes of my own life. Kafka teaches us how to love ourselves even as we’re being merciless toward ourselves; how to remain humane in the face of the most awful truths about ourselves. The stories that recognise people as they really are – the books whose characters are at once sympathetic subjects and dubious objects – are the ones capable of reaching across cultures and generations. This is why we still read Kafka.

The bigger problem with the question about influences, however, is that it seems to presuppose that young writers are lumps of soft clay on which certain great writers, dead or living, have indelibly left their mark. And what maddens the writer trying to answer the question honestly is that almost everything a writer has ever read leaves some kind of mark. To list every writer I’ve learned something from would take me hours, and it still wouldn’t account for why some books matter to me so much more than other books: why, even now, when I’m working, I often think about The Brothers Karamazov and The Man Who Loved Children and never about Ulysses or To the Lighthouse. How did it happen that I did not learn anything from Joyce or Woolf, even though they’re both obviously “strong” writers?

The common understanding of influence, whether Harold Bloomian or more conventional, is far too linear and one-directional. When I write, I don’t feel like a craftsman influenced by earlier craftsmen who were themselves influenced by earlier craftsmen. I feel like a member of a single, large virtual community in which I have dynamic relationships with other members of the community, most of whom are no longer living. By means of what I write and how I write, I fight for my friends and I fight against my enemies. I want more readers to appreciate the glory of the 19th-century Russians; I’m indifferent to whether readers love James Joyce; and my work represents an active campaign against the values I dislike: sentimentality, weak narrative, overly lyrical prose, solipsism, self-indulgence, misogyny and other parochialisms, sterile game-playing, overt didacticism, moral simplicity, unnecessary difficulty, informational fetishes, and so on. Indeed, much of what might be called actual “influence” is negative: I don’t want to be like this writer or that writer.

The situation is never static, of course. Reading and writing fiction is a form of active social engagement, of conversation and competition. Indeed – and I’ll say more about this later – it’s impossible for me to write a new novel without first finding new friends and enemies. To start writing The Corrections, I befriended Kenzaburo Oe, Paula Fox, Halldor Laxness, and Jane Smiley. With Freedom, I found new allies in Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Alice Munro. For a while, Philip Roth was my new bitter enemy, but lately, unexpectedly, he has become a friend as well. I still campaign against American Pastoral, but when I finally got around to reading Sabbath’s Theater its fearlessness and ferocity became an inspiration. It had been a long time since I’d felt as grateful to a writer as I did when reading the bit where Mickey Sabbath’s best friend catches him in the bathtub holding a picture of the friend’s adolescent daughter and a pair of her underpants, or the scene in which Sabbath finds a paper coffee cup in the pocket of his army jacket and decides to abase himself by begging for money in the subway. Roth may not want to have me as a friend, but I was happy, at those moments, to claim him as one of mine. I’m happy to hold up the savage hilarity of Sabbath’s Theater as a correction and reproach to the sentimentality of certain young American writers and not-so-young critics who seem to believe, in defiance of Kafka, that literature is about being nice.

The second perennial question is: What time of day do you work, and what do you write on?

This must seem, to the people who ask it, like the safest and politest of questions. I suspect that it’s the question people ask a writer when they can’t think of anything else to ask. And yet to me it’s disturbingly personal and invasive. It forces me to picture myself sitting down at my computer every morning at eight o’clock: to see objectively the person who, as he sits down at his computer in the morning, wants only to be a pure, invisible subjectivity. When I’m working, I don’t want anybody else in the room, including myself.

Question No. 3 is: I read an interview with an author who says that, at a certain point in writing a novel, the characters “take over” and tell him what to do. Does this happen to you, too?

This one always raises my blood pressure. Nobody ever answered it better than Nabokov did in his Paris Review interview, where he fingered EM Forster as the source of the myth about a novelist’s characters “taking over”, and claimed that, unlike Forster, who let his characters sail away on their passage to India, he himself worked his characters “like galley slaves”. The question obviously raised Nabokov’s blood pressure, too.

When a writer makes a claim like Forster’s, the best-case scenario is that he’s mistaken. More often, unfortunately, I catch a whiff of self-aggrandisement, as if the writer were trying to distance his work from the mechanistic plotting of genre novels. The writer would like us to believe that, unlike those hacks who can tell you in advance how their books are going to end, his imagination is so powerful, and his characters so real and vivid, that he has no control over them. The best case here, again, is that it isn’t true, because the notion presupposes a loss of authorial will, an abdication of intent. The novelist’s primary responsibility is to create meaning, and if you could somehow leave this job to your characters you would necessarily be avoiding it yourself.

But let’s assume, for charity’s sake, that the writer who claims to be the servant of his characters isn’t simply flattering himself. What might he actually mean? He probably means that, once a character has been fleshed out enough to begin to form a coherent whole, a kind of inevitability has been set in motion. He means, specifically, that the story he originally imagined for a character often turns out not to follow from the lineaments of the character he’s been able to create. I may abstractly imagine a character whom I intend to make a murderer of his girlfriend, only to discover, in the actual writing, that the character I’m able to make actually work on the page has too much compassion or self-awareness to be a murderer. The key phrase here is “work on the page”. As Flannery O’Connor famously said, the fiction writer does whatever she can get away with – “and nobody ever got away with much”. Once you start writing the book, as opposed to planning it, the universe of conceivable human types and behaviours shrinks drastically to the microcosm of human possibilities that you contain within yourself. A character dies on the page if you can’t hear his or her voice. In a very limited sense, I suppose, this amounts to “taking over” and “telling you” what the character will and won’t do. But the reason the character can’t do something is that you can’t. The task then becomes to figure out what the character can do – to try to stretch the narrative as far as possible, to be sure not to overlook exciting possibilities in yourself, while continuing to bend the narrative in the direction of meaning.

Which brings me to perennial question No. 4: Is your fiction autobiographical?

I’m suspicious of any novelist who would honestly answer no to this question, and yet my strong temptation, when I’m asked it myself, is to answer no. Of the four questions, this is the one that always feels the most hostile. Maybe I’m just projecting that hostility, but I feel as if my powers of imagination are being challenged. As in: “Is this a true work of fiction, or just a thinly disguised account of your own life? And since there are only so many things that can happen to you in your life, you’re surely going to use up all of your autobiographical material soon – if, indeed, you haven’t used it up already! – and so you probably won’t be writing any more good books, will you? In fact, if your books are just thinly disguised autobiography, maybe they weren’t as interesting as we thought they were? Because, after all, what makes your life so much more interesting than anybody else’s? It’s not as interesting as Barack Obama’s life, is it? And also, for that matter, if your work is autobiographical, why didn’t you do the honest thing and write a non-fiction account of it? Why dress it up in lies? What kind of bad person are you, telling us lies to try to make your life seem more interesting and dramatic?” I hear all of these other questions in the question, and before long the very word “autobiographical” feels shameful to me.

My own strict understanding of an autobiographical novel is one in which the main character closely resembles the author and experiences many of the same scenes that the author experienced in real life. My impression is that A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western Front, Villette, The Adventures of Augie March, and The Man Who Loved Children – all of them masterpieces – are substantially autobiographical in this regard. But most novels, interestingly, are not. My own novels are not. In 30 years, I don’t think I’ve published more than 20 or 30 pages of scenes drawn directly from real-life events that I participated in. I’ve tried to write a lot more pages than that, but these scenes rarely seem to work in a novel. They embarrass me, or they don’t seem interesting enough, or, most frequently, they don’t seem quite relevant to the story I’m trying to tell. Late in The Corrections, there’s a scene in which Denise Lambert – who resembles me to the extent of being a youngest child – tries to teach her demented father how to do some simple stretching exercises, and then has to deal with his having wet the bed. That actually happened to me, and I took a number of the details straight from my life. Some of what Chip Lambert experiences when he’s with his father in the hospital also happened to me. And I did write an entire short memoir, The Discomfort Zone, which consists almost entirely of scenes that I experienced first-hand. But that was non-fiction, and so I ought to be able to answer the perennial autobiography question with a resounding, unashamed NO. Or at least to answer, as my friend Elisabeth Robinson does, “Yes, seventeen per cent. Next question, please?”

The problem is that, in another sense, my fiction is extremely autobiographical, and, moreover, that I consider it my job as a writer to make it ever more so. My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author’s story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family’s table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with his Jewish heritage, with moral law, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka’s work, which grows out of the night-time dreamworld in Kafka’s brain, is more autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka’s, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There is an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer’s work, the smaller its superficial resemblance to the writer’s actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer’s life become impediments to deliberate dreaming.

And this is why writing good fiction is almost never easy. The point at which fiction seems to become easy for a writer – and I’ll let everyone supply his or her own examples of this – is usually the point at which it’s no longer necessary to read that writer. There’s a truism, at least in the United States, that every person has one novel in him. In other words, one autobiographical novel. For people who write more than one, the truism can probably be amended to say: every person has one easy-to-write novel in him – one ready-made meaningful narrative. I’m obviously not talking here about writers of entertainments, not PG Wodehouse or Elmore Leonard, the pleasure of whose books is not diminished by their similarity to one another; we read them, indeed, for the reliable comforts of their familiar worlds. I’m talking about more complicated work, and it’s a prejudice of mine that literature cannot be a mere performance: that unless the writer is personally at risk – unless the book has been, in some way, for the writer, an adventure into the unknown; unless the writer has set himself or herself a personal problem not easily solved – it’s not worth reading. Or, for the writer, in my opinion, worth writing.

This seems to me all the more true in an age where there are so many other fun and inexpensive things a reader can do besides picking up a novel. As a writer, nowadays, you owe it to your readers to set yourself the most difficult challenge that you have some hope of being equal to. And if you do this, and you succeed in producing a reasonably good book, it means that the next time you try to write a book, you’re going to have dig even deeper and reach even farther, or else, again, it won’t be worth writing. And what this means, in practice, is that you have to become a different person to write the next book. The person you already are already wrote the best book you could. There’s no way to move forward without changing yourself. Without, in other words, working on the story of your own life. Which is to say: your autobiography.

❦

So how do you become the person who can write the book you need to write? I recognise that by talking about my own work, and telling a story of my progress from failure to success, I run the risk of seeming to congratulate myself or of seeming inordinately fascinated with myself. Not that it’s so strange or damning if a writer feels proud of his best work and spends a lot of time examining his own life. But does he also have to talk about it? For a long time, I would have answered no, and it may very well say something bad about my character that I’m now answering yes. But I’m going to talk about The Corrections anyway, and describe a few of the struggles I had to become its author. I will note in advance that much of the struggle consisted – as I think it always will for writers fully engaged with the problem of the novel – in overcoming shame, guilt, and depression. I’ll also note that I’ll be experiencing some fresh shame as I do this.

The first thing I had to do in the early 90s was get out of my marriage. Breaking the oath and the emotional bonds of loyalty is rarely an easy thing for anyone to do, and in my case it was particularly complicated by my having married another writer. I was dimly aware that we were too young and inexperienced to be making a lifetime vow of monogamy, but my literary ambition and my romantic idealism prevailed. We got married in the fall of 1982, when I had just turned 23, and we set about working as a team to produce literary masterworks. Our plan was to work side by side all our lives. It didn’t seem necessary to have a fallback plan, because my wife was a gifted and sophisticated New Yorker who seemed bound to succeed, probably long before I did, and I knew that I could always take care of myself. And so we both proceeded to write novels, and we were both surprised and disappointed when my wife couldn’t sell hers. When I did sell mine, in the fall of 1987, I felt simultaneously excited and very, very guilty.

There was nothing for us to do then but start running, to various towns and cities on two continents. Somehow, amid all the running, I managed to write and publish a second novel. The fact that I was having some success while my wife was struggling to write her own second novel I attributed to the general injustice and unfairness of the world. We were a team, after all – it was us against the world – and my job as a husband was to believe in my wife. And so, instead of taking pleasure in my accomplishments, I felt angry and bitter with the world. My second novel, Strong Motion, was an attempt to convey how it felt to be the two of us living in that bitter world. Looking back, although I’m still proud of that novel, I can now see the ways in which its ending was deformed by my wishful thinking about my marriage: by my loyalty. And it only made me feel guiltier that my wife didn’t see it this way herself. She once claimed, memorably, that I had stolen from her soul to write it. She also asked me, fairly enough, why my main female characters kept getting killed or severely wounded by gunfire.

Nineteen-ninety-three was the worst year of my life. My father was dying, my wife and I had run out of money, and we were both increasingly depressed. Hoping to get rich quick, I wrote a screenplay about a young couple, very much like the two of us, who start committing burglaries together, almost have affairs with other people, but end up blissfully united in a triumph of eternal love. By this point, even I could see that my work was being deformed by my loyalty to the marriage. But this didn’t stop me from plotting a new novel, The Corrections, in which a young midwestern man like myself goes to prison for 20 years for a murder committed by his wife.

Fortunately, before my wife and I ended up killing ourselves or somebody else, reality intervened. This reality took several forms. One was our undeniable inability to tolerate living together. Another was the handful of close literary friendships I finally made outside my marriage. A third form of reality, the most important of all, was our pressing need for money. Since Hollywood didn’t seem interested in a screenplay that reeked of Personal Issues (and that bore a fatally strong resemblance to Fun With Dick and Jane), I was forced to start doing journalism, and before long the New York Times assigned me to write a magazine piece about the parlous state of American fiction. While researching this piece, I got to know some of my old heroes, including Don DeLillo, and I became aware of belonging not just to the two-person team of me and my wife but to a much larger and still-vital community of readers and writers. To whom, as I discovered, crucially, I also had responsibilities and owed loyalty.

Once the hermetic seal on my marriage had been broken in these ways, things fell apart quickly. By the end of 1994, we each had our own apartment in New York and were finally leading the single lives we probably should have had in our 20s. This ought to have been fun and a liberation, but I was still feeling nightmarishly guilty. Loyalty, especially to family, is a foundational value for me. Loyalty unto death had always given meaning to my life. I suspect that people less encumbered by loyalty have an easier time being fiction writers, but all serious writers struggle, to some extent, at some point in their lives, with the conflicting demands of good art and good personhood. As long as I was married, I’d tried to avoid this conflict by remaining technically anti-autobiographical – there’s not a single scene drawn from life in either of my first two novels – and by constructing plots that were preoccupied with intellectual and social concerns.

When I went back to writing The Corrections, in the mid-90s, I was still working with an absurdly over-complicated plot that I’d developed while trying to work safely within my loyalty. I had many reasons to want to write a Big Social Novel, but probably the most important was my wish to be all intellect, all worldly expertise, so as to avoid the messy business of my private life. I tried for another year or two to keep writing that Big Social Novel, but eventually it became apparent, from the less and less deniable falseness of the pages, that I would have to become a different kind of writer to produce another novel. In other words, a different kind of person.

The first thing that had to go was the novel’s main character, a man in his mid-30s named Andy Aberant. He’d been a fixture of the story from the very beginning, when I’d imagined him in jail for a murder his wife had committed, and he’d since undergone numerous metamorphoses, finally ending up as a lawyer for the United States government, investigating cases of insider stock trading. I’d written about him in third person and then, at great length, and with absolutely no success, in first person. Along the way, I’d taken several long, enjoyable vacations from Andy Aberant in order to write about two other characters, Enid and Alfred Lambert, who’d appeared out of nowhere and were not unlike my parents. The chapters about them had poured out of me quickly and – compared with the torture of trying to write about Andy Aberant – effortlessly. Since Andy wasn’t the Lamberts’ son and, for complicated plot reasons, couldn’t be their son, I was now trying to invent even more complicated ways to tie his story to theirs.

Although it’s obvious to me now that Andy didn’t belong in the book, it was anything but obvious at the time. I’d spent a number of really bad years of marriage becoming intimately and encyclopedically acquainted with depression and guilt, and since Andy Aberant was defined by his depression and guilt (especially regarding women, and especially regarding women’s biological clocks), it seemed unthinkable not to make use of my hard-won knowledge and keep him in the book. The only problem was – as I wrote again and again in my novel notes – I couldn’t see the humour in him. He was creepy and self-conscious and remote and depressing. Almost every day, for seven months, I struggled to write some Andy pages that I liked. Then, in my notes, for another two months, I wrestled with whether or not to give him the boot. What exactly I was thinking and feeling during all these months is no more accessible to me now than the misery of the flu is after I’ve recovered from it. I only know that what finally gave me the resolve to lose him was 1. sheer exhaustion, 2. a general lifting of my depression, and 3. a sudden easing of my guilt about my wife. I still felt plenty guilty, but I’d achieved enough distance from her to see that I was not to blame for everything. And I had lately fallen for a woman who was slightly older, which, ridiculous though it may sound, made me feel less villainous for having left my wife childless in her late 30s. My new friend came out from California and spent a week with me in New York, and at the end of that extremely happy week I was ready to recognise that Andy Aberant had no place in the book. I drew a little tombstone for him in my notes and gave him an epitaph from Faust II: “Den können wir erlösen.” I honestly don’t think I understood what I meant then in saying, “Him we can redeem.” But it makes sense to me now.

With Andy gone, I was left with the Lamberts and their three grown children, who’d been haunting the novel’s margins all along. To become writable, the story had to undergo many further contractions and subtractions, and it took me a full year to overcome the shame I felt about the strangeness of my personal history – to learn to embrace the strangeness, rather than try to hide it.

Much of this shame became concentrated in the character of Chip Lambert. In the last days of my marriage, I’d had a brief relationship with a young woman I’d met when I was teaching. It was a very awkward and unsatisfactory relationship, a relationship that I now literally writhed with shame to think about, and for some reason it seemed necessary to incorporate it into Chip’s story. To make his situation plausible, I kept trying to invent a back story for him that bore some resemblance to my own, but I couldn’t stop hating my own innocence. I was haunted by the ghost of Andy Aberant, haunted also by two early novels of Ian McEwan, The Innocent and The Comfort of Strangers, both of which were so powerfully icky that I’d wanted to take a hot shower after reading them. They were my prime example of what I didn’t want to write but couldn’t seem to help writing.

Two things that people said to me that year stand out in particular. One was said by my mother, on the last afternoon I spent with her, when we knew she was going to die soon. I wanted to reassure her that, strange though my life might look to her, I was still going to be OK after she was gone. Late in the afternoon she nodded and said, in a kind of vague summation: “Well, you’re an eccentric.” This was, partly, her best effort to recognise and forgive who I was. But the statement was mainly, in its almost dismissive tone, her way of saying that it finally didn’t matter to her what kind of person I was. That what mattered most to her now was her own life, which was about to end. And this was one of her last gifts to me: the implicit instruction not to worry so much about what she, or anybody else, might think of me. To be myself, as she, in her dying, was being herself.

The other really helpful comment came from my friend David Means. “You don’t write through shame,” he said, “you write around it.” I still couldn’t tell you exactly what David meant by these contrasting prepositions, but it was immediately clear to me that those two early McEwan novels were examples of somebody writing through shame, and that my task, with Chip Lambert, was to find some way to to isolate and quarantine shame as an object, ideally as an object of comedy, rather than letting it permeate and poison every sentence.

I’d like to conclude by saying more about my problem with loyalty, which persisted even after I’d escaped from my marriage. The problem arose particularly in the writing of the chapter about Gary Lambert, who bore a certain superficial resemblance to my oldest brother. There was, for example, Gary’s project of assembling an album of his favourite family photographs: my brother was involved with a project like that himself. And since my brother is the most sensitive and sentimental person in my family, I didn’t see how I could use details from his life without hurting him and jeopardising our good relations. I felt afraid of his anger, guilty about laughing at real-life details that weren’t funny to him, disloyal to be airing private family matters in a public narrative, and all-around morally dubious to be appropriating, for my own professional purposes, the private life of a non-writer. These were all reasons I’d resisted “autobiographical” fiction in the past. And yet the details were too meaningful not to use, and it wasn’t as if I’d ever concealed from my family that I was a writer listening carefully to everything they said. So I went around and around and finally ended up discussing the matter with a wise older friend of mine. To my surprise, she became angry with me and reproached me for my narcissism. She said, “Do you think your brother’s life revolves around you? Do you think he’s not an adult with a life of his own, full of things more important than you are? Do you think you’re so powerful that something you write in a novel is going to harm him?”

All loyalties, both in writing and elsewhere, are meaningful only when they’re tested. Being loyal to yourself as a writer is most difficult when you’re just starting out – when being a writer hasn’t yet given you enough of a public return to justify your loyalty to it. The benefits of being on good terms with your friends and family are obvious and concrete; the benefits of writing about them are still largely speculative. There comes a point, though, when the benefits begin to equalise. And the question then becomes: am I willing to risk alienating somebody I love in order to continue becoming the writer I need to be? For a long time, in my marriage, my answer to this was no. Even today there are relationships so important to me that I’m at pains to write around them, rather than through them. But what I’ve learned is that there’s potential value, not only for your writing but also for your relationships, in taking autobiographical risks: that you may, in fact, be doing your brother or your mother or your best friend a favour by giving them the opportunity to rise to the occasion of being written about – by trusting them to love the whole you, including the writer part. What turns out to matter most is that you write as truthfully as possible. If you really love the person whose material you’re writing about, the writing has to reflect that love. There’s still always a risk that the person won’t be able to see the love, and that your relationship may suffer, but you’ve done what all writers finally reach the point of having to do, which is to be loyal to themselves.

I’m happy to report, in closing, that my brother and I are now on better terms than ever. When I was about to send him an advance copy of The Corrections, I told him, on the phone, that he might hate the book and might even hate me. His reply, for which I remain deeply grateful, was “Hating you is not an option”. The next time I heard from him, after he’d read the book, he began by saying, “Hello, Jon. It’s your brother – Gary.” He has since gone on, when talking to his friends about the book, to make no secret of the resemblance. He has his own life, with its own trials and satisfactions, and having a writer for a brother is just another piece of his own story. We love each other dearly.

The nurse attending Bobby Womack wears an expression for which the phrase “long-suffering” was invented. “Can I give you your meds?” she asks, proffering a handful of tablets. “Potassium, magnesium, something for blood sugar,” she explains. Seated in his hospital bed, naked from the waist up save for a pair of immense bejewelled sunglasses, monitors attached to his chest, his thinning hair dyed yellow and what seems to be a tattoo of himself in full song on his right bicep, the singer makes a grunting noise that could well indicate assent but could equally herald the start of what would clearly be the umpteenth argument of the day. “Potassium, magnesium, something for blood sugar,” she repeats firmly. “Take them. Be a good boy,” she adds, before hurriedly exiting the room.

You get the feeling that dealing with the man some people call The Greatest Soul Singer In The World constitutes the short straw for the staff of Encino Medical Centre in Los Angeles. Already suffering from a tumour on his colon – it is later removed and found to be non-cancerous – he was admitted this morning with breathing difficulties, apparently much against his will. Apparently much against the medical staff’s will, he has insisted our interview go ahead regardless: for the first time in 12 years, Bobby Womack has a new album, The Bravest Man In The Universe, recorded in London last year. It was co-produced by his former collaborator in Gorillaz, Damon Albarn, and Richard Russell, head of Womack’s new label XL and, following his work on Gil Scott Heron‘s triumphant final album I’m New Here, something of a past master at encouraging errant soul legends back to the studio.

The album, which sets Womack’s careworn voice and acoustic guitar against clattering electronics, and mixes old gospel songs with guest appearances by Lana Del Rey, is a triumph. It may even be as magnificent as all the other magnificent albums Womack has released: his peerless soundtrack to Across 110th Street; 1968′s Fly Me To The Moon and 1972′s Understanding; The Poet and The Poet 2, where his voice chafed beautifully against the slick 80s production. Womack proclaims The Bravest Man in the Universe “the best thing I’ve ever done” and he clearly isn’t minded to let a trifling matter like being rushed to hospital get in the way of promoting it.

“The doctor said I’ve got pneumonia,” he growls. “It’s bad enough to take my life. I said: ‘I’m gettin’ out of here.’ I was raising a big fight in there.” Chief among his weapons was his threat to simply leave the hospital and die, which on the one hand seems a little dramatic, but on the other feels entirely in keeping with 68 years already so filled with drama as to beggar belief. “I know one thing, I can walk out of this hospital any time I want to. If I chose to leave, and die, it’s my life. You can’t stop it. Mentally, spiritually, if I don’t feel like I wanna live no more, I don’t wanna live no more. Ain’t nothing you can do about that.” He chuckles. “I’m mad at everything. Damn, man, I’m supposed to be doing an interview. They tricked me into being here.”

Being rushed to hospital because you’re suffering from potential fatal pneumonia doesn’t seem much like being tricked, but then the interview doesn’t seem much like an interview either. Indeed, it resembles one only in so far as I’m an interviewer and I’m in the same room as Womack. I haven’t said anything to him yet, beyond hello, at which point he embarks upon a monologue that continues unabated for an hour. It leaps without warning from topic to topic: during one particularly head-spinning section we go from Muhammad Ali’s unerring ability to find racist undercurrents in innocuous adverts, to Aretha Franklin’s love of soap operas to Martin Luther King in the space of about two minutes. It takes in both gruff homespun wisdom (“I don’t wanna be a star because stars fall from the sky, and when they hit the ground they turn into a rock and a rock ain’t no good unless you bust someone in the head with it”) and, at one juncture, the impossibly winning phrase “your mama only got one titty and that’s full of wine”.

“I’m skipping subjects, but that’s what I do,” he offers. “If there’s any questions you wanna ask, just ask me,” he says, with a laugh that seems to carry a parenthetical “best of luck with that”. “But I’ll talk myself and I’ll tell you the real deal.”

But I don’t ask any questions. That’s partly because, even nearing 70, frail and occasionally struggling for breath, Womack has something about him that precludes interrupting. He still undeniably has the aura of, as Richard Russell puts it, “a badass”, who somehow survived a childhood in Cleveland amid poverty so grinding that even the projects seemed like a distant land of plenty (“They didn’t have no rats in the projects,” reasons Womack. “I thought, boy, they get that for free?”), 30 years of drug addiction and enough personal tragedy to fell the most stoic man. He has outlived virtually all of his peers, something even he seems faintly startled by. “Ain’t none of those people living now, and they were all around the same age as me,” he frowns. “I made it. They didn’t do no drugs and they died anyway. There’s got to be a reason.”

But the main reason I sit back and let Womack speak is because everything he says is fascinating, an endless stream of anecdotes with an impossibly starry cast drawn from what may be the most remarkable CV in music: he is, as Albarn notes, “like Zelig”. He formed his first gospel group with his five brothers before he had reached his teens. A few years later, their father kicked them out when they announced they wanted to play secular music. They were mentored by Sam Cooke, who moved them to LA and whose band Womack joined, touring a segregated America. “Sam used to tell me, whenever you got some money, you go get yourself a good ring and a good watch. Why would I need that? And Sam would say, you might have to get outta town quickly, before you get paid, and you can always hock that ring and that watch.”

He played with James Brown and Ray Charles and toured with a young Jimi Hendrix. He wrote The Last Time, which the Rolling Stones turned into a global hit, a state of affairs that did not overly delight Womack. “To be honest with you, I said: ‘Let the Rolling Stones get their own fuckin’ record and record that.’” He worked with the Stones decades later, on 1986′s Dirty Work: he liked Keith Richards and Ron Wood, but “had a problem with Mick Jagger”. “Some people never grow up if you give ‘em too much,” he grimaces. “They gonna be assholes, then they just become a bigger asshole.”

He spent time as a session guitarist in Memphis, where he played with Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and on Dusty Springfield’s Dusty In Memphis. He also played on Elvis Presley’s Suspicious Minds, which didn’t impress him much either. “People say: ‘What did you think of Elvis Presley?’ I say: ‘He wasn’t shit. Everything he got he stole.’”

He returned to LA, where he recorded Trust Me and Mercedes Benz with Janis Joplin on the day she died – he was the last person to see the singer alive, save for the drug dealer who sold her the smack that killed her – and moved into the Bel-Air mansion where the coke-addled sessions for Sly And The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On were in full swing: “It was a circus.” He was working with Marvin Gaye when the latter was murdered. “The last time I saw him, the day before he died, he said: ‘Bobby, what’s a nigger got to do to get on the cover of Rolling Stone?’ It was all white acts. I said: ‘Die.’” He sighs. “It’s bullshit, it’s really bullshit. One of the greatest singers in the world. Marvin never knew he was gonna be as big as he is. Now you hear him on commercials every day.”

Occasionally, he sounds mad at everything. He hates hip-hop. “What the shit is that?” he spits. “No melody. Generations are coming up, if they have to listen to bullshit, they’ll grow up bullshitty. People don’t respect their mom, say they’re gonna knock her out. White kids trying to be black because they’re confused. I say to them, you wanna be black? You’re gonna have a hard time!”

He’s angry at America for criticising the Obama administration – “He got four years to straighten out 50 years of bullshit, shit’s been going on a long time, but they gotta put it on the black man” – angry at the music industry for ripping off artists, himself included, and, furthermore, angry he was admitted to the hospital without his sunglasses. The latter situation at least has been rectified by the arrival of the three young women he introduces as his nieces. They are indeed his nieces, daughters of his brother Cecil and Linda Cook, better known as Womack And Womack, the duo behind the 80s hits Love Wars and Teardrops. But thanks to what you might charitably call Bobby Womack’s complicated personal life, they’re also the grand-daughters of his ex-wife: Bobby married Linda’s mother, Sam Cooke’s widow Barbara, shortly after the murder of her husband, a move that proved so controversial it scuppered his career for years. And they’re also the daughters of his ex-lover: with his marriage to Barbara failing, Womack began an affair with his step-daughter, which ended when his wife discovered them together and expressed her displeasure in no uncertain terms by shooting him.

Incredibly, this was just another incident in a life filled with turmoil. Two of his sons are dead – one, Truth Bobby, suffocated in 1978 aged four months after being left unattended, while Vincent, the little boy pictured on the cover of his 1972 album Understanding, killed himself in 1986. Another son, Bobby Jr, is in jail for second-degree murder. His brother Harry, the subject of his 1972 hit Harry Hippie, was stabbed to death in Womack’s home by a jealous girlfriend. In the late 90s, Womack finally kicked a 30-year cocaine addiction, but found himself despondent. “When I walked away from that I lost a lot of so-called friends. I was ready to check out. I knew more people dead than I knew living. Now I say, God, what a fool I’ve been. Put my music on hold. It was my life. A God-given gift.”

He credits Albarn – “a sweetheart” – with re-igniting his interest in music, first by co-opting him into Gorillaz, then by offering to co-produce The Bravest Man In The Universe. He was, he says, equally startled by Russell’s appearance in the studio. “I thought it was one of Damon’s friends. I didn’t know he was president of the record company. Never in my 50 years have I had the president of a record company come in and play with me. Normally, you got to fight them for every goddam song. I didn’t understand a lot of things they were doing, to tell you the truth. I’d say: ‘Damn, what the fuck is that?’ They said: ‘That’s you! Took your voice, speeded it backwards.’ I would never have dreamed of doing stuff like that, but I wanted to related to the people today. Bad as I been, I can sing my ass off, better than I could before. Maybe it’s been preserved or something. If I can take control of my life from drugs, divorces, anything, I stand tall.” He frowns. “I’m speaking for all those singers who gave up. Marvin, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett: I can keep naming them until you say OK, I got enough. They need more respect than can ever be given to them. And I’m gonna set the record straight.”

Albarn calls Womack “a force of nature”, which sounds like a knowing understatement. “He’s booked himself in to headline Lovebox,” he laughs incredulously, “which I find extraordinary. I mean, if he’s there, I’m there. I’ve got great faith that he’s going to pull through all the problems he’s got at the moment. You wouldn’t ordinarily think that, but because it’s Bobby Womack I don’t really think his time is up in any sense of the word. It’s just an instinctive thing. I can’t really explain it. Do you know what I mean?”

I do. Another nurse arrives in the room. She too wears a long-suffering expression, but this time it’s coupled with a purposeful air, which seems to indicate the interview is over. But Womack waves her away. He has something else to tell me. “I talked for hours and if I find out you only done an article on me this big” – he indicates a tiny space with his thumb and forefinger – “I swear to God, when I throw a punch, I’ve lost my cool, I can’t take no more of this shit and whoever’s in front of me is in trouble. I’m serious.” The nurse, having finally lost her own cool, starts strapping an oxygen mask to his face, but Womack is still talking. “You better not bullshit me, boy!” he laughs. “Don’t think I ain’t gonna be back!” I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute. And neither should you.

Tom Daley has big hands. When he shakes mine, I am surprised by his oversized, chunky grip. “I also have out-of-proportion feet,” he says as we chat in a hotel room in his home town of Plymouth. Are those useful attributes for a diver? “Definitely. Big feet help you balance. The bigger surface area you have with your hands, the cleaner you can hit the water. It’s important to go in with the least splash possible.”

A bigger splash is what you want if you are David Hockney, not if you are Tom Daley. His aim is to be like Kristofferson in the film Fantastic Mr Fox, who dives from a great height into a bucket of water, making only a teeny-weeny splash before the home crowd go wild for the superb athlete’s perfect performance.

Zaha Hadid’s Aquatic Centre is more than a bucket, but otherwise this is pretty much the scenario Daley hopes for come the Olympics when he plummets from the 10m board, ideally like a knife slicing the water. “It’s going to be down to six dives, 1.6 seconds per dive, so it’ll be over quicker than Usain Bolt’s 100 metres,” he says.

Daley has been dreaming of these dives for most of his life. In 2002, after watching the diving at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester on TV, eight-year-old Tom drew a picture. In the middle was a man standing on his hands on a diving board, wearing union flag trunks, his abs defined by pencil squiggles alongside the words: “My Ambition. London 2012.” One of the divers whose performances he recorded and microanalysed in 2002 was Pete Waterfield, now 31, who will be his diving partner for the 10m synchronised competition. Daley will also compete solo in the 10m and 3m platform competitions. “It was my dream then, and still is now, to perform the best dives of my life there – to dive out of my socks.” He won’t actually have to dive out of his socks, having – you’d hope – sensibly removed them earlier.

But there are a few problems in the way of realising this dream. First, Daley is, in theory, too tall at 5ft 8in. “I’m actually one of the tallest divers,” he says. “It helps to be smaller so you can spin faster. But I’ve got enough strength to outdo the fact that I’m taller than most divers.” Second, his Chinese rivals, who dominate the sport. “As a Chinese diver you don’t go to school. They get taken away from their families and they are completely focused on diving. They have a conveyor belt of divers – if one gets injured, another comes up.”

So how do you beat them? “By the second or third round they expect to be 20 points ahead of the field, so if you stay up there with them they get rattled. They try too hard and the pressure gets to them and they mess up.” He smiles, then a shadow passes over his face: “The thing with diving is that you don’t know – that kind of pressure might be good for them.”

But the biggest problem for any competitive diver is that “anything can happen on the day. One thing can go wrong and you go from first to last in one dive.” When Daley became world 10m platform champion in 2009, it was because his leading competitors fluffed their final dives. At the 2004 Olympics, the Greek synchro team won gold despite being nowhere in the event’s world rankings. That Greek precedent may suggest that home advantage is helpful – or that anyone with plausible abs, well-filled trunks and oversized hands could shatter Daley’s dreams.

Daley has two things that may help. First, what sports physiologists call an inner mental compass. Is that surgically implanted or something? “If you’re spinning around you have to know which way’s up, which way’s down, at all times because if you don’t you land flat and you hurt yourself,” Daley explains. “There are some divers who just jump off and hope for the best and those are the ones who aren’t very consistent. I am.”

Second, Daley has developed a mental toughness borne of adversity. Aged 11, he had a growth spurt that changed his body’s centre of gravity and ruined his diving technique. “It was so scary. I thought this could be my diving done.” Imagine: career over before puberty started. What happened? “I had to learn it again. Diving’s 80% psychological. It’s not a sport like tennis or football where if you hit or kick a ball in a different direction you have to refocus your movements. You can only focus on yourself. I go into my own little bubble and then the results look after themselves.”

This makes diving sound like the loneliest activity. “It is and it isn’t. Diving’s a really friendly sport where you want everyone to do well.” Imagine Wayne Rooney or Dereck Chisora saying that.

But in the three hours Daley spends poolside during a competition, has nobody ever given him the evils, whispered “Your reverse pike sucks, you big-handed loser!” or deleted his iPod’s inspirational playlist? “No. I’m as nice to everyone as I can be and everyone’s nice to me.”

We’re meeting because Daley has published his autobiography, aged 18. If you have any issues with people publishing their life stories before they have actually reached adulthood, direct them to the Penguin Group UK, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL. “We were originally thinking of a picture book with minimal words. Then I realised how much I wanted to say.”

There remain lots of pictures in the published version, mostly of Daley in his trunks, sometimes in the chilly waters off Plymouth Hoe, and always enviably buff. He has the ripening torso that recalls Daniel Radcliffe when, aged 17, he took a break from being Harry Potter and posed topless to promote his stage performance in Equus. Daley shows me the proposed cover image on his phone. If he is the hottie male answer to Team GB poster girl Jessica Ennis, then this image of him half naked with a flag over his shoulders clinches the point. (“When we saw that in the office,” says the PR woman from Penguin, “we were like, ‘Oh my God.’” How Penguin has changed: there probably wasn’t an “Oh my God” moment when it decided the cover image for Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections or Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils.)

The life-defining epiphany in Daley’s life came aged seven while swimming at Central Park pool, 10 minutes from the family home in Plymouth. “I looked up at the 10m platform and every time someone walked to the edge and jumped, my eyes were popping out of my head. I thought that was pretty cool. I loved the thought of being able to do somersaults into the water.”

His dad Rob signed him up for diving lessons the following weekend, saying later it was the best £25 he ever spent. He then became his son’s almost constant companion, driving him to competitions, videoing his dives and laminating his certificates and cuttings.

Doesn’t Daley find it boring chucking himself off boards into water umpteen times a day during what could have been the best years of his life? “No. It’s different every day. Each dive is different. I love the feeling of weightlessness, the freedom.”

Reading the book, I was amazed by how young Daley was when competitive diving took him away from his family. Aged nine, he stayed overnight for a competition in Southampton. The book teems with tearful phone calls home to his mum, Debbie. “My mum didn’t like it when I rang upset. She wanted to come over and get me.” Aged 11, he competed in the 2007 Australian Youth Olympic Festival, after its minimum age requirement of 15 was relaxed for him. He won the silver medal in the 10m synchronised diving with partner Callum Johnstone, beating competitors more than double his age. By 13, he was a sporting prodigy. In January 2008, he became the youngest winner of the senior British 10m title. He also won the 10m platform synchro title with new partner Blake Aldridge. That summer, he flew to Beijing for the first of what he hopes will be four Olympic competitions in his career.

At Beijing, Daley snuck into the American camp to hang out with diver Mary Beth Dunnichay, whom he fancied. He even feigned an American accent so as not to arouse suspicion. “I don’t think it worked,” he writes. It’s a rare passage in the book: otherwise Daley is unremittingly focused on diving. Doesn’t he feel he is missing out? “It’s my dream to go to the Olympic Games and win a medal and I know I’m not going to be able to do that if I’m constantly going to a girlfriend’s house and her ringing up every 10 seconds saying: ‘Why haven’t you called me today?’ I’m not up for a relationship.”

His first Olympics were overshadowed by a mid-competition row with synchro partner Blake Aldridge, which Daley describes in the book. After their fifth dive, Aldridge rang his mum from poolside. “‘I’m sorry, Mum. I don’t know what’s happening, it’s not going very well,’ he was saying. ‘Tom’s being all moody.’ I called over to him. ‘Blake, shouldn’t you be off your phone now? Don’t apologise to your mum. We need to go out there and show everyone what we can do.’ ‘Don’t tell me what to do. I can do what I want.’” The pair came a disappointing eighth. At the press conference, 26-year-old Aldridge blamed 14-year-old Daley for their poor performance, saying: “He had a pop at me before the last dive.”

When I ask Daley about this incident, he says: “I don’t know why it happened. All I could do is focus on my own performance. It was only when I got home I realised the amount of coverage we had got and I thought, ‘Wow, I didn’t realise we’d fallen out so terribly.” Are they still in touch? “I keep in touch with him on Facebook and when I see him at nationals say hello. It’s not awkward. It’s one of those things you have to get over.”

After Beijing, Daley returned home and was bullied at Eggbuckland Community College. It started with him being called “Diver boy” and escalated to him being physically assaulted, mostly by older boys. In one incident, a boy said to Daley, “How much are your legs worth? I’ll break them for you” before rugby tackling him. “Looking back,” writes Daley, “I can see that they were probably jealous but it didn’t feel like it then. It was hell.” Matters came to a head when he was tackled by a “fairly big guy” and fell awkwardly on his wrist. “It swelled up. I wasn’t allowed to land hands-first during my diving for five days.” His mother and father decided to pull him out of school and transfer him to Plymouth College. Before the bullying, Daley was already a supporter of ChildLine. He says his experiences reinforced his commitment to the counselling service. “At the time you think it’s OK, it’ll go away, and then it keeps going on. So it’s good to unload the burden on to someone else. Tell parents or a teacher – just say something. You don’t want it inside you. You’ve got to let it out, and then hopefully things get better.”

Why was it easier at Plymouth College? “It was a school where they have lots of sports people. So they understood the sacrifices you needed to do in terms of hours at school for training. They were just so supportive.” It’s there that he has started A-levels in photography, maths and Spanish. “It only takes an injury and it’s over, so I have to have something to take me off into a career.”

He hopes to become a TV presenter, but he is also developing some talent as a photographer – the book includes some of his pictures, including elegant underwater shots of diving and arty shots of fellow diver Tonia Couch. If the diving fails, he has given himself a springboard (so very sorry) into professional photography. “I’m very proud of my photographic work. Everything I do I put in 100% effort because I feel I’ve failed if I get a B. In my A-levels, I’m on for three As.”

He has the jump on fellow photography students in one respect: unlike them, he gets to photograph Kate Moss. During a recent Bruce Weber photo shoot for Italian Vogue, he hung out with Moss at a pool in London’s Victoria and asked the supermodel if he could take some pictures of her for his coursework. She agreed. “I felt really bad telling her what to do. In the end I said: ‘To be honest, I’m not going to tell you what to do because you know far more than I do.’” The book includes two of his photos of Moss – one in which she’s pouting in her swimsuit outside the female changing room; the other leaning against a wall looking like trouble (but in a good way).

While Daley struggled at school, his dad had developed brain cancer. Tom flew back from a competition in Mexico to find him dying at home. In the book, he describes his feelings shortly after his father’s death in May last year. “I thought about everything I had done, every podium I had stood on with Dad looking on crying, every training session I had been to and Dad was in the balcony, talking to the other parents, clapping each dive I made.”

He describes his father as his best friend, and Rob certainly was his closest companion. “Definitely. As long as I tried my best and worked hard, he was happy. It’s been difficult, but my dad would have wanted me to carry on going strong. He’s still giving me that extra drive.”

Earlier this year, Alex Evangulov, performance director of British Diving, warned that Daley’s medal chances were being jeopardised by all the media and sponsorship work he had been doing in the runup to the Games. He has 225,000 Twitter followers, has already endorsed several sporting products and is tipped to have more after the Olympics.

Last week Daley launched an iPhone app aimed at improving awareness of the sport. The Tom Daley Dive scores gamers according to their ability to copy 79 of his dives. A sceptic might suggest that instead of signing off on every aspect of the app, he might have concentrated more on real diving. That same sceptic might eat their words, though, after Daley won 10m gold last weekend in the European championships at Eindhoven, scoring two perfect 10s from the judges.

“The thing is I owe my dad everything and all I can do to show him that is to keep training hard, working as hard as I possibly can,” he says. “I’m going to have to go into my own little bubble and give it my best shot.”

Professor Peter Murray-Rust was looking for new ways to make better drugs. Dr Heather Piwowar wanted to track how scientific papers were cited and shared by researchers around the world. Dr Casey Bergman wanted to create a way for busy doctors and scientists to quickly navigate the latest research in genetics, to help them treat patients and further their research.

All of them needed access to tens of thousands of research papers at once, so they could use computers to look for unseen patterns and associations across the millions of words in the articles. This technique, called text mining, is a vital 21st-century research method. It uses powerful computers to find links between drugs and side effects, or genes and diseases, that are hidden within the vast scientific literature. These are discoveries that a person scouring through papers one by one may never notice.

It is a technique with big potential. A report published by McKinsey Global Institute last year said that “big data” technologies such as text and data mining had the potential to create €250bn (£200bn) of annual value to Europe’s economy, if researchers were allowed to make full use of it.

Unfortunately, in most cases, text mining is forbidden. Bergman, Murray-Rust, Piwowar and countless other academics are prevented from using the most modern research techniques because the big publishing companies such as Macmillan, Wiley and Elsevier, which control the distribution of most of the world’s academic literature, by default do not allow text mining of the content that sits behind their expensive paywalls.

Any such project requires special dispensation from – and time-consuming individual negotiations with – the scores of publishers that may be involved.

“That’s the key fact which is halting progress in this field,” said Robert Kiley, head of digital services at the Wellcome Trust. “For a lot of people, though there is promise there, the activation effort is just too great.”

The restrictions placed by publishers on text mining has led campaigners to view the issue as another front in the battle to make fruits of publicly funded research work available through “open access”, free at the point of use. That would allow researchers to mine the content freely without needing to request any extra permissions.

The scale of new information in modern science is staggering: more than 1.5m scholarly articles are published every year and the volume of data doubles every three years. No individual can keep up with such a volume, and scientists need computers to help them digest and make sense of the information.

Bergman, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Manchester, used text mining to create a tool to help scientists make sense of the ever-growing research literature on genetics. Though genetic sequences of living organisms are publicly available, discussions of what the sequences do and how they interact with each other sits within the text of scientific papers that are mostly behind paywalls.

Working with Max Haeussler, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Bergman came up with Text2genome, which identifies strings of text in thousands of papers that look like the letters of a DNA sequence – a gene, say – and links together all papers that mention or discuss that sequence. Text2genome could allow a clinician or researcher who may not be an expert on a particular gene to access the relevant literature quickly and easily. Haeussler’s attempts to scale up Text2genome, however, have hit a wall, and his blog is a litany of the problems in trying to gain permissions from the scores of publishers to download and add papers to the project. “If we don’t have access to the papers to do this text mining, we can’t make those connections,” says Bergman.

Murray-Rust, a chemist at the University of Cambridge, has used text mining to look for ways to make chemical compounds, such as pharmaceuticals, more efficiently.

“If you have a compound you don’t know how to make and it’s similar to one you do know how to make, then the machine would be able to suggest a number of methods which would allow you to do it.”

But, although his university subscribes to the journals he needs to do this work, he is forbidden from using the content in what he calls “a modern manner using machines”.

A member of his research group accidentally tripped the alarms of a publisher’s website when he downloaded several dozen papers at once from journals to which the university had already paid subscription fees. The publisher saw it as an attempt to illegally download content and immediately blocked access to its content for the entire university.

Asking for permission from publishers is an option, though time-consuming. The University of British Columbia (UBC) researcher, Heather Piwowar, was trying to map the ways scientists use and share papers.

She was eventually contacted by Alicia Wise, Elsevier’s director of universal access, who convened a conference call with Piwowar, a UBC librarian and five Elsevier colleagues. That conversation led to permission for UBC researchers to text mine the Elsevier journals to which they already had access.

Piwowar said: “It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and doesn’t scale at all. To me it’s a good result because now I have access to things I didn’t have access to before and also it will also hopefully drive change by people saying, ‘This is not an OK way to build on our scholarly literature.’”

Wise said that, in principle, her company was happy to enable text mining for its content. “We want to help researchers deepen their insight and understanding, we want to help them to advance science and healthcare and we want to be able to do that in ways that help realise the maximum benefit from the content we publish. Text mining is clearly a part of this landscape and it will continue to be and we’re keen to support it.”

The UK government supports open access to publicly funded research and the text mining that it would allow. In a report for the Intellectual Property Office last year on intellectual property and growth, Professor Ian Hargreaves proposed that researchers should be allowed to text mine articles to which they had already subscribed – a position supported by science funding organisations such as the Wellcome Trust.

“Imagine a world where you weren’t allowed to use powerful computers to use weather patterns and astronomical data – it’s just nonsensical,” said Kiley. “Even in commerce, the reason Amazon knows what records I should buy or what books is because it knows what I’ve bought before, it knows what other people have bought similar to what I’ve bought and it can suggest things.

“To not be able to exploit that technology in healthcare and life sciences, that doesn’t make much sense nowadays.”

Warning for publishers

The brewing controversy between scientists and publishers over access to scientific information has also caught the attention of investors. In an briefing note on the publishing company Elsevier, Claudio Aspesi of Bernstein Research warned investors that publishers might be on the verge of falling out with scientists. “We continue to be baffled by Elsevier’s perception that controlling everything (for example by severely restricting text and data mining applications) is essential to protect its economics,” he wrote.

He said some of the commercial restrictions from publishers seemed not only to be restricting access to the scientific community, but also hindering the work of researchers. “Elsevier needs to take a much harder look at what it is doing to work well with the academic community at large, since it believes that its future lies in tapping the funding for science,” he wrote.

Elsevier bosses have long told investors that the publisher’s relationship with academics is excellent. But Aspesi doubted that things were so rosy. “If the academic community were to conclude that the commercial terms imposed by Elsevier are also hindering the progress of science or their ability to efficiently perform research, the risk of a further escalation in what is already an acrimonious debate would rise substantially,” he wrote.

None of which would be beneficial for Elsevier’s bottom line. “Adding confrontational relationships with the research community to the difficult ones it already has with academic librarians looks self-defeating,” wrote Aspesi”Elsevier needs to rethink altogether how it thinks of researchers as customers, or it could end up, in a few years, facing the same hostility it encounters with much of the academic librarian community. Governments and other funding bodies may then look a lot less kindly on subscription publishers if they antagonise scientists as well.” The note was written before Heather Piwowar’s discussions with Elsevier had concluded but Aspesi said those results did not change his conclusions. “If anything I would say that … my impression is that more issues were raised by the meeting with Elsevier rather than fewer,” he said.

A Reed Elsevier spokesman pointed to reports from other analysts which, he claimed, demonstrated that Elsevier still had good relations with librarians. “We continue to look at ways in which we can benefit the research community, and our position to enable text mining is just one recent example,” he said.

The Greek radical left leader, Alexis Tsipras, is making his international debut, holding talks with European leftists and government officials in Paris before moving on to Berlin. He spoke at length before his departure to Helena Smith, our correspondent in Athens.

This is the interview in full.

Helena Smith: The European parliament president, Martin Schulz, emerged from talks with you here in Greece saying you are not as dangerous as you might seem, Mr Tsipras. Is this true?

Alexis Tsipras: We had a substantive and a rather constructive talk, and I think the first thing that is necessary is to start a real dialogue. Because, you know, if you don’t talk, you can’t find a solution.

HS: And this hasn’t happened to date?

AT: So far, I believe there hasn’t been any real discussion, just as there was no political negotiation in Europe before the memorandum [of bailout conditions] on the terms and ways of confronting Greece’s fiscal problem. The memorandum was a political decision that was taken without consulting the Greek people, and it has proved catastrophic. The decision to place the country under [the supervision of] the IMF was taken by Mr Papandreou [the former prime minister] without any prior consultation and in full absence of any real political attempt to make any demands of the European Union.

And we’ve got to the point where it has been proved disastrous. After two packages of financial support that were accompanied by very harsh measures, recession remains at monumental levels, unemployment has soared, social cohesion has collapsed, and Greece is in danger of a humanitarian crisis. And on top of this, we’re not seeing results. Neither is the debt being reduced effectively, nor is the deficit; and nor is recession subsiding. Consequently, we can’t insist on a programme that has proved catastrophic and ineffective.

HS: You have spoken of the memorandum as a path that will lead to hell. How far off is this hell?

AT: We have never been in such a bad place. After two and a half years of catastrophe, the Greek people are on their knees; the social state has crumbled; one in two youngsters is out of work; there are people leaving en masse; the climate psychologically is one of pessimism, depression, mass suicides. We cannot accept that this is the future of a European country. And precisely because we recognise the problem is European, and it will spread to the rest of Europe, we are sounding the alarm bell and are appealing to the people of Europe to support us in an effort to stop this descent into what can only be called social hell.

HS: I was told by one of your assistants that you were born on the same day as Hugo Chávez. Do you have a good relationship with him?

AT: That is true, but he must have been born a few years before me. I have never met him but I have communicated with him because as a municipal councillor of Athens in the past. I travelled to Venezuela as part of a Greek monitoring mission overseeing elections there before I became president of the Left coalition [Syriza's main party] in 2008. And since then I have met with its foreign minister, and we have a good relationship with the Venezuelan ambassador.

HS: Is Chávez one of your heroes?

AT: I don’t believe there are heroes or saviours in politics. I don’t feel like a saviour: salvation can only be found by people en masse when they understand they have power in their hands. I totally disagree with the notion of a nation looking for heroes and saviours, especially a nation that needs a saviour. Whenever I am in contact with people who tell me of their woes and say “Save us”, I always say that we are the only people who can save ourselves, altogether, when we realise the power that we have in our hands. It is a mistake to put salvation in the hands of individuals.

Right now, I represent a political party that works collectively, and which represents the struggle and anguish of a great part of the Greek people. Someone else could easily represent it. Since I am in this position, I will try to do my best but I know that my power is not dependent on my own capabilities or strengths but on the trust and strength that people will give us through their vote.

HS: Are you worried? In the event of Syriza emerging as the first party and you are put in the position of governing the country, would you be afraid?

AT: I would be afraid if this didn’t happen and Greece continued on a path of catastrophe and unhappiness where our children, and my own children, live in a country that has been destroyed, one in which they basically can’t live and are forced to move abroad. That is my worry. All these years, we allowed the people who governed us to destroy this country. And we have to stop them.

HS: You were born on 28 July 1974. You are from a generation that never experienced dictatorship, but democracy. Was the country you were born in the one you, and your parents, hoped for?

AT: I was born four days after the return of democracy. It was a definitive moment for Greek society, a moment of progress when it threw off a seven-year yoke [with the collapse of military rule]. I grew up at a time when there were huge hopes in Greek democracy and the political system.

I was very young but I do remember the period of “allagi” [change] after 1980, when Pasok took power. My parents at that time voted Pasok; a lot of people who came from the left did in 1981. But I also remember the expectations that had been created and the contribution of the left and particularly Harilaos Florakis [the late leader of the long outlawed KKE communist party] and Leonidas Kyrkos [the late leader of the communist party of the Interior] to the cultural and political renaissance that was happening in Greece.

But things changed in the 80s and very quickly visions of democracy and social equality were replaced by scandal, vested interests, a miserable public sector, [and] a state that lacked meritocracy, where to find work you had to go around MPs offices in the hope that they would find you a job. It was a system that did not give opportunities to young people.

HS: Did you feel this personally?

AT: I lived, and live, in this country, and in that sense of course I felt all of these things. But I am lucky that I managed to study at a very important university [Athens's Polytechnic] and to do postgraduate studies there. And I believe, despite the difficulties in Greek political and social life, that there are certain good things, such as our universities. But in recent years, the political system led us to an impasse.

New Democracy and Pasok, the two parties that were in charge of the fate of the country all these years, and took it into the eurozone, worked on the basis of easy profit on the stock exchange, easy loans and the false consumer needs of the Greek people. They didn’t leave anything behind, any infastructure, when for over a decade, between 1996 and 2008, Greece had a record of positive growth – rates that before the [2004] Athens Olympic Games were at 7% or 8%. Where did it go? It went into the pockets of certain corrupt and wealthy [individuals] and banks, to those who were paid kickbacks for defence procurements and constructions for the Olympic Games. It didn’t go into building a better social state. We didn’t build better schools or better hospitals, and now Greek people are in a much worse place to confront the crisis than, say, the French, the Spanish and other Europeans.

HS: Are Greeks one step before social explosion?

AT: Greek people have shown great maturity, huge maturity. Given all the terrible things they have suffered, I am amazed there has not been a social explosion. With dignity Greek people have protested, filling the streets and filling the squares. With dignity they have been teargassed in Syntagma and other squares around the country. With dignity they have gone and voted, and with great dignity they are have resisted all this scaremongering [about Greece exiting the eurozone] and have not gone to banks to withdraw their small deposits, unlike big-time businessmen and the lobbies of ship-owners and industrialists here, who have been, and are, involved in a dirty game of profiteering.

HS: Are you against the euro or are you against the policies being conducted in the name of the euro?

AT: Of course we are not against the euro or the idea of a unified Europe or monetary union. We believe that resolution of the problem is not found in friction or in the struggle for competitiveness between different nations. We have to understand that when we have a common currency we owe it to every member state that it has the right of last lender. If California has a huge problem with its debts, Congress and the Fed aren’t going to decide to expel California from the dollar or the US. Instead, the Fed assumes the cost of it being able to borrow cheaply until it the state can borrow again on markets. If we want a strong Europe and a united Europe we’ve got to show our teeth to the markets. When you create an EFSF that resembles a yacht when it is trying to pass off as a cruise ship, markets are not going to be appeased.

HS: Polls show Syriza is very likely to emerge with the greatest number of votes in the coming election. Have you thought about what you might do in government?

AT: I have thought about every [scenario], and it will of course be unprecedented in contemporary Greek politics for a party, in the space of a month, to go from less than 5% as the opposition to being in government. But what we have been experiencing in Greece these past two years is also unprecedented. The absurd thing would be if the Greek people didn’t react and allowed destiny to take its course. No one has the right to reduce a proud people to such a state of wretchedness and indignity. What is happening in Greece with the memorandum is assisted suicide.

You ask if I am afraid? I would be afraid if we continued on this path, a path to social hell. Defeat is the battle that isn’t waged, and when someone fights there is the big chance of winning; and we are fighting this to win. Lost battles are battles that are not fought.

HS: Is your enemy Germany?

AT: No, no, not at all. The war that we are experiencing is not between nations and peoples. On the one side, there are workers and a majority of people, and on the other are global capitalists, bankers, profiteers on stock exchanges, the big funds. It’s a war between peoples and capitalism, and Greece is on the frontline of that war. And, as in each war, what happens on the frontline defines the battle. It will be decisive for the war elsewhere. Greece has become a model for the rest of Europe because it was chosen as the experiment for the application of neoliberal shock [policies], and Greek people were the guinea pigs. If the experiment continues, it will be considered successful, and the policies will be applied in other countries. That is why it is so important to stop the experiment. It will not just be a victory for Greece but for all of Europe.

HS: But isn’t this very risky? Greece is receiving loans on which its economic survival depends.

AT: But who is surviving? Tell me. Greeks are not. Banks are surviving, but Greeks are not surviving. In reality, we have the salvation of Greece with the destruction of the people of Greece. What, ultimately, is Greece if it is not the people who live in this country? It’s not the mountains and the plains. We can’t say we’re saving a country when its people are being destroyed. The loans are going straight to interest payment and banks. We don’t want to blackmail: we want to persuade our European partners that the way that has been chosen to confront Greece has been totally counterproductive. It is like throwing money at a bottomless pit.

They gave the first assistance package in 2010, the second in 2012, and in six months we will be forced to discuss a third package, and after that a fourth. They have to be aware that what they are doing is not in the interests of their own people. European taxpayers should know that if they are giving money to Greece, it should have an effect … it should go towards investments and underwriting growth so that the Greek debt problem can be confronted. Because with this recipe, we are not confronting the debt problem, the real problem.

HS: You are visiting Paris and Berlin as of Monday. Who will you be seeing?

AT: Of course, I won’t be seeing Merkel. We will have meetings with the French and German left and social democrats and various representatives from the governing parties in France and Germany.

HS: What message do you want to pass on to representatives of the governments in Germany and France?

AT: That they understand the historic responsibility that they are under and don’t press ahead with a crime against the Greek people, a crime that is also a huge danger for the people of the rest of Europe. Mrs Merkel has a huge historical responsibility, and she should be conscious that as leader of Europe she cannot obstinately insist on a choice that is leading Europe into danger. I also want to send the message that they have to respect democracy, which is the basis of European law. Greece gave democracy to the rest of the world. With the change of political balances here after the [6 May] vote against the memorandum, we are seeing democracy again. Europe has to understand that when a people makes a democratic decision, it has to be respected. We are at the same crossroads as we were in the 1930s, after 1929. In the US, we had the policy of Roosevelt and the New Deal, a completely different development. In Europe, we had the rise of National Socialism because of the insistence on harsh fiscal policies, and the result was the second world war.

HS: Does Europe need a Roosevelt?

AT: Europe needs a New Deal and a Marshall Plan and expansionary monetary policies like those being followed by Obama. It doesn’t need disastrous financial policies

HS: If you are to negotiate with Europe, will you start on the basis that you no longer accept the memorandum [bailout conditions]?

AT: It’s not that we, Syriza, don’t want it: the Greek people don’t want it. If you have a sick patient, and you see that the medicine you are giving him makes him worse, then the solution is not to continue the medicine but to change the medicine. It’s only logical.

HS: But then what happens after you have rejected the memorandum and creditors say: “OK, we are not going to give you the next loan”?

AT: Then they will be acting unilaterally because we have no desire to make any unilateral move. We want to convince them, to come to some mutual understanding. If they make a unilateral move, one that is the equivalent of blackmailing us, then we will be forced to react.

HS: Perhaps they will consider rejection of the memorandum, which Greece signed up to, a unilateral move.

AT: This memorandum is a law of the Greek state, and the state has the right to change its laws when balances change in the parliament … a different plan for fiscal adjustment can be voted in the parliament. The memorandum was a political choice, and those who made that political choice [New Democracy and Pasok] no longer have the majority. To vote a different law in parliament is not a unilateral move. A unilateral move would be to renounce commitments we have signed up to via European treaties and conventions, or if we stopped paying our creditors.

HS: But how will you pay creditors if you don’t have the money?

AT: Europeans have to understand that we don’t have any intention of pushing ahead with a unilateral move. We will [only] be forced to act if they act unilaterally and make the first move. If they don’t pay us, if they stop the financing [of loans], then we will not be able to pay creditors. What I am saying is very simple.

HS: Is Greece in a much stronger position that people think?

AT: Yes, it is. Keynes said it many years ago. It’s not just the person who borrows but the person who lends who can find himself in a difficult position. If you owe £5,000 to the bank, its your problem; but if you owe £500,000, it’s the bank’s problem. This is a common problem: It’s our problem; it’s Merkel’s problem; it’s a European problem; it’s a world problem. The euro is the second strongest currency in the world, and no one has the right to play games with it on the basis that it is they who are strong and have power.

HS: Some would say Syriza, and you personally, are playing with fire. What do you have to say to that?

AT: It is not us who are scaremongering. Pasok and New Democracy are scaremongering, and it is very dangerous for the economy. In order to survive politically, all of them are scaremongering with all this talk that we are leaving the eurozone. As a result, since the beginning of the crisis €75bn has been withdrawn from banks. It’s criminal, what they are doing.

HS: Are fears overblown, then, that Greece could leave the eurozone?

AT: From what I know, there is no institutional possibility to eject a country from the eurozone, and they know this very well. Greece could leave the eurozone only if Greeks themselves choose to leave the eurozone. And given that our aim is not the exit of Greece from the eurozone but to remain there as an equal, Greek people have no reason to fear being kicked out. The only thing they have to fear is the continuation of policies of austerity.

HS: Do you agree on the need for structural reforms?

AT: Of course, absolutely. We always said there was a need for corrective reforms, and we have always pointed out that Greece’s productive base and economic policy is dysfunctional. First of all, we have to combat tax evasion. It’s not in our genes that we can’t combat it when everywhere else in Europe it is successfully combated. The truth is, no one in this country has ever wanted to

combat it, and as a result the rich have got away with not paying taxes. Reforms are definitely needed. The political system never pushed ahead with them all these years because the two main parties, Pasok and New Democracy, were mired in corruption.

HS: What will your priorities be if you get into government?

AT: Our first priority will be to put a break on this downward spiral by stopping the measures and starting a real dialogue at a European level to find a common solution to the basic problem that should be discussed, which is the debt. It’s not only Greece: Italy, Spain [and] France all have debt problems.

Our second priority will be to proceed with changes that will remedy the system such as changing the tax system to change the redistribution of wealth. I am not going to say, as [former PM] George Papandreou said, that “money exists”: money does not exist. Without growth, we won’t find money; and without necessary corrective reforms, we can’t boost productivity.

HS: Syriza is an alliance of 12 different groups ranging from communists to socialists. What would you say you are?

AT: In this most neoliberal phase of capitalism, in the depths of this crisis, it’s a bit oxymoronic to speak of labels. Syriza believes in social justice, democracy and equality in a society where there is no exploitation of man by man: the basic rights that were fought for from the French revolution and in Greece from the 1821 war of independence. We have a vision of socialism in the 21st century, and we don’t believe in investing in wretchedness. A fair society can be created by taking positive steps. Which is why we believe this downward spiral has to stop.

During the summer of 2003, more than 600 public meetings were held across the country on the order of the government. One was even held in the fictional town of Ambridge, setting for Radio 4′s rural soap The Archers, such was the desire to spark a “national debate”.

At each event, attendees were asked about their attitudes towards a technology that left very few people on the fence – genetically modified (GM) food. When Professor Malcolm Grant, the man chosen by the Labour government to lead the consultation, published the findings of the “GM Nation” report a few months later, the conclusions could not have been clearer: “The mood ranged from caution and doubt, through suspicion and scepticism, to hostility and rejection.” Such views, added the report, “far outweighed any degree of support or enthusiasm for GM”. In fact, only 2% of those surveyed said they would be happy to eat GM food. It was about an emphatic a “No!” from the British public as it could muster. The food industry, especially the supermarkets, heard it loud and clear and abandoned the technology.

But almost a decade on from the report – and after barely a word spoken about the technology in the British media in the intervening period – GM food is once again creating a growing ripple of headlines. A collective of anti-GM protestors calling themselves Take the Flour Back promised last month that they would rip up a test crop of genetically modified, aphid-resistant spring wheat currently being grown at the Rothamsted research station in Hertfordshire on 27 May unless the small band of publicly funded research scientists abandoned the trial. The scientists have so far refused to back down, instead posting an emotional appeal on YouTube calling for the protestors to meet them and “discuss the science”. But tensions were raised further earlier this week when an organic farmer from Devon was charged for allegedly breaking in and vandalising crops and property at Rothamsted over the weekend, an act which a Take the Flour Back spokeswoman said the group “had no information about”.

In stark contrast to the widespread anti-GM mood a decade ago – an age when GM was being described in the popular press as a “Frankenfood” and protesters dressed in bio-hazard suits routinely trampled on and pulled up test crops – it appears that the scientists have been far more successful this time at garnering sympathy and understanding of their work and motives. And there are signs from Europe, too, that attitudes are – albeit glacially – starting to shift: on Monday, Europe’s food safety agency ruled against a temporary French ban on a strain of GM maize made by the US company Monsanto, saying there was “no specific scientific evidence, in terms of risk to human and animal health or the environment” to justify it. But the protesters feel the public is still on their side – a point supported by a British Science Association survey published in March which found that opposition to GM food in UK has only weakened by a few percentage points since 2003.

Liz Walker, a veteran of the 1990s anti-GM protests who is now an active member of Take the Flour Back, says any notion that GM “went away” is folly. While the UK and, to an equal extent, the European Union, has largely shunned the technology, the rest of the world, particularly North America and Asia, has pushed ahead with growing GM crops commercially.

“Around 2.7% of the global agricultural acreage is under GM crops now,” she says. “There has been an almost unchallenged wave of pro-GM lobbying over the past few years in the UK and despite the GM Nation consultation finding clear opposition from the British public, there has been an absolute continuum of support for GM between the last government and the present one. Our supermarkets don’t want it because they know their customers don’t. They are not stupid. And there’s just no market for it in Europe. But, despite all this, in recent years the UK government has approved GM wheat and potato trials.”

Walker, who says she “works for a soap company” but doesn’t wish to discuss her background in further detail, says the protesters are happy to talk with the scientists but insists the planned direct action will only be called off if the trial is halted. Rothamsted has “no democratic mandate to proceed”, she says. Furthermore, the various claims by GM advocates – it is safe to grow and eat and offers multiple advantages to farmers and the environment – simply don’t stack up: “Supposed reassurances from America about the safety of GM crops have not been borne out. And there is a question mark about it being cheaper for consumers, too. Even the UN and World Bank said in a major joint report in 2008 that GM isn’t a contender.” (The 2,500-page “International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science and Technology for Development” – IAASTD – concluded that the “information [about GM] is anecdotal and contradictory, and uncertainty about possible benefits and damage is unavoidable”.)

When it was revealed last year that a trial for blight-resistant GM potatoes was being conducted at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, 60 protesters with signs saying “Stop gambling with our chips” marched through the city, before dumping a tractor-load of potatoes at the entrance. But media interest was negligible. Walker admits that there has been a conscious decision by the protesters this time round to raise the stakes.

“It took the announcement of this new protest to get everyone interested again in GM. The idea for the direct action emerged last year at a series of meetings held between those concerned by the announcement of the trial. Many were connected to the Community Food Growers Network.” The network’s online manifesto says it is “actively engaged in growing food plants and supporting others to grow food, in healthy, sustainable ways.” It adds: “We exist to join together in defence of any member whose legitimate activities are threatened: an injury to one is an injury to all.”

Walker also admits that the group contains “some of the same faces” that were part of the Climate Camp, a nationwide, non-hierarchical collective of environmentalists that has organised a series of high-profile protest camps in recent years, but which appears to be now focusing on “fracking”, the controversial method of extracting natural gas from shale, as well as partially dissolving into groups such as Occupy and UK Uncut.

Beyond this, Walker refuses to say who the protesters are or how many they number: “We don’t have a leadership structure. There’s no fixed office and we take it in turns to man the phone.” She says the protesters are “keeping an open mind” about how far they are prepared to take things on the day of the protest, but insists they have a mandate to express their objections. “The scientists and their supporters are in a massive minority. Concerns about the science of GM, and its corporate ownership, are both key, intertwined reasons for opposing it. The public mood on this is clear.”

Mark Lynas, an anti-GM protester in the late 1990s who now admits to a Damascene conversion to the merits of the technology in recent years, believes the protesters have misjudged the public attitude to GM this time round. “I think there are several reasons why GM is making a comeback. First, the blanket opposition to GM per se as a technology is obviously untenable in any scientific sense – there is no reason why it should present any new dangers in food, and, indeed, may well be safer than conventional breeding in crops.”

The experience of seeing GM crops grown and sold in other parts of the word goes a long way to prove this, he says: “With the passage of more than a decade since the widespread commercialisation of GM crops in North America, Brazil and elsewhere, hundreds of millions of people have eaten GM-originated food without a single substantiated case of any harm done whatsoever.”

But the world’s priorities and needs are also fast changing, says Lynas. Issues such as climate change and population rise mean we just don’t have the luxury any more as a species to ignore or decry this technology: “It is increasingly obvious – even to environmentalists like myself who had initial strong doubts about the technology – that unnecessarily ruling out crop improvement technologies harms the interests of humanity when our challenge is to feed over nine billion much richer people by mid-century on a similar cultivated area to today and without enormous increases in fertiliser and pesticide use.”

Lynas believes that the opposition to GM is now more driven by ideological rather than scientific objections: “I think most of the remaining opposition to GM is really a displaced fear about big corporations dominating the food chain, which is why every argument about GM seems to be reduced down to one word: Monsanto. In which case we should be encouraging publicly-funded, open-source GM such as that conducted at Rothamsted and the John Innes Centre, not threatening to rip out their crops.”

It was, in part, the fear of international biotech firms such as Monsanto, Bayer and Syngenta attaining a stranglehold on global farming through their patented GM seeds that enraged so many back in the 1990s, when campaign groups such as GM Freeze were first formed to block the technology’s advance. Pete Riley, a Friends of the Earth campaigner back then but now spokesperson for GM Freeze, the “only UK national umbrella organisation” to campaign against GM, says there is an increasingly pro-GM stance being adopted by the UK “establishment”.

“The UN’s IAASTD report back in 2008 concluded that GM offered marginal benefits,” says Riley. “But since then we’ve seen the government’s Foresight Global Food and Farming Futures report published last year, as well as the Royal Society, being positive about GM. This has helped to push it back on to the table here in the UK.”

Riley says GM Freeze doesn’t participate in direct action itself, but shares Take the Flour Back’s concerns. “Spring wheat only accounts for 1% of wheat grown in the UK. There just isn’t a market for it here. You have to wonder if this wheat trial at Rothamsted is just an attempt to justify their stream of public funding. Anyway, alternative technologies such as marker-assisted selection [non-GM genetic mapping] is now overtaking GM, but the immense lobbying power of the industry could still get it back on to the agenda.”

It’s the “same-old” thinking and assumptions being made about agriculture, observes Riley: “Ultimately, we need to have a wide debate about the direction of agriculture in the EU. We’ve been abusing our soil for 60 years. We need to move away from monoculture, energy-intensive farming. We don’t need GM for a healthy diet. There’s no evidence it increases yields. We need a diverse gene pool. The experience of using GM crops in the US has proved not to be good. There are now 21 herbicide-resistant weeds, meaning the industry is now proposing that more herbicides are introduced to tackle them. It’s a pesticide treadmill in the US and a blind alley that we must not also go down.”

This kind of talk exasperates Colin Ruscoe, chairman of the British Crop Production Council, a charity, supported by the biotech industry, which “promotes the use of good science and technology in the understanding and application of effective and sustainable crop production”. The council has angrily condemned the planned anti-GM protest and believes it is an “attack on science”. Ruscoe says it was a “deja vu moment” when he heard about the protest, which “took me back to when we had all those debates about ‘Frankenfood’”.

“We saw the same reaction when the plough was introduced,” he sighs. “I am pessimistic about this debate. Europe is well fed. There is just no incentive to debate GM properly. It’s simply not that high on the political agenda at the moment. Denmark, as president of the European Council, recently attempted to get it back on the table, but that failed. A compromise was also opposed. The opposition to GM in countries such as Germany is just too strong. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is racing ahead of us.”

Ruscoe believes this is foolish as GM offers the promise of a number of beneficial traits: “Some crops could be climate change resistant. They could be both salt and drought resistant. Or they could be enhanced with extra health-giving properties such as omega-3 oils. Food security – being able to grow your own indigenous food supplies – has also become a bigger concern since the late 1990s. But it will take a few more shocks to the system to get the debate going again in Europe.”

But Ruscoe offers a controversial half-way house as a suggested way forward for this seemingly interminable debate. “There has been a clever, yet misleading use of the word ‘contamination’ in this debate by the organic food lobby. I actually have a lot of respect for the principles of that form of farming. The best of both worlds would be a meshing together of the two systems, with each crop treated on a case-by-case basis, with one shared goal being reduced pesticide use. This would clearly threaten the organic brand and cause problems for labelling organic foods. But it would only cause a contamination of the brand. We have to be more pragmatic and sanguine about GM.”

However, whether the protesters like it or not, GM crops are already heading towards Europe, insists Ruscoe. “Eventually, due to their use in neighbouring regions, we will get GM crops blowing into Europe over borders. There will be leaks in the dyke. We need to accept and prepare for this, not fear it.”

Alan Hollinghurst lives in a light and preternaturally quiet flat on Parliament Hill in north London. When his novel The Line of Beauty won the Booker prize in 2004, he spent some of his winnings on revamping it, with the result that it has a new, large sitting room with a lush view out on to a corner of Hampstead Heath. Furniture is sparse (he likes to joke that the money ran out before he could stretch to armchairs), but there are pale carpets and good paintings and – what’s this? – a strange plaster relief, in an elaborate gilt frame, of the face of a (presumably long dead) young woman.

I move towards it excitedly, as if I were the first visitor ever to notice it. Beneath her profile is written her name: Daphne. Crikey. Was this a source of inspiration for Daphne Sawle, one of the most important characters in The Stranger’s Child, his fifth and most recent novel? He smiles, indulgently. But, no. He bought it at auction just as he was finishing the book, by which time Daphne Sawle was every bit as real to him as this fine-boned, turn-of-the-century creature.

Hollinghurst is all indulgent smiles today, which is just as well because I’ve got the jitters. The Stranger’s Child, a capacious and wonderful book that begins in one suburban garden in 1913 and ends in another in 2008, has many themes. It is about love, and the passing of time; it is, too, about ambition, taste and disappointment. But more than anything, it is about the unknowability of human beings, and the misunderstandings, even the danger, associated with trying to plug the gaps in our perceptions.

Its nastiest and perhaps most memorable character is Paul Bryant, an enterprising hack reviewer and the would-be biographer of Cecil Valance, the Rupert Brooke-ish figure whose short life and long but ever-shifting literary reputation crouches at the heart of The Stranger’s Child.

Bryant, like me, makes a living poking around in people’s lives – and I have the impression that his creator disapproves. When he goes to stay with Daphne Sawle, for whom, when she was a girl, Cecil Valance wrote a famous poem, she likens him to a “little wire-haired ratter”; she knows, even before he has lobbed his first question, that all he is interested in, basically, is “smut”. When Paul asks her if he might tape their conversation, Hollinghurst writes of the recorder’s “odd insinuations of flattery and mistrust”. He then lists, highly accurately, the various ways interviewees respond to it: some made awkward, as if it were an eavesdropper; others reassured to a degree that results in a kind of verbal incontinence.

I place my own tape recorder down on the small table beside us. I half expect it to explode, like a grenade. So, does he loathe Paul?

“Well, I wanted to depict him changing,” he says, carefully. “And one knows how sweet young people can turn into monsters and bores.” They curdle. “Yes, exactly. They curdle.”

What about biography? Does he disapprove of it? “No, of course not. I love biography. But as with the novel, there’s a great range between the great and the crap. A great biography is like a great novel; it has a deep sense of wisdom about life. I’m quite amused, though, and sometimes frustrated, when someone ends up with the wrong biographer.

“I’m potty about Ronald Firbank, and the first person to have access to all his papers was this woman, Miriam Benkovitz. She was in a position to do something wonderful, and she wrote this utterly inane book – and, of course, a minor literary figure is unlikely to have their life written again, so it feels like a waste. The same thing happened with Denton Welch [the writer and painter, who died in 1948]. There was this very slipshod biography by Michael De-la-Noy.”

The Stranger’s Child came out last year (it is published in paperback this week) to almost universal praise; the only criticism anyone seemed to be able to level at it was that it isn’t The Line of Beauty. But then… controversy! The novel was left off the Booker shortlist, and thus became the focus for discontent with the prize and its supposedly lowbrow leanings; soon after, the literary agent Andrew Kidd announced that he hoped to establish a new, more serious fiction award (although, so far, nothing has yet happened on this score).

How did Hollinghurst feel about this? “I didn’t say anything [at the time], and it’s hard for me to say anything about it now because it sounds like I’m saying: I should have been on the shortlist.”

But? “But there were a lot of books that should have been on the shortlist – Teddy [Edward St Aubyn, author of At Last] and Philip Hensher [King of the Badgers] and probably a lot of other books I haven’t read, too. One can take a position about the shortlist in almost an objective way. But I also learnt, a long time ago, to be aloof from these things. You realise how arbitrary they are. It’s lovely if it works out for you, but it doesn’t mean anything, really, except in commercial terms.

“The Booker made me a lot of money. I didn’t realise that all over the world, people will read a book just because it won the Booker prize.” A delicious pause. “Not something I would do myself… But then one goes into some quite other, private region to produce a book.” He gives me a knowing look. “I think the Booker can drive people quite mad. That’s why it’s good to be detached from it.”

Is he in that private region now? I hope so. “I’m in that rather unfocused phase, which is one of discontent with not writing another book. What I’m missing is sitting at my desk and getting into the large alternative space of a book. I’ve got quite a few bits and pieces, but I haven’t quite had the moment of revelation where I see how they fit together. It’s always like this: a blur of different things, and then a story emerges.”

Does he ever think: I’m not sure I can do this again? “I have an underlying confidence that I won’t suffer writer’s block or anything. But I never think: oh, this will be a smash hit. I know there are things I can do, but an element of doubt is probably quite important.” Is writing painful? For some, it’s agony. “Perhaps we tend to overplay the agony side of it. But then, like any pain, when it’s over, you can’t remember it. So perhaps I’m wrong to say we exaggerate it. What I will say is that there are times when it’s just the best thing: the high of things coming to you. You get a peculiar sense of elation, as if nothing else really matters. It’s not a sense of smugness. But you’re buoyed up. Your mind is wonderfully perceptive. It’s a very beautiful feeling.”

I can measure out my adulthood not in coffee spoons, but in Alan Hollinghurst novels. Partly, this is because he takes such an age to write a book; the anxious wait means that one’s circumstances have inevitably changed by the time he delivers. Partly, it’s because I read his first novel, The Swimming Pool Library, which came out in 1988, during my first year at university, that exciting time when I felt life was just beginning to get going. I remember vividly both the deep surprise of it – all that sex! – and my complete inability to put it down, for all that I was supposed to be watching children (I was their nanny).

This is, I think, something the critics rarely point out. They will tell you that his first four novels compose an unofficial history of gay life in Britain (The Swimming Pool Library, which fleshed out – quite literally – the gay world before and after the decriminalisation of homosexuality, was followed by The Folding Star, a study of romantic and sexual obsession; The Spell, a comedy of manners whose twin engines are ecstasy and a certain kind of narcissism; and finally, triumphantly, The Line of Beauty, perhaps the best book ever written about the 80s). They will also, inevitably, claim him as the greatest stylist of our age. But do they ever use the word page-turner? No, they most certainly do not.

He wasn’t always going to be a novelist, though. Poetry was his first love. An only child, he grew up in Stroud, Gloucestershire, where his father was a bank manager (he poured this time into The Stranger’s Child: Paul Bryant begins his working life in a bank in a small, country town, where he reads Angus Wilson in his lunch hour, and gets turned on by the angle of his stool at the cash desk). At school – his parents sent him to board at Canford in Dorset – Hollinghurst became fascinated by poetical forms.

“We had to do a competition,” he says. “The theme was ‘the pleasures of life’. I wrote three sonnets.” And what were, in his then opinion, the pleasures of life? A low chuckle (Hollinghurst is the drollest, most quietly mischievous man I’ve ever met – though it’s in his eyes and the cast of his mouth and the tone of his voice, rather than in anything he actually says). “I’m not sure I’d actually experienced the pleasures of life, then. So it was a case of…. going for a walk, having a cup of tea, er… a pint of foaming ale!” He laughs. “They were published, with some typos, in the school magazine. Being a poet at school had a certain prestige; it was a source of glamour. And if you could write modernistic poems, which no one could understand, then even more so.”

Later on, as a young man, he published a volume of poems, Confidential Chats with Boys (1982) – “intensely rare”, he once described it, self-mockingly – but then the muse left him, and he started on The Swimming Pool Library instead. He was 33 when it was published.

Hollinghurst dates his interest in architecture from school, too – and thus, wary though we must be of conflating life and fiction, we can also trace the big houses in his books to this time. “I placed Corley Court [the Valances' home in The Stranger's Child] almost exactly where my prep school had been,” he says. “I’d never gone back into that world before [Corley Court later becomes a school], and I realised the memories were so abundant, I could easily have written a 500-page novel only about that – not that I’m going to! My prep school, an early Jacobean house, made a deep impression on me. I could draw an accurate plan of every floor, even now – and all the fireplaces, the plasterwork on the ceilings. I just absorbed it all. You’re wonderfully open and suggestible as a boy, though one also goes through agonies. The emotions of adolescence are so extreme.”

After a long period at Oxford – he wrote an MLitt thesis on Firbank, Forster and LP Hartley – he came to London, and began working as a reviewer, eventually joining the Times Literary Supplement as an editor. “It was completely unanticipated,” he says. “I’d applied for teaching jobs. I had an interview in Edinburgh, and perhaps I’d still be there if I’d got that.”

The editor told Hollinghurst, sounding slightly embarrassed, that his salary would be £11,500. “And my father said: that’s more than I ever earned, old boy.” His parents were reassured by the fact of his working at the TLS – and it pleased him, too, to be able to jump dramatically into a taxi and shout: the Times! (both papers were in the same place ). He went part-time after The Swimming Pool Library came out, and eventually was able to make a living from writing full-time – which is a good thing because he has a problem combining fiction with the rest of life. Hollinghurst is rather sociable. He has been known to go to parties. But once he’s deep into a novel, he has to isolate himself. It’s for this reason, too, that he has mostly always lived alone.

We talk, before I go, about literary estates. It is a horrible fact that while he was writing The Stranger’s Child, in which we see Cecil Valance’s reputation wax and wane, different parties claiming him as their own at various times, Hollinghurst’s dear friend Mick Imlah, the poet, died of motor neurone disease at the age of 52. Hollinghurst, his literary executor, looked on as people wrote about Imlah, “each of them saying what they thought about him rather as the characters do in the book”.

His own literary executor is Andrew Motion (the two of them shared a house in Oxford; Hollinghurst is also Motion’s executor). “Oh, yes, I’ve kept everything,” he says. “A couple of American libraries have suggested I might like to deposit things with them. But I don’t like the idea of people rummaging about in my drafts. It’s embarrassing. Why expose oneself to that? And I don’t think you should be too concerned with posterity while you are living your life.”

He will admit, though, to enjoying writing his will, when he finally got round to it (“Andrew was much more organised; he wrote his ages before me”). Specifically, he liked the bequest section. So who, I wonder, will get Daphne, with her marble eyes, and her well-bred nose? He laughs, a low rumble of delight. “Yes, that’s something I really should think about. I probably need to add a whole new clause for her.”

When you arrange to meet Antony Hegarty, you don’t have to worry about questions like “How will I recognise you?” The singer is in London visiting his parents’ home near Kingston upon Thames, so we’ve agreed to get together at a place on the river. At 11 in the morning, I’m standing outside the designated cafe – which is closed – among the inevitable joggers and retired couples on their constitutional and toddlers feeding the swans, when Hegarty comes striding along the boardwalk. He is well over 6ft tall, his bulky frame dressed in indeterminate numbers of layers of black, his moon-pale face and soft features and smile partly covered by strands of long, straight black hair. As a younger man he used to walk the streets of New York wearing a sheer silk slip and military boots with the words “fuck off” inked on his forehead. He’s lost the stare-rejecting attire, if not quite all of the sentiment.

In search of coffee we head to the nearby Rose theatre foyer, which is full of latte-loving young mothers encouraging their offspring to let off some steam. When he was invited to edit the Guardian’s music website a couple of years ago, Hegarty suggested that what humanity urgently needed in order to survive was “a seismic shift toward the feminine in our empathetic systems of perceiving and interacting with the world”. When he was making this claim I’m not sure that what he had in mind was the fecund yummy mummies of the royal borough of Kingston, but it seems appropriate anyhow, in the hour or so that follows, that his thoughts on the future feminisation of the planet should occasionally be threatened to be overwhelmed by women talking over voluble babies.

While he is in London, Hegarty is finalising some of his plans for the forthcoming Meltdown festival, which he is curating, down river at the Southbank Centre. He has been dividing his time of late between his home in New York and a base in Madrid (where he has been working on a theatre project with the cultish performance artist Marina Abramovic), but southern England, where he lived until the age of 10, remains a formative grid reference. Though he has been an important figure in the New York avant garde for 20 years, Hegarty grew up in Chichester, west Sussex. He is 41 now, but he is so curiously boyish in manner that you can well imagine him still as the awkward British chorister, developing a bit faster, and a bit more unconventionally than his fellow descants; he still looks both at home and not at home in these suburbs, a big man who has got used to projecting his inner hermaphrodite quite comfortably.

Hegarty’s spoken voice, a warm conspiratorial whisper, only occasionally hints at the uniquely powerful and vulnerable sound that he is capable of making on stage and in recordings. When the range of that soul-charged tenor first fully unfolded with his band Antony and the Johnsons in 2005, you had the sense of it coming out of nowhere, emerging, as the title of his breakthrough Mercury prize-winning album I Am a Bird Now suggested, as if from another, more aery, species entirely.

Hegarty himself doesn’t quite see it that way. The creation of his androgynous persona, and the discovery of the possibilities of his voice, was a mix-and-match of influence and experiment conducted over many years. Meltdown works best when the curator approaches it as a kind of musical autobiography, and certainly that is Hegarty’s intention this year. His first forays into art were collages and cut-ups of magazines, which he still makes and exhibits from time to time, cultural references spliced together to form vivid and unsettling wholes. He takes the approach into other areas of his life, too, he suggests. “I like arranging all my friends as constellations, and I do love the process of curation, so this is perfect for me.” To prove the point he sets his smartphone on his knee and starts scrolling excitedly through the acts he has lined up.

First up in an eclectic list – “mainly ecstatic female voices with a few queens thrown in” – is Marc Almond, whom Hegarty has persuaded to appear in his Marc and the Mambas incarnation, the side project of his Soft Cell years. Almond has become a friend, but in his teens Hegarty was the obsessive fan. “Marc pretty much singlehandedly determined my future as a musician and the style of music I would pursue,” he recalls. “I was about 13 when I heard him. I was living in America, a suburb in California and getting those records by land mail was really hard work. You would hear rumours about records in magazines which themselves were pretty hard to get hold of. But for all those reasons Marc and the Mambas were really important to me. I lived on the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. And those records arriving through the door were really my lifeline.”

Hegarty moved out to California in 1981. The family were following his father’s work as an engineer; they had gone first to Amsterdam, before ending up on the west coast of the US. Hegarty is not keen on public psychoanalysis and pretty wary of sharing even the facts of his life, preferring mystery, but he hints that the abrupt shift across the Atlantic was not an especially happy one for him. In Chichester he had enjoyed singing with the choir but that opportunity was not available to him at school in the US, where singing was considered “effeminate” and “shameful” among the boys. As he reached puberty and his ambiguous gender identity became more defined, he suggests he wasn’t bullied so much as left to his own devices. His reaction was, he has said elsewhere, to confront his identity head on: ‘I started wearing more makeup. That’s the honest truth. I started probably about 12… 13.”

As he applied his eyeliner, Marc Almond made him feel as though he was not alone. Previously his only musical crush, inevitably, had been on Kate Bush. But he looked on Almond as something like a cross between a role model and a guardian angel. “I always felt he had kind of left a trail of breadcrumbs for me, to follow him into music,” he says. “You know I would collect quotes and references that he mentioned in interviews, pore over them. He laid out the land for me. And I really learned to sing listening to him singing. Him and Nina Simone. As Nina would say in the studio, ‘Don’t put nothing in unless you really feel it. Let’s do it again from the top please.’”

Hegarty likes his singers to embody different kinds of courage, “people who deliver a vision of the world they totally believe in”. In his live performances he is a master of that kind of conviction: his most recent show, at Radio City Music Hall in New York, a staging of his latest album Swanlights, saw him bathed in the green glow of lasers, accompanied by a 60-piece orchestra while keening rapturously about a vision of “being dead, underwater and filled with crystals of light”. It was described in the New York Times as an evening of “wonderment” with “cries from the heart, crashing like waves”.

Hegarty has always been drawn to voices that self-consciously channel female mythic power. His South Bank lineup will include not only the return to a mainstream stage of the ethereal Scots vocals of Liz Fraser, once of the Cocteau Twins, but also the “Edith Piaf of Turkey”, Selda Ba˘gcan, who took up the people’s cause against the generals of Istanbul armed only with a guitar, and Buffy Sainte Marie, who invigorated electronic and folk music with Native American wisdom in the 1960s and 70s.

Hegarty’s father used to play tapes of Sainte-Marie in his car, and those songs retain an eerie nostalgia for Hegarty himself. “Little Wheel Spin and Spin was so haunting and so frightening to me as a child,” he says. “Buffy was very clear about what she saw as the crisis and very keen to spit it out, almost like a witch. I like singing that is not far short of a hex. Nina Simone did the same thing around race and the civil rights movement. All of that taught me how you can participate in culture as an artist.”

In his own engagement with that “crisis”, he defines it as “a crisis of spiritual issues, but also a practical crisis of ecology”. Hegarty is an avid reader of the Guardian’s environment pages and our conversation is salted with quotes from articles he has recently clipped. (“They said last month in the US it was 8.7 degrees hotter than it should have been… Every taxi driver knows something weird is happening with the weather. And everyone is waiting in vain for the institutions that are supposed to have our best interests at heart to come up with some solution…”)

Some of the lyrics on his last two albums suggest a kind of transcendent Wordsworthian relationship with the natural world. I wonder if this was established in Hegarty as a child.

“Well,” he says, “I think it was but in just in a very typical south of England way. I was raised walking around on the South Downs at weekends on my father’s shoulders. And with a sense that nature was for ever. The critical shift that has happened in our lifetimes is the idea that we are actually undermining that whole belief. Can you imagine the burden on the psyche of our species that has involved? How can we possibly process that without massive global summits on what we should be doing? Instead we are being divided and conquered by this terrorism scaremongering and half the world, including most of America, is tied up in patriarchal religions that believes apocalypse is the climax of what we are waiting for.”

Once he is into his stride on this theme, there is no stopping him. Hegarty was an ardent Christopher Hitchens fan, slayer of “sky god religions that destroy our connection with the natural world and promote the idea that paradise lies elsewhere”. As a transgender person – and he has no wish to define the “meat and potatoes” of his sexuality any more precisely – he sees himself as having a small headstart on most of the rest of civilisation in his intimate understanding of the need for feminine power structures to restore imbalances created by “patriarchal religion, patriarchal economies and patriachal government”. In this way he has moved from the deeply personal emotional conflicts and epiphanies of his earlier songs to what he sees as a more political message. In this vision the drag queens and trannies that he came of age among in New York are not only defiantly transgressive but also prophetic.

“There was another article I was reading in the Guardian,” he says, with a grin, “about a year ago that declared there was no fundamental difference between men and women. I mean, are you off your rocker? The whole problem is this difference between men and women and our lack of self-knowledge about it. Our bodies are like computers with two different operating systems. One is called testosterone, one is called oestrogen. The same body, different software. And within the transgender community you see this very clearly. You watch people take oestrogen or testosterone and you see them change not just physically, but their whole way of thinking, their whole approach.”

Has he ever experimented with that process himself?

“No, but I have seen it very intimately, and the changes are not subtle, they are fundamental…” Hegarty has perhaps always been aware that he has the capacity to shift between these two operating systems, to try them both on for size and communicate in his highly allusive way how it feels. “The future,” he declares in his stagey whisper, “is bringing more understanding of how we make the decisions we make on a biological level, and then to step back from that and see what is going on. We need more oestrogen-based thinking, basically.”

If Marc Almond helped him to understand this calling, it was watching the film Mondo New York, about the lives of Manhattan performance artists, when he was 17, that allowed Hegarty to see where he had to go to be himself. One star of that film, Joey Arias, “is my New York hero really,” he says. “In the film I saw this queen dressed as Billie Holiday, singing in the voice of Billie Holiday A Hard Day’s Night by the Beatles. It was like seeing a black swan made out of razor blades or something. So elusive, so threatening, so androgynous, so sexual. I was still living in California, but I knew I had to go and see Joey.”

Not long after he arrived in Arias’s New York, Hegarty formed the Blacklips Performance Cult, a drag theatre troupe with whom he put on weekly shows at Mother, a club in the Meatpacking District frequented by drag punks and “gender mutants”. The Blacklips performed a surreal burlesque during which Hegarty rehearsed his spellbinding laments, in a show that also occasionally involved throwing offal and buckets of blood at the audience. The Johnsons (the name a tribute to Marsha P Johnson, a transgender activist and leader in the Stonewall Riots, whose body was discovered in the Hudson river after a gay pride march in 1992) followed on from the Blacklips. The band was always a shifting group of collaborators for Hegarty’s voice, and though the first Antony and the Johnsons album was released in 1998, it was not until 2003, when an EP called I Fell in Love with a Dead Boy (the cover of which shows Hegarty lying in supplication before a naked Japanese hermaphrodite) caught the attention of Hal Willner, the music director for Saturday Night Live, that he received any wider attention. Willner passed the record on to Lou Reed, who insisted: “When I heard Antony, I knew that I was in the presence of an angel.” Reed invited Hegarty to join him as a backup vocalist on his Animal Serenade tour, and the pair have been friends and occasional collaborators ever since (Hegarty is hoping that Reed and his partner Laurie Anderson, of O Superman fame, will both return the compliment and appear at Meltdown).

If for any reason they don’t make it, there will be no shortage of friends from Hegarty’s meat-chucking Blacklips days. He has, he says, of late helped to form a sort of political group called the Future Feminist Foundation, which has meetings in New York from time to time. They have been working on a manifesto, but it’s not the most organised of groups, so they haven’t quite drafted all of it yet. The basics are pretty clear though. “It’s not a group that thinks women should just crawl towards economic equality in the way we have been engaged in since the 60s,” Hegarty says. “That can’t be the climax of feminism. It’s like gay rights, as if gay marriage is the end point, as if we just want to be included in these business-as-usual institutions. That’s not the point of being queer, just as mitigated reproductive rights aren’t the point of being a woman. We want to move this forward. Do something great… overturn all these failed male structures of thinking, all this aggression in decision-making…” he pauses in his impromptu stump speech to the mother’s union of Kingston upon Thames to laugh a little. “Sorry if I sound nuts,” he says.

The unofficial leader of the Future Feminist Foundation, or at least the woman that Hegarty “would follow anywhere”, is Kembra Pfahler. She fronts a glam-punk band called the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. “Kembra,” Hegarty says, with a certain amount of jealous awe, is “the most hardcore future feminist really.”

How so?

“Well, for example she does this one performance piece called Wall of Vagina, which is like seven girls spray-painted different colours and naked and they just pile up on top of each other and open their legs wide and create this wall on stage or in a gallery, this wall of vaginas, and you may not pass through the wall.”

That does sound quite a hard act to follow, I say.

Pfahler will be coming to London to perform for Meltdown, though regrettably not with her painted fellow travellers. “I’ve asked her to do a lecture, and then she will do a concert accompanied by Vaginal Creme Davis, the quintessential LA Afro-American drag punk…”

Of course. You get half a sense that Hegarty sees Meltdown as a delicious opportunity to close the circle of his life, to bring his New York extremes back home to the norms of his childhood in a spirit of mischief as well as political commitment. He has learned a lot, he says, from Marina Abramovic, the self-harming godmother of performance art, about the possibilities of theatre. He has asked Abramovic to do a lecture that will only be open to women, part of his current project of finding ways to have men “understand the sacred humility of recognising a woman’s space”. This is the first step in what he sees as the necessary transfer of power between the sexes in order to save the species. “Many men,” he believes, with wild optimism, “will be hugely relieved by that shift.”

There is not a vast amount of evidence for that assertion at the moment, I suggest. Where does he look for hope?

“Well,” he says with a laugh, “they are letting us do this festival. It’s a start!” With that battle cry he heads out into the streets of Kingston, a man with a mission, which in the short term involves buying a loaf of bread to go and feed the swans.

Antony’s Meltdown, 1-12 August, is part of the Southbank Centre’s Festival of the World with MasterCard; www.southbankcentre.co.uk/meltdown. The Observer is media partner

MUSICAL HEROES: Antony on some of his Meltdown highlights

MARC ALMOND

“The work that Marc did was totally off the mark. It was so ambitious. He is very well loved, and he is interesting, because he did it the wrong way round as it were. He went from mainstream pop into subculture. Usually things go the other way.” 9 August

LIZ FRASER

“In my later teens I became intensely preoccupied with the work of Liz Fraser and the Cocteau Twins. Liz is the secret jewel of Britain. I would cry to those songs a lot, more than sing them. There is something so maternal in her voice. It’s not just a melodic but a phonetic approach to singing which is totally intuitive, and which she invented herself. I get chills just thinking about it. She hasn’t performed for a long time, so for her to sing is a centrepiece of the festival.” 6 and 7 August

DIAMANDA GALÁS

“Diamanda is the other great singer in the group. Just her ferocity as a singer – no one does what she does. She is the Maria Callas of art music. Again that ecstatic range and extraordinary courage.” 1 August

SELDA BAĞCAN

“Selda is like the Edith Piaf of Turkey, a tremendous political voice, a folk musician in the broadest sense. She has this tone in her voice that makes me cry my eyes out even though I don’t understand the language, or really the tradition. I’ve probably listened to her more than anyone in the last two years.” 2 August

LAURIE ANDERSON

“My mother listened to Laurie Anderson; one of the records we brought with us from WH Smith out to America was O Superman. My mum was a photographer – and Laurie is someone who names what she sees in bold language. She is also one of very few artists who will write about the future, which surprisingly few musicians do.” 3 August

COCOROSIE

“CocoRosie are a very inspired band of young women from New York, part of our Future Feminist Foundation group. They honestly don’t give a shit what anybody thinks about them. They taught me so much about magical space. And it is amazing to be taught by people who are younger than you.” 4 August

BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE

“Buffy is on another frontier, for the way that she merged folk music and indigenous music with new technologies. She was using electronic instruments in the early 70s. She had a certain moral authority on the basis of her indigenous identity. A real spiritual clarity.” 7 August

KEMBRA PFALER

“Kembra, from the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, is one of the most important artists in New York. She is a true pioneer of avant-garde urban theatre. She just creates these art movements, availabilism, which is all about working with what you have. She is going do a lecture, and then she will do a concert accompanied by Vaginal Creme Davis, the quintessential LA afro American drag punk.” 10 August

JOEY ARIAS

“Joey is going to come and do his Strange Fruit. A whole night as Billie Holliday. It’s the highest art punk has to offer. What Joey does is not female impersonation, it’s as if he channels Billie. It’s punk really in the way that Leigh Bowery was punk.” 8 August

MARINA ABRAMOVIC

“Marina recently did this huge piece at Moma, New York where she sat in the gallery for 700 hours and people queued up to sit one to one and look at her. I have asked her to do a lecture only for women. She said she would never have suggested that of her own volition but she has agreed to do it. I think it is very important, very golden that men understand the sacred humility of recognising a woman’s space.” 5 August

Bernard L Madoff ran the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, operating it for 30 years and causing cash losses of $19.5bn. Shortly after the scheme collapsed and Madoff confessed in 2008, evidence began to surface that for years, major banks had suspected he was a fraud. None of them reported their suspicions to the authorities, and several banks decided to make money from him without, of course, risking any of their own funds. Theories about his fraud varied. Some thought he might have access to insider information. But quite a few thought he was running a Ponzi scheme. Goldman Sachs executives paid a visit to Madoff to see ifthey should recommend him to clients. A partner later recalled: “Madoff refused to let them do any due diligence on the funds and when asked about the firm’s investment strategy they couldn’t understand it. Goldman not only blacklisted Madoff in the asset management division but banned its brokerage from trading with the firm too.”

UBS headquarters forbade investing any bank or client money in Madoff accounts, but created or worked with several Madoff feeder funds. A memo to one of these in 2005 contained the following, in large boldface type: “Not to do: ever enter into a direct contact with Bernard Madoff!!!”

JPMorgan Chase had more evidence, because it served as Madoff’s primary banker for more than 20 years. The lawsuit filed by the Madoff bankruptcy trustee against JPMorgan Chase makes astonishing reading. More than a dozen senior JPMorgan Chase bankers discussed a long list of suspicions.

The Securities and Exchanges Commission has been deservedly criticised for not following up on years of complaints about Madoff, many of which came from a Boston investigator, Harry Markopolos, whom they treated as a crank. But suppose a senior executive at Goldman Sachs, UBS or JPMorgan Chase had called the SEC and said: “You really need to take a close look at Bernard Madoff. He must be working a scam.”

But not a single bank that had suspicions about Madoff made such a call. Instead, they assumed he was probably a crook, but either just left him alone or were happy to make money from him.

It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident.

This behaviour is criminal. We are talking about deliberate concealment of financial transactions that aided terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferation and large-scale tax evasion; assisting in major financial frauds and in concealment of criminal assets; and committing frauds that substantially worsened the worst financial bubbles and crises since the Depression.

And yet none of this conduct has been punished in any significant way.

Total fines on the banks for their role in the Enron fraud, the internet bubble, violation of sanctions against countries including Iran and money-laundering activities appear to be far less than 1% of financial sector profits and bonuses during the same period.

There have been very few prosecutions and no criminal convictions of large US financial institutions or their senior executives. Where individuals not linked to major banks have committed similar offences, they have been treated far more harshly.

The Obama government has rationalised its failure to prosecute anyone (literally, anyone at all) for bubble-related crimes by saying that while much of Wall Street’s behaviour was unwise or unethical, it wasn’t illegal. With apologies for my vulgarity, this is complete horseshit.

When the government is really serious about something – preventing another 9/11, or pursuing major organised crime figures – it has many tools at its disposal and often uses them. There are wiretaps and electronic eavesdropping. There are undercover agents who pretend to be criminals in order to entrap their targets. There are National Security Letters, an aggressive form of administrative subpoena that allows US authorities to secretly obtain almost any electronic record – complete with a gag order making it illegal for the target of the subpoena to tell anyone about it. There are special prosecutors, task forces and grand juries. When Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974, the FBI assigned hundreds of agents to the case.

In organised crime investigations, the FBI and government prosecutors often start at the bottom in order to get to the top. They use the well-established technique of nailing lower-level people and then offering them a deal if they inform on and/or testify about their superiors – whereupon the FBI nails their superiors, and does the same thing to them, until climbing to the top of the tree. There is also the technique of nailing people for what can be proven against them, even if it’s not the main offence. Al Capone was never convicted of bootlegging, large-scale corruption or murder; he was convicted of tax evasion.

A reasonable list of prosecutable crimes committed during the bubble, the crisis, and the aftermath period by financial services firms includes: securities fraud, accounting fraud, honest services violations, bribery, perjury and making false statements to US government investigators, Sarbanes-Oxley violations (false accounting), Rico (Racketeer Influenced and Criminal Organisations Act) offences, federal aid disclosure regulations offences and personal conduct offences (drug use, tax evasion etc).

Let’s take the example of securities fraud. Where to begin?

When did Wall Street insiders know there was a really serious sub-prime mortgage bubble, and that they could game it? Many of the clever ones knew by about 2004, when Howie Hubler at Morgan Stanley first started to bet against the worst securities with the approval of his management. But you can only make money betting against a bubble as it unravels. As long as there was room for the bubble to grow, Wall Street’s overwhelming incentive was to keep it going. But when they saw that the bubble was ending, their incentives changed. And we therefore know that many on Wall Street realised there was a huge bubble by late 2006, because that’s when they started massively betting on its collapse.

Here, I must briefly mention a problem with Michael Lewis‘s generally superb financial journalism. In his book The Big Short, Lewis leaves the impression that Wall Street was blindly running itself off a cliff, whereas a few wild and crazy, off-the-beaten-track, adorably weird loners figured out how to short the mortgage market and beat the system. With all due respect to Mr Lewis, it didn’t happen like that. The Big Short was seriously big business, and much of Wall Street was ruthlessly good at it.

To begin with, a number of big hedge funds figured it out. Unlike investment banks, however, they couldn’t make serious money by securitising loans and selling CDOs (collateralised debt obligations), so they had to wait until the bubble was about to burst and make their money from the collapse. And this they did. Major hedge funds including Magnetar, Tricadia, Harbinger Capital, George Soros, and John Paulson made billions of dollars each by betting against mortgage securities as the bubble ended, and all of them worked closely with Wall Street in order to do so.

In fairness to Mr Lewis, it is true that in several major cases – most notably Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Lehman and Bear Stearns – senior management was indeed disconnected and thus clueless, allowed their employees to take advantage too long and therefore destroyed their own firms.

But cluelessness was most definitely not an issue with the senior management of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley. As we saw, Morgan Stanley started betting against the bubble as early as 2004. Conversely, JPMorgan Chase mostly just remained prudently above the junk mortgage fray. Goldman Sachs, though, was in a class by itself. It made billions of dollars by betting against the very same stuff that it had been making billions selling only a year or two before.

Almost all the prospectuses and sales material on mortgage-backed bonds sold from 2005 until 2007 were a compound of falsehoods. And as the bubble peaked and started to collapse, executives repeatedly lied about their companies’ financial condition. In some cases, they also concealed other material information, such as the extent to which executives were selling or hedging their own stock holdings because they knew their firms were about to collapse.

In some cases, we have evidence of senior executive knowledge of and involvement in misrepresentations. For example, quarterly presentations to investors are nearly always made by the CEO or chief financial officer of the firm; if lies were told in these presentations, or if material facts were omitted, the responsibility lies with senior management. In other cases, such as Bear Stearns, we have evidence from civil lawsuits that senior executives were directly involved in selling securities whose prospectuses allegedly contained lies and omissions.

The Rico Act provides for severe criminal (and civil) penalties for operating a criminal organisation. It specifically enables prosecution of the leaders of a criminal organisation for having ordered or assisted others to commit crimes. It also provides that racketeers must forfeit all ill-gotten gains obtained through a pattern of criminal activity, and allows government prosecutors to obtain pre-trial restraining orders to seize defendants’ assets. Finally, it provides for criminal prosecution of corporations that employ Rico offenders.

Rico was explicitly intended to cover organised financial crime as well as violent criminal organisations such as the mafia and drug cartels. A great deal of the behaviour that occurred during the bubble would appear to fall under Rico statutes. Moreover, pre-trial asset seizure is a widely and successfully used technique in combating organised crime, and asset seizures now generate more tha $1bn a year for the US government. However, there has not been a single Rico prosecution related to the financial crisis, nor has a single Rico restraining order been issued to seize the assets of any individual banker or any firm.

It is important to note here that these asset seizures would not merely represent justice for offenders but for victims as well. US law allows seized assets to be used to compensate victims. In this case, the potential economic impact of seizures could be enormous.

Finally, personal conduct subject to criminal prosecution might range from possession and use of drugs, such as marijuana and cocaine, to hiring of prostitutes, employment of prostitutes for business purposes, fraudulent billing of personal or illegal services as business expenses (sexual services, strip club and nightclub patronage), fraudulent use or misappropriation of corporate assets or services for personal use (eg use of corporate jets), personal tax evasion and a variety of other offences.

I should perhaps make clear here that I’m not enthusiastic about prosecuting people for possession or use of marijuana, which I think should be legal. In general, I tend to think that anything done by two healthy consenting adults, including sex for pay, should be legal as well.

But the circumstances here are not ordinary. First, there is once again a vast disparity between the treatment of ordinary people and investment bankers. Every year, about 50,000 people are arrested in New York City for possession of marijuana – most of them ordinary people, not criminals, whose only offence was to accidentally end up within the orbit of a police officer. Not a single one of them is ever named Jimmy Cayne, despite the fact that the marijuana habit of the former CEO of Bear Stearns has been discussed multiple times in the national media (his predecessor in the job, Ace Greenberg, called him a “dope-smoking megalomaniac”).

There is also a second, even more serious, point about this. If the supposed reason for failure to prosecute is the difficulty of making cases, then there is an awfully easy way to get a lot of bankers to talk. It is a technique used routinely in organised crime cases. What is this, if not organised?

As time passes, criminal prosecution of bubble-era frauds will become even more difficult, even impossible, because the statute of limitations for many of these crimes is short – three to five years. So an immense opportunity for both justice and public education will soon be lost. In some circumstances, cases can be opened or reopened after the statute of limitations has expired, if new evidence appears; but finding new evidence will grow more difficult with time as well. And there is no sign whatsoever that the Obama administration is interested.

Charles Ferguson will appear at the Edinburgh international book festival on Sunday 12 August.

Halden prison smells of freshly brewed coffee. It hits you in the workshop areas, lingers in the games rooms and in the communal apartment-style areas where prisoners live together in groups of eight. This much coffee makes you hungry, so a couple of hours after lunch the guards on Unit A (a quiet, separated wing where sex offenders are held for their own protection) bring inmates a tall stack of steaming, heart-shaped waffles and pots of jam, which they set down on a checked tablecloth and eat together, whiling away the afternoon.

The other remarkable thing is how quiet the prison is. There isn’t any of the enraged, persistent banging of doors you hear in British prisons, not least because the prisoners are not locked up much during the day. The governor, Are Høidal, is surprised when I ask about figures for prisoner attacks on guards, staff hospitalisations, guard restraints on prisoners, or prisoner-on-prisoner assaults. I explain that British prisons are required to log this data, and that the last prison I visited had a problem with prisoners melting screws into plastic pens, to use as stabbing weapons; he looks startled, says there isn’t much violence here and he can’t remember the last time there was a fight.

Halden is one of Norway’s highest-security jails, holding rapists, murderers and paedophiles. Since it opened two years ago, at a cost of 1.3bn Norwegian kroner (£138m), it has acquired a reputation as the world’s most humane prison. It is the flagship of the Norwegian justice system, where the focus is on rehabilitation rather than punishment.

There was early speculation that Anders Breivik, currently on trial in Oslo for the murder of 77 people, might end up here, given that there are few high-security options across Norway, but that now looks unlikely, at least for the first chunk of his sentence. If he is judged to be sane, he will probably remain in isolation in the Ila prison where he is currently being held, a former Nazi concentration camp with a less utopian vision. However, the underlying ethos of Halden prison gives an insight into Norwegian attitudes towards justice, one that is under scrutiny as the country assesses how to deal with Breivik.

When Halden opened, it attracted attention globally for its design and its relative splendour. Set in a forest, the prison blocks are a model of minimalist chic. Høidal lifts down from his office wall a framed award for best interior design, a prize given in recognition of the stylishness of the white laminated tables, tangerine leather sofas and elegant, skinny chairs dotted all over the place. At times, the environment feels more Scandinavian boutique hotel than class A prison.

The hotel comparison comes up frequently. Høidal is just back from visiting a British prison and had to stay a night in a hotel off Oxford Street. Happily for the hotel, he can’t remember the name, but he noticed his room was certainly smaller and probably less nice than the cells in Halden. Every Halden cell has a flatscreen television, its own toilet (which, unlike standard UK prison cells, also has a door) and a shower, which comes with large, soft, white towels. Prisoners have their own fridges, cupboards and desks in bright new pine, white magnetic pinboards and huge, unbarred windows overlooking mossy forest scenery.

“There was much focus on the design,” Høidal says. “We wanted it to be light and positive.”

Obviously the hotel comparison is a stupid one, since the problem with being in prison, unlike staying in a hotel, is that you cannot leave. Even if the prison compound has more in common with a modern, rural university campus, with young and enthusiastic staff (who push themselves around the compound on fashionable, silver two-wheel scooters), the key point about it is that hidden behind the silver birch trees is a thick, tall concrete wall, impossible to scale.

Given the constraints of needing to keep 245 high-risk people incarcerated, creating an environment that was as unprisonlike as possible was a priority for Høidal and the prison’s architects. “The architecture is not like other prisons,” Høidal says. “We felt it shouldn’t look like a prison. We wanted to create normality. If you can’t see the wall, this could be anything, anywhere. The life behind the walls should be as much like life outside the walls as possible.”

This principle is governed in part by a key feature of the Norwegian sentencing system, which has no life sentences and stipulates a maximum term of 21 years.

“Everyone who is imprisoned inside Norwegian prisons will be released – maybe not Breivik, but everyone else will go back to society. We look at what kind of neighbour you want to have when they come out. If you stay in a box for a few years, then you are not a good person when you come out. If you treat them hard… well, we don’t think that treating them hard will make them a better man. We don’t think about revenge in the Norwegian prison system. We have much more focus on rehabilitation. It is a long time since we had fights between inmates. It is this building that makes softer people.”

Prisoners are unlocked at 7.30am and locked up for the night at 8.30pm. During the day they are encouraged to attend work and educational activities, with a daily payment of 53 kroner (£5.60) for those who leave their cell. “If you have very few activities, your prisoners become more aggressive,” Høidal says. “If they are sitting all day, I don’t think that is so good for a person. If they are busy, then they are happier. We try not to let them get institutionalised.”

The role of the prison guard is very different from that in the UK. While officers in Britain get a few weeks’ training, Norwegians will have completed a two-year university course, with an emphasis on human rights, ethics and the law. At Halden there are 340 staff members (including teachers and healthcare workers) to the 245 male inmates. Staff are encouraged to mingle with inmates, talking to them, counselling them, working with them to combat their criminality. A great deal of attention is given to making sure people have homes and jobs to go to when they leave, and that family ties are maintained. (There is a well-stocked chalet-style house for prisoners to receive overnight visits from their families.) “We have many more prison officers than prisoners. They are talking about why they are here, what problems got them into this criminality. Our role is to help them and to guard them. The prison governor role in Norway is unique. They are meant to be coach, motivator, a role model for the inmates.”

The regime is expensive – approximately 3,000 kroner (£320) a night, compared with around 2,000 (£213) at the more basic, older Norwegian institutions, such as the Oslo prison where inmates are often locked up for 23 out of 24 hours, but it is cheaper than Ila, where the guard count is higher and the cost 4,000 kroner (£426) a night. A year in Halden costs the state around £116,000, while the average cost of a place in the UK is £45,000.

Cost is only one of the reasons prison reformers in the UK don’t think there’s any prospect of the Halden model being adopted here. We have double the number of prisoners that Norway has (around 140 per 100,000 in England and Wales, to Norway’s 74.8), and having a smaller prison population makes things simpler for the Norwegian state. Halden is so new, there are no figures yet for how swiftly and frequently prisoners drift back into prison after their release, but nationwide Norway has one of the lowest recidivism rates in Europe, just 20% after two years, compared with around 50% in England. Partly that’s down to the prison system, but it’s also the result of a much better welfare system. There is little popular appetite for softening the prison regime in this country. The justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, may have stated, “It is just very, very bad value for taxpayers’ money to keep warehousing them in overcrowded prisons where most of them get toughened up”, but his early commitment to tackling rising prison numbers was not well-received.

The large amount of money and thought lavished on inmates at Halden doesn’t stop them (politely) expressing their dislike of the place and their desire to leave as soon as possible. An elderly prisoner, with terminal cancer, serving a long sentence for drug smuggling, is in the craft room, crocheting a toy teddy bear with no enthusiasm for his task. He concedes that Halden smells better than other prisons he has been in, because it doesn’t have the mildewed odour of the old buildings, or the deep stench of bodies squeezed together in close confinement. “The only thing that is nice is the building,” he says. “People think that you are staying in a five-star hotel, but prison is prison. They lock you up.”

Kent, a 43-year-old office manager serving a three-year sentence for a violent attack, is sitting in the prison’s mixing studio, where prisoners record music and make a programme that is broadcast monthly by the local radio station. He has formed a band with three other inmates and two guards, and performs regularly for fellow inmates. Leaning back in his swivel chair, sipping at his coffee and fiddling with his red baseball cap, he admits he’s enjoying being able to focus on his music, but says, “The Halden prison has been compared to the finest hotel. That’s the impression my friends and parents have from reading the papers. It is not true. The real issue is freedom, which is taken away from you. That is the worst thing that can happen to you. When the door slams at night, you’re sat there in a small room. That’s always a tough time.”

He has children aged 10 and 12. “I think about them 24/7. I speak to them three times a week for 30 minutes, but there is so much to say, so much I need to be doing for them. I think I’m never going to commit another crime. Freedom means so much to me.”

There is some annoyance from staff at the focus on the buildings, rather than on the principle of rehabilitation that drives the prison. “One politician when it opened said, ‘I could live here for a year, no problem.’ But he was in the cell for two minutes,” says Janne Offerdal, who teaches English to the inmates (mainly to foreign nationals caught smuggling drugs into the country; the Norwegian prisoners all speak impeccable English). “They compare the facilities with the elderly prisons. But if you are building a new building now, you wouldn’t build an old one.”

Høidal is bemused by the popular fascination with the prisoners’ flatscreen TVs, pointing out that it’s now impossible to buy the older models. “I don’t call the cells luxurious. It’s 10 square metres, a toilet, a shower, that’s all.”

No one is thrilled to arrive here. The reception officer explains that the most positive reaction is one of relief. When they are brought in, “some of them are crying,” he says. “They don’t know what they’re going to do with their dog. There are aggressive people who are high on drugs, or withdrawing from drugs, which is not always easy to deal with. It’s only the older guys who’ve been in other prisons who are happy to be in Halden.”

As we walk around the compound, an inmate comes up to ask Høidal, “Can we have a swimming pool?” He laughs, and remembers the shock of a Russian prison governor who visited recently and was horrified to see that the inmates didn’t stand to attention when Høidal came past but instead clustered around him, seizing the chance to list their complaints.

There are no plans for a swimming pool, but Høidal does want to make a jogging track through the woods, and a young sports teacher (who is working on specialised programmes for recovering drug addicts) says he hopes to start rock climbing lessons in the summer.

I wonder if it’s a good idea to teach inmates how to scale rock faces, but he responds with hurt amazement. “There would be no security risk. I wouldn’t be teaching them how to escape.” So far there have been no escapes, or attempts.

The sports centre is focused on team sports, especially football. There are a few bits of training equipment, but no weights, because Høidal doesn’t approve of them: “I see the negative of focusing too much on muscles. It is a violent thing.”

The inmates tell Høidal they’re annoyed by recent changes to the routine, but they are respectful when they address him. He listens politely, agrees that in prison minor irritations can become major frustrations, but remarks that people outside the building would laugh at the trivial nature of their complaints.

In the winter, when the compound was covered in snow, one of the inmates went outside and stamped around for a while. Looking out from the staff canteen later, guards noticed he’d written Help Me with his footprints. A UK prisoner might set fire to his cell; even these appeals for attention are done in the most non-aggressive manner.

I see only one piece of prisoner graffiti, a rather half-hearted scribble on an A4 printed notice (to avoid causing permanent damage): “Fuck the rules” (only the pen has stopped working, so all that’s really legible is Fuck the r). Otherwise, there is the prison-sanctioned graffiti, the recurring logo of a convict in striped uniform, apparently about to hurl his ball and chain to the wind, which decorates the yard walls and toilet doors, and was commissioned at considerable expense from the Norwegian graffiti artist Dolk, out of the prison’s 6m kroner (£640,000) art budget.

Huge, blown-up photographs of daffodils, Parisian street scenes or Moroccan tiles cover the corridors. Høidal doesn’t have a clear answer to whether the pictures have a positive effect on inmate behaviour, but says that whenever a state building is opened in Norway, 1% of the construction budget goes on art.

One wild-eyed ex-amphetamine addict slaps Høidal on the back, tells him he is a good man, but says he misses his old prison, Oslo, where he served an earlier sentence. Drugs were more of a problem in that jail, he adds wistfully. Høidal agrees that the style of Halden prison, with the relentless presence of guards wanting to talk and help inmates, does not suit everyone. “Some people don’t like them being around all the time. If you want drugs, then you prefer Oslo prison.”

Another prisoner, living in the relative seclusion of Unit A, where he is a year into a sentence for sexual abuse of a minor, pays tribute to the humanity of the prison staff (as opposed to that of the fellow prisoners, who, when they found out what he was in prison for, announced they were going to dismember him). “The people who work here don’t look down on you,” he says. Compared with the 1850s Eidsberg prison, where he was before, Halden is a relief: “Being there and being here, it’s like heaven and hell.”

Two prison officers are sitting with the eight prisoners on A-block, encouraging them to knit woollen hats. One also has expensive oil canvases for them to experiment with, but there isn’t much appetite for either activity, so once the waffles are finished, they return to playing a card game.

The civility between staff and inmates is noticeable everywhere. Information for new inmates is translated into English for those who do not speak Norwegian. The text is apologetic about the possibility that they may have to wait before they are transferred to a cell, and concludes: “We hope you have understanding for any waiting and hope to help you as soon as possible. With best regards, the reception officers.”

Maybe I’m not there long enough to sense latent anger or profound despair, but Halden doesn’t feel like a place where you have to look over your shoulder. An official in the healthcare division says up to 40% of inmates will be taking sleeping pills, and between 10% and 20% are on anti-depressants, but overall the atmosphere is calm.

Though food is provided by the prison, inmates can buy ingredients to make their own meals. The prison shop has wasabi paste for those who want to make sushi. You can buy garam masala, vanilla pods or halva, and there is prime fillet of beef at 350 kroner (£37) a kilo, which prisoners club together to buy when they want to make a special meal. The most frequently borrowed books in the library are cookbooks. Most prisoners’ fridges are full of yoghurt drinks and cheeses; a couple say they’ve put on weight since they arrived.

At 3pm, a table is set for 10, with white china plates, glasses and white paper napkins, in the drug rehabilitation unit, where Robert, 45 and an ex-addict and dealer, is living. Some prisoners are sitting on the brown woollen sofas watching the communal television. It looks like an advertisement for a family ski-chalet, complete with beautiful forest views. This is the main meal of the day; afterwards, between four and five prisoners will be locked in their cells for an hour to give the prison guards time for a break, then there will be free time until lock-up at 8.30pm.

Occasionally the prisoners talk of the Breivik trial, which is closely followed on television. On the whole they don’t believe the liberal regime from which they benefit should be extended to him. “He couldn’t stay in a place like this,” Robert says. “If I saw him, I would knock him down. I’m a nice prisoner but I would do it and I would brag about it. Everybody wants to take him out.”

A fellow inmate, Patrick, serving a 12-year sentence for drug smuggling, was one of two prisoners who organised a prison-wide collection to buy flowers for the victims of Breivik’s attack. Everyone gave up their daily wage of 53 kroner (£5.60); even the prime minister was moved by the gesture. “It was horrible, the thing that happened, and we felt helpless,” Patrick says. “We wanted to do something. I was surprised that it got so much media attention; I was surprised that people thought, ‘You’re prisoners, but you are so nice.’ We are also human beings. We also have daughters, sisters, children.”

Høidal says, with some relief, that if Breivik is ever transferred to Halden, it won’t be for at least a decade, by which point he will have retired. Although special arrangements may have to be made for the first stage of Breivik’s incarceration, he believes the Norwegian principles of fair and liberal punishment will not be threatened by the atrocity. In the days after the attack, the Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, said, “We are shaken but we will not give up our values. Our response is more freedom, more democracy.”

Høidal echoes his words: “If it happens again, then maybe we will have another discussion about the system. For the moment, I don’t think that this case will change Norwegian thinking.”

In a suite at Claridge’s Hotel, on a chair of generic print, writer/director/crown prince of the awkward Wes Anderson is mulling over the allure of the man-child. He, or indeed she, is a figure that features heavily in Anderson’s work, endearingly flawed and aesthetically pleasing. Margot Tenenbaum, all fur and kohl and endless issues; the Whitman brothers and their substantial baggage, both physical and metaphorical, aboard The Darjeeling Limited; The Life Aquatic‘s Steve Zissou, searching for something he cannot find (with a wardrobe that inspired hipsters everywhere); and now Walt Bishop, the emotionally absent father in his latest offering, Moonrise Kingdom. But where does Anderson actually stand on this man-child he seems to champion so heartily? He crosses and uncrosses his legs, clad in his trademark clay-coloured corduroy, strokes his clean-shaven chin and runs his hands through his mousey bob.

“Bill Murray’s character in Rushmore is doing some childlike stuff,” he admits, shifting in his chair and adjusting the over-sized lapel of his pale blue striped shirt. “He’s having a major crisis in his life. But I don’t know if it’s exactly adolescence, it’s more just bad behaviour. There’s no reason we have to limit that to young people, although sometimes that behaviour does seem kind of juvenile.” He sinks back into his seat, as though the observation has never struck him before. But for a man so measured, and with such precision apparent throughout his film-making, the reaction seems perhaps faux-naif. “I guess when I think about it,” he says, slowly, “one of the things I like to dramatise, and what is sometimes funny, is someone coming unglued. I don’t consider myself someone who is making the argument that I support these choices. I just think it can be funny. Gene Hackman’s character in The Royal Tenenbaums is not a particularly kind or evolved person in any way, but he made him funny and that was the material that he was working with.”

So perhaps Anderson is misunderstood. His characters are less a parade of man-children and more a study of adult dysfunction? “Usually the characters are inspired by a combination of people and, if they’re worth even thinking about as a character, they’ve got something wrong with them,” he agrees. “There’s no story if there isn’t some conflict. The memorable things are usually not how pulled together everybody is. I think everybody feels lonely and trapped sometimes. I would think it’s more or less the norm.”

It is certainly the norm in a Wes Anderson film, whether it is the Tenenbaums and their cacophony of problems, Fantastic Mr Fox and his skewed ideas of paternal protection, or Suzy and Sam, the 12-year-old protagonists in Moonrise Kingdom (co-written with Roman Coppola) both miserable at home, the outsider nobody else can understand. With the teens ticked off in Rushmore and adults in almost every other outing, now it seems the turn of the children to take their place on Anderson’s dysfunctional centre stage.

“Their unhappiness is part of their reason to run away,” he says, of his latest pair of antiheroes. “That’s the point of departure for these guys. But the main thing I was interested to do was to make a romance of two 12-year-olds. I was remembering how strong those feelings are when you’re that age. Any romantic feelings for a 12-year-old are like entering into a fantasy world.”

Wesley Wales Anderson was born in 1969 in Houston, Texas. It was at the University of Texas, studying philosophy, where he met Owen Wilson. “I chose philosophy because it sounded like something I ought to be interested in,” he says. “I didn’t know anything about it, I didn’t even know what it was talking about. What I really spent my time doing in those years was writing short stories. There were all sorts of interesting courses, but what I really wanted to do was make stories one way or another.”

‘I don’t think any of us are considered “normal” people. It’s probably more a family of crazy uncles. But there’s an energy that comes from using people who are friends’

Wilson became his first writing partner, but since those days, he has teamed up with other indie darlings Noah Baumbach, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman. “Owen and I wrote together,” he says, “but then he started acting more so he was less and less available. You sort of find your way to it I guess. Moonrise Kingdom took a year of trying to write, and then a month of actually getting it written. I spent a year on my own, figuring out what I thought it to be, then Roman and I joined forces and he helped me get it sorted. Once I had his help, it kind of all came into focus.”

As well as his regular writing partners, there is an almost family feel to the casts he surrounds himself with. Bar Bottle Rocket, Anderson’s first outing, Bill Murray has been onboard for every one of his films, and now plays Bishop in Moonrise Kingdom. Schwartzman, whose career was kickstarted with the role of Max Fischer in Rushmore, has been in four, and also features in his latest. Owen Wilson co-wrote three and starred in five. Pay cheques aside, there is an obvious pull to Anderson’s idiosyncratic film-making. A sort of functioning family, in a world based upon its opposite. Is it important for Anderson to have that sense of normality, that film family surrounding him, in order to take on such dysfunctional characters?

“I don’t think any of us are considered ‘normal’ people,” he says. “It’s probably more a family of crazy uncles. But there’s an energy that comes from people who are friends. Whatever chemistry is on set is going to be there in the movie, and you want some electricity that you don’t really control.”

You can imagine Anderson as something of a taskmaster. There is not a single frame in his entire history that does not look like it belongs in an Anderson movie. Even the stop-motion animated Fantastic Mr Fox could only be his. Does he consider himself a perfectionist?

“I don’t know … I think … really I just think …” Another long pause. “There’s the moment when it happens on the set and there you’re capturing something spontaneous. And then there’s a long, long process where you can keep refining and reworking. I like to do that, I always get the feeling it’s getting a little better and a little better and a little better and by the end it will be quite a bit better. I feel like my movies need that and they respond to that and so I don’t know if I see it as perfectionism or that I like to keep working on it.”

It’s not always seen as a good thing, this Andersonian approach. For all the lovers of his whimsy, there are equally ardent critics. There are those who see his films as pretentious, as lacking in substance, as self-indulgent. But, for Anderson, what could be seen as naive and simplistic seems instead carefully constructed ambiguity.

‘The kind of movies I do can be interpreted in a lot of ways, and someone can rightly hate it for good reasons that they can articulate’

“People don’t know how to take it,” he says of his film-making. “The kind of movies I do can be interpreted in a lot of ways, and someone can rightly hate it for good reasons that they can articulate, and then somebody else can say, ‘Yes, I experienced all those things and that is why I liked it.’ You really hope that people will get them right off the bat because most people aren’t ever going to see it again. I see movies over and over.”

Does that bother him, that viewers might miss the point he is trying to make?

“Usually I don’t really think so much about how I want someone to react,” he continues. “Most of the time my focus is on ‘I want you to believe that the character is feeling this, and this is true and really happening’. Usually I don’t feel ‘this is a comic scene, or not a comic scene’. Almost always there is some kind of mixture, and I’m inclined to just let it be not one or the other, which I think sometimes makes it a little challenging.”

Do you read the negative reactions? “Some, but I try not to,” he shrugs. “You’re opening yourself up to something that might make you feel quite bad. You don’t want to get too distracted by that. You really can kind of say, ‘Well, now I don’t even want to work on my script any more.’”

Just as niche movies of the 70s have influenced him and his co-collaborators, Anderson’s influence can now be seen across modern media, whether it be Zooey Deschanel‘s wave of “adorkability” or Richard Ayoade’s Submarine. “When I think of Rushmore, I think of movies before that,” he says, once again shifting in the chair. “People could very quickly point out huge influences on the movie, so I think if I see something where I think there is some connection to something I did, I think maybe if I’m right, that puts me in a continuity that I’m happy to be a part of. I liked Submarine very much, it’s wonderful.”

As with Submarine, it is children who are the heart of the story in Moonrise Kingdom. It makes a welcome change from the man-child and his endless issues, but with the adults quite clearly in turmoil, you sense Anderson is not quite done with him yet. And would he be Wes Anderson if he was?

With just a few weeks to go before the first instalment of DC Comics’ controversial Watchmen prequels hits the shelves, publisher Dan DiDio is hoping fans will be won over by the “quality of the material”. But its co-creator Alan Moore won’t even talk about a project which he holds in “contempt”.

Watchmen, first published in 1986, is the anti-superhero superhero graphic novel – the comic which transcends its genre, beloved even by non-comics readers. Speaking to the Guardian, DiDio said the “Before Watchmen” prequels – seven interconnected miniseries focusing on the original characters Rorschach, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre, Dr Manhattan, the Comedian and Ozymandias, and on the Minutemen group they originally formed – “look spectacular”.

“We knew when we were trying to build these books that there were going to be a lot of questions, concern, and a lot of deep introspection about what we’re trying to do here. We wanted to make sure if anything that the books could stand on their own merits and their own creative strengths, which is one of the reasons we assembled the teams we did,” said DiDio, who admits that at one point, “even our own internal staff were having problems with it”. But “we’re not going to shy away from the controversy on this – as a matter of fact we’re embracing it because we have belief in the strength of the product and stand behind it.”

Even DC’s press release announcing the prequels acknowledged their divisiveness. It includes a quote from Watchmen’s illustrator and co-creator Dave Gibbons, lending his support but not his involvement. But it notably fails to include anything from Moore. The legendary British author, held in reverence by his fans, will not comment further about Watchmen. But he recently laid out in some detail his opposition to the project, even asking his readers to ignore it – “I would hope that you wouldn’t want to buy a book knowing that its author actually had complete contempt for you” – in an interview with Seraphemera Books comic writer Kurt Amacker.

Moore has cut off all contact with DC, taking his name off the 2009 Watchmen movie. He goes on to say that he feels the original contract screwed him over, he no longer even keeps a copy of Watchmen in his house – and he doesn’t anticipate the prequels, focusing on a single character, will work.

“They weren’t designed to work like that, and I’m the person who designed them. They were designed to work in an ensemble piece. They’re in some ways very generic characters – deliberately so,” he told Amacker. “They were kind of archetypal comic book characters, or were intended as such. So, no I don’t think this can work creatively. I mean, that does my work for me to a certain degree. All the nasty comments that I was making when I was angry – about the comics industry not having had an idea of its own in the last 40 years and not having sufficient talent any more to create new ideas – these are very unkind things to say about an entire industry. But, it would seem that DC are really going that extra mile in trying to prove me incontrovertibly right.”

DC, unsurprisingly, feels otherwise. In the original Watchmen graphic novel, set in an alternate version of the 1980s, vigilantes – or superheroes – have been outlawed, but as nuclear war threatens, the costumed fighter Rorschach pulls his retired former colleagues into uncovering a complicated plot. In the prequels, DiDio revealed, the Silk Spectre comic is a coming-of-age story about a girl in the late 60s who rebels against her mother, the Comedian’s back story will take a look at “turbulent times in the government”, Nite Owl’s is “almost a father and son-style story as one man hands the mantle of Nite Owl to the other” and Dr Manhattan’s a time-shifting journey through history. Rorschach’s story, predictably, is “extremely violent”.

The Ozymandias prequel “is basically the string that ties it all together, from his story of how he first formulates his idea of how to save the world to the moment when he decides to execute that plan”, and the Minutemen miniseries will chronicle “the final days of the Minutemen and how that team really came apart”. The first book in the series, Minutemen #1, is out on 6 June, with a new issue to follow each week.

DiDio is hopeful the books might just help save the struggling comics industry. “Honestly, it dates back to when we started the ‘New 52′ line of books and relaunched the entire DC universe. The industry we saw was fading, for several reasons, whether the strength of the product or the fact there’s been so many other distractions taking people away from buying comics. We saw our sales not just in DC but across the industry starting to flag a bit and we knew we had to do something about it, take some dramatic steps in order to reinvigorate our fan base and get people excited about comics again,” he said.

“Once we reintroduced our line it gave us the strength to say we should look at other things that we knew would excite the fans. When you have a product like Watchmen that is as worldwide known as it is, and the fact there are millions of copies in print, we wouldn’t be doing our jobs if we didn’t go out and say, ‘is there other ways we can grow new material from this?’ We went out and reached the original creators and they had passed, but we still believed this was the right choice to make. And in doing so we went out with the strongest creators possible, so while you may question the decision you can’t question the quality of the product and the quality of the people behind the product.”

Growing new material from old: not something which has impressed Moore, who dismissed it in the New York Times “as a kind of eager confirmation that [DC] are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago”, and “completely shameless”.

DiDio says he can understand Moore’s perspective. “Honestly I can understand why he might feel the way he does because this is a personal project to him. He has such a long and illustrious career and he’s been able to stand behind the body of work he’s created. But quite honestly the idea of something shameless is a little silly, primarily because I let the material speak for itself and the quality of the material speak for itself.”

As for depending on Moore’s ideas, DiDio says that “all the characters in all the universes and all that we do in comics, we’re constantly building on other people’s lores and legends. Watchmen in some ways fits that bill as we have done in so many series in the past. In this particular case we feel very strong about what we’re doing and honestly I’m going to let the product speak for itself.”

Even Moore himself has worked with characters he hasn’t created, points out DiDio. “Realistically some of Alan’s strongest works at DC outside of Watchmen were built off of characters like Swamp Thing which was created by Len Wein, Superman, Batman, so many of our great characters he’s worked on and they helped build his career.”

Moore disputes this point. “I understood that whether I had created the characters like John Constantine, or whether I’d simply recreated them beyond all recognition like Swamp Thing, that these would just go into the general comic company’s stockpiles. I’ve never objected to that. I mean, I don’t think it is necessarily the fairest thing, but I’ve not objected to that,” he told Amacker. “The thing was, that wasn’t what we were told Watchmen was. We were told that Watchmen was going to be a title that we owned and that we would determine the destinies of.”

DC says Watchmen was “a work for hire agreement at the start”, however. And it provides such a rich basis for prequels, according to DiDio. “The stories and ideas are so well defined, and there are so many throwaways in the body of the original work, a one-line mention or a side item or a cameo shot of a character, that were basically great wonderful springboards we could grow the world from,” he said. “That’s why when everybody says this is a finite story, true if you’re looking at the beginning, middle, end of that particular story itself. But when you’re talking about the characters, there’s nothing finite about them. They have endless possibilities in the types of stories we could tell with them. And like I said we’ve found the right creators to tell those stories.”

The artists and writers working on the books – including Brian Azzarello, Darwyn Cooke and Len Wein – have “an incredible résumé of classic stories which have really helped change what comics are today”, said DiDio. “From our standpoint we wanted to make sure that regardless of what people feel about how this came about to be, they have no question that this isn’t the best people possible to do it. If it was ever going to be done, these are the people that should be handling it.”

He has not spoken to Moore about the prequels, but said that if the British author “did get a chance to read them, I hope he looks at them with an open mind and a chance to understand this is a love letter to what he created, and more importantly that the strength of his work is allowing other people to grow and tell other stories which will hopefully inspire other creators along the way. In the way he was inspired by the creators when he was younger, we’re hoping these ideas and these books are inspiring new people, so that we continue to grow the comics business as a whole.”

Will there be more Watchmen follow-ups? “Let’s wait and see how these work first,” said DiDio. “At this point the audience will decide that.” So who watches the Watchmen? It’s up to you.

Last Sunday, Manchester City, the club I grew up supporting, won the Premier League, 44 years after their last championship. City’s all-star squad, paid for from the oil fortunes of the club’s far-fetched owner, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, were playing Queens Park Rangers, who were struggling to stay in the league. The old Manchester City, who had stumbled through 30 years of mishaps since their excellent 1970s, might have been expected to flap at such a moment of triumph. But this team is different. Few of the 48,000 supporters at the Etihad Stadium on Sunday truly felt they would witness the kind of wobble that has come to be known over the years as “Typical City”.

At the end of August 2008, Manchester City, always written up as the people’s club (in contrast to Manchester United’s corporate greed), had been owned by the fugitive former prime minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra. He was accused of murderous human rights abuses, had been convicted in absentia of corruption and the club was hurtling towards ruin. When Sheikh Mansour decided to buy the club, it was staring, not for the first time, at financial ruin. City had managed to tumble into that hapless predicament despite a gift of outrageous fortune: a new, 48,000-seat stadium, built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games with public money – £78m from the national lottery, £49m from Manchester city council – and converted at the public’s expense. But there was also a long history at the club of debt, relegation and disappointment.

Mansour has since wholly overhauled the new Manchester City; an office block has been built, bars and an entertainment square for supporters have been opened, the Carrington training ground revamped. The cost of such solid improvements, though, is nothing compared with the £452m of Mansour’s oil inheritance spent on 22 new players (average price £22m) and paying wages gross enough to lure them to City – the highest paid, the Argentinian Carlos Tevez, earns £198,000 a week, or £10m a year, basic. The total committed is already more than £1bn, on one football club. This fact is not lost on City fans: after a year of Abu Dhabi investment, a group of them clubbed together to buy a banner that read: “MANCHESTER THANKS YOU SHEIKH MANSOUR.”

Yet the neighbourhoods around Sheikh Mansour’s recently renamed Etihad Stadium – after the Abu Dhabi airline that is paying £350m to have its name for 10 years on City’s shirts, stadium and new £140m training “campus” – remain Manchester’s most deprived and some of the poorest in Britain. Mansour has been to Manchester only once to watch the team on which he has spent so much. He has never given an interview to an English journalist. Not much is known about the young man with two wives who controls billions of pounds of Al-Nahyan family wealth, rulers in Abu Dhabi since the 18th century. Or how Manchester City – no trophy since the League Cup of 1976, in the third division as recently as 1999, sitting in the post-industrial husk of east Manchester – fitted into this world-view of almost incomprehensible riches.

When the Abu Dhabi regime arrived, as people used to living in a world of success, they were surprised by the expectation of failure they found. Fans who in the 1980s carried inflatable bananas to lighten the mood, whose main collective song was a bleak profession of loyalty:

City till I die
I’m City till I die
I know I am, I’m sure I am
I’m City till I die

A song about a fan’s relationship with his football club that does not celebrate glory, but simply states that he is loyal and will then die, with nothing to celebrate in between? A fixation on the fan’s own death, in a football song? That did rather puzzle the Sheikh’s can-do men.

Khaldoon al-Mubarak, a senior figure in the strategic shaping of Abu Dhabi’s economic direction and image, took over as the public face of the new venture and became City’s chairman. After agreeing to buy the Brazilian striker Robinho for £32.5m before they had actually completed the takeover, Mansour, Al-Mubarak and manager Mark Hughes spent £50m on a first wave of players. In summer 2009, they went on a more dedicated spree, spending £137.5m. Hughes was authorised to sign Gareth Barry from Aston Villa (£12m); Roque Santa Cruz from Blackburn Rovers (£17.5m); Emmanuel Adebayor from Arsenal (£25m); Kolo Touré, also from Arsenal (£16m); Joleon Lescott from Everton (£22m); and Carlos Tevez.

Manchester United had had Tevez on loan for two seasons and had said they were willing to buy him for the £25.5m option price. But across town there was now an unfeasibly rich buyer willing to pay a great deal more. The price City paid, never disclosed in public, was, say reliable sources, £45m, though that is disputed. A clause in the contract guaranteed that Tevez would always be the highest paid thoroughbred in Mansour’s stables.

City decided to blare his arrival – and theirs, too, really – on a billboard positioned at the beginning of Deansgate, the gateway to the city. It was a boast about having gazumped United for the signature of Tevez, a recognisable football superstar. The £45m fee was paid by an Abu Dhabi sheikh to an unnamed company, which owned the player’s economic rights and was based in the British Virgin Islands, a tax haven that ensured secrecy about who owned the company.

The billboard had a picture of Tevez in a City shirt, arms outstretched, and it proclaimed: “Welcome to Manchester.”

Growing up in Manchester, you had to support one club or the other. In those days, the two clubs were equals. For me, it wasn’t a matter of family heritage or any grown-up influence. My dad was not a football fan, and my two brothers weren’t interested. It was an instinctive choice: because of the Manchester badge and the sky blue of the shirt, it would be relegations and City till I die for me.

I was three, so too young to see City in the two years, 1968–70, into which they compressed a golden age, winning the League championship, FA Cup in 1969, European Cup Winners’ Cup and League Cup the year after. Into the 1970s, though, City were still a top team, superior to Manchester United, who were relegated in 1974. In formative years for my generation, City played enlightened football, won the League Cup at Wembley with a wondrous Dennis Tueart overhead kick in 1976, and played in European competitions on those starry midweek nights.

City’s collapse, when it came at the end of the 1970s, was self-inflicted. The club had finished above United for six years out of seven in the 1970s, and chairman Peter Swales’s stated ambition was to make that superiority permanent. What was required was steady stewardship. Instead, Swales took a headlong, showy leap for glory. In January 1979 he supplanted manager Tony Book, who had all the fans’ respect, with Malcolm Allison, the coach to Joe Mercer when City had harvested their late 1960s glories. The idea was that Allison had the innate genius to magic back the golden years. In fact, he proceeded to clean out all our favourites, without seeming to take time even to watch them. Gary Owen, one of the very successful young players to advance and replace ageing stars, was sold to West Bromwich Albion. Then Allison sold Peter Barnes and Asa Hartford, Brian Kidd and Dave Watson. Joe Royle, Dennis Tueart and Mike Doyle had already gone. It was almost a whole team of excellent, beloved international players dismantled.

The overspending on new players by Allison and Swales is still legendary. Swales, an obsessive generator of publicity, was forever allowing the cameras behind the scenes, most famously for an ITV Granada documentary TV mini-series, City! It is an excruciating fly-on-the-wall witness to Allison’s vainglory, Swales’s self-regard for his own leadership qualities and the poor young players’ overpromoted helplessness.

In 1979, after half a season of Allison in charge, City stumbled to 15th. The following season, we were knocked out of the FA Cup 1–0 by Fourth Division Halifax Town. In just a year, Swales had transformed City from a club that needed to steady itself to a hollowed-out team at the bottom of the league. So he sacked Allison, his exit filmed for the City! documentary. The club finally went down at Maine Road on the final Saturday of the 1982–83 season.

There followed a relentless, vitriolic campaign on behalf of fans against Swales, though it was not until the spring of 1994 that he was finally ousted. His replacement, the blond, cherubic Francis Lee, a former Manchester City centre forward, was a haloed figure from a glorious era. We all had pictures of Franny on our bedroom walls, and we put our faith in him. “St Francis: the Second Coming”, read one of the T-shirts.

Swales had not, in fact, been extracted out of Maine Road; he still owned 10% of the club. Lee and his consortium made no secret that their intention was to float Manchester City Ltd on the London Stock Exchange, as Martin Edwards had done with United in 1991. We had roared Franny in, so that he and his associates could buy shares in Manchester City, then float it on the stock market, sell their shares and bank a profit.

The share structure of the club was reorganised. A new company was formed, called Manchester City plc. That plc would in turn own the shares in Manchester City Football Club Limited, the company that would employ the footballers and manager, and take the fans’ money. Importantly, the requirements of the Football League and the Football Association – that dividends paid out to shareholders and directors’ salaries had to be approved by the FA, and any money left after a member club was wound up should go to charity – would not be applicable to Manchester City plc.

Manchester United had been pioneers in this gold rush, as they were of so much else in the Premier League era: corporate entertainment, merchandising, all the various ways, including seriously inflated ticket price rises, to make money from the loyalty of fans. Several other big clubs were later floated on the Stock Market in a two-year flurry, from 1996–7, making their owners immediate paper profits of tens of millions of pounds. These men had bought majority stakes and become club-company chairmen before leading their clubs to break away from the Football League and form the Premier League in 1992, its 22 clubs keeping all the TV money about to flood in.

As it would turn out, though, Lee never did cash in. Unlike United, Newcastle, Aston Villa, Chelsea and others, City would not harvest the copious rewards of the Premier League breakaway, and Lee and his long list of “consortium” investors would not make personal fortunes out of it. Just two years after our heartfelt battle to invoke St Francis’s second coming, City was overspent, over-borrowed and going down again.

In May 1996, City went down to the Second Division for the third time in my generation’s supporting life, though by now it was called the First Division, the Football League trying its best to battle on as if the breakaway had never happened. In the week of that final match, Peter Swales had died aged 62, a broken man shattered by his ousting. Before the game, the City crowd observed a minute’s silence for his death. As everybody hung their heads, there was a sense of shame. We had hounded Swales out, in an unforgiving public humiliation, for a childhood hero we believed would make us happy again. And now here we all were, gathered together at Maine Road, on the brink of relegation.

Two years later, City were down again, to the Third Division (now the Second Division). Lee, by now a minority shareholder, was out and David Bernstein, who had remained as a director, was appointed chairman – he’s now chairman of the FA.

City’s players struggled to adjust down in previously unexplored battlegrounds, and fans developed a detachment, too. Not to the idea of being fans, but to the reality that their club really had landed in the Third Division. It was standing on Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road, a sagging, patched-up old place then, where I first heard City fans sing that witty riff of disbelief:

We are not, we’re not really here,
We are not, we’re not really here
Just like the fans of the Invisible Man,
We’re not really here

Surreal, funny, and also genuinely disbelieving. They sing it still, in the Etihad stadium, but now it is at the unbelievable fact that Yaya Touré, Sergio Agüero, David Silva and Vincent Kompany are wearing sky-blue shirts and playing to win the Premier League.

By the time Sheikh Mansour bought Manchester City in 2008, the club had been in the Premier League for six successive seasons and had just finished ninth. It had a new stadium, built by its local council, that could seat 48,000 fans; that, Khaldoon al-Mubarak has always affirmed, was a crucial factor in the decision to buy the club. Its fans had proved over 40 years that they were unshakably, bloody-mindedly loyal, addicted to the hope of seeing City successful, apparently whatever it took. And so Sheikh Mansour decided that this would be the club to transform with his unthinkable wealth.

Despite the Premier League’s continued TV boom, a £1.6bn deal secured for 2001–04, and the gift of the new stadium, City were in money trouble again and seriously struggling. In 2006 and 2007, a grim side finished 15th and 16th in the league. So, in June 2007, somewhat desperate, they agreed to sell to Thaksin Shinawatra, who had been accused of human rights abuses, ousted as prime minister of Thailand in a military coup, charged with three counts of corruption and had his financial assets in Thailand frozen. He appointed Sven Göran-Eriksson as manager and provided the wherewithal to sign exciting new players including Martin Petrov, Vedran Corluka and Elano, a real, live Brazilian international. The accounts from Thaksin’s single season owning Manchester City, 2007–08, show that, as many had suspected, Elano, Petrov and several others were signed in instalments, not as the result of massive investment from Thaksin. He had put some money into the club, but not as much as it had appeared. A year later, with Thaksin on the run, City’s finances plummeted.

Abu Dhabi United did not say at the time exactly how much they had paid for Manchester City, but a figure of £150m later emerged, meaning that Thaksin had made a personal profit of £90m. It was still in the dawn of Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi ownership that Sheikh Mansour signed Tevez for £45m and City proclaimed this triumphant coup with that billboard in Deansgate.

I first met the chairman, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, in the summer of 2009, just after City’s second spending spree. He was calm, not flashy but studious, and gave the appearance of being in control even as he was pouring so much money into both City and the bank accounts of some lucky footballers. His new role was, it turned out, just a small addition to his portfolio of major responsibilities. He also runs a company, Mubadala, where his brief is to buy into diverse ventures around the world targeted at helping to solidify Abu Dhabi’s wealth and power, in a future once the oil has run out. And he chairs the Executive Affairs Authority, a key branch of the Abu Dhabi government, providing strategic advice. It is involved in strategic communications – PR and image management – for the country of Abu Dhabi itself. The global popularity of the English Premier League, shown and watched in 200 countries around the world, means that Manchester City, Peter Swales’s cocked-up football club I grew up supporting, is a huge media phenomenon. Al-Mubarak told me that the attention and coverage devoted to the takeover of City, worldwide, dwarfed anything he had ever been involved with. He hoped the expressions of thanks and goodwill from City fans, and the lack of any animosity or racism towards them, could improve relations between the Middle East and the west. “There is an element of bridge-building, of understanding, between the Arab world and here,” he said.

But Al-Mubarak was at pains to emphasise that the purchase was not a corporate or state-sponsored venture planned by the Abu Dhabi government or those investment companies straining to spend the oil miracle prudently. “Sheikh Mansour is a huge football fan, he follows it very closely, and I think he has always wanted to have a European club that he can take and build and become one of the top clubs in the world. There is an enjoyment that comes with owning it, a pleasure, but also he is an astute businessman. He believes that you can create a value proposition in football that has not yet been accomplished.”

The plan for Manchester City, worked up with Garry Cook, then chief executive, envisaged an overhaul in every area of the club: football structure, administration, executive and board level, coaching, academy, supporter relations, commercial, the lot. Cook, an ex-Nike man, saw City as a “brand” itself, which would have major sponsors and “partners”, and be sold and broadcast all over the world. Al-Mubarak continually expressed amazement that the basics of a proper organisation were missing, that there was no personnel department, for example. “One of the big surprises was how amateurish it was,” Al-Mubarak said of City during another meeting in Abu Dhabi. “I found it shocking in the famous Premier League, to be without such basic functions.” City appointed Brian Marwood, the former Arsenal winger (also capped by England, once), as head of football administration. From the beginning, they identified that to have a winning team, capable of competing with United and the best clubs in Europe, given Uefa and the Premier League’s squad limit of 25, they wanted two world-class players in each position.

In December 2009, the Abu Dhabi regime sacked Hughes and replaced him with Roberto Mancini, an Italy international and successful manager with Internazionale of Milan. It seemed a ruthless move, but there was little dissent from the stands. In fact, a little ruthlessness crept into many of the fans, too; they were intent on City being successful, they felt they had remained loyal through all the ignominious decline, while United were winning everything, and they wanted nothing now to stand in the way of an ascent to trophies.

That summer, the Abu Dhabi regime sanctioned and bankrolled Mancini’s shopping with a vast financial outlay hugely beyond what the club could have afforded were it living on its own resources. City signed Jérôme Boateng from Hamburg for £10.5m; David Silva from Valencia for £26m; Yaya Touré, attacking midfield force from the great Barcelona, for £24m; Aleksandar Kolarov from Lazio for £19m; Mario Balotelli from Internazionale for £24m, and James Milner from Aston Villa for £26m. Then, in January 2011, they signed the striker Mancini had long coveted, Edin Dzeko, from Wolfsburg, for £27m, who turned out rather more of a game-changer than Lee Bradbury had been for Frank Clark’s £3m. This incredible series of international player purchases, unparalleled by any other club, totalled £156.5m. That brought the expenditure from Abu Dhabi, on transfer fees alone, to £376.5m in just two seasons.

Marwood showed me the 30-page, colour-coded analysis produced by City’s new inter-departmental analytic system for just one 15-year-old on whom they had been keeping an eye. For major signings, Marwood said, the dossiers would run to 40 or 50 pages. Before, he said, “it was in people’s heads”. Not any more. “The players on Roberto’s list, it was like a spreadsheet. It is that detailed, not left to chance.”

Many people in football take the view that this venture is repulsive and vulgar, contrary to the sporting heart and traditions of the game. The president of Uefa, Michel Platini, wondered at a football culture which allowed a sheikh from Abu Dhabi with no connection to Manchester to buy up an institution as locally rooted as a football club, and pour money in without restraint. Reacting to the game’s troubled relationship with money, Uefa introduced a rule, to be enforced from 2014, to try to stop clubs spending far beyond their true means and falling into financial trouble, as so many have during what should be football’s best of times. Under the “financial fair play” rules, between 2011 and 2013 clubs will be permitted to make losses of €45m in total, at most. If they are flagrantly in breach and rack up huge losses, Uefa’s ultimate sanction is to exclude that club from European competition, unthinkable for Sheikh Mansour’s Champions League-aspirant project. City’s losses for 2010–11, the year just before their finances come to be assessed for the financial fair play rules, were £197m, the greatest ever by an English football club. It was more than five times the total City will be permitted to lose over the following two years, and so made it look impossible that they could be anywhere near breaking even by the deadline, without Sheikh Mansour’s bankroll.

Yet, whichever way I asked Al-Mubarak about the instinctive repulsion many people in football have for this kind of “project” – for a rich man to just buy a club, then pour in as much money as it took to buy success – he did not so much defend what they were doing as fail to understand the question. If you told him that English football was never based on an “owner” buying a club and throwing money in to buy a team of stars, you realised before you trailed off that Jack Walker had done just that at Blackburn in 1995 and Roman Abramovich at Chelsea since 2003. English football was open to it. If you said football was not supposed to be about which “owner” had the most money, so who could pay the most to players, thereby seducing them to their club, he wondered aloud how United had won the Premier League so many times, and how anybody could compete with them without money. If you tried to argue that a club should be a club, belonging to the people who support it, that a sporting competition does not seem sporting if it is owned by one rich man spending whatever it takes to stockpile the necessary mercenary talent, you would be describing an abstract idea with which he was unfamiliar, and which did not match reality as it was, and as it was viewed from Abu Dhabi. From there, Mansour had watched the Premier League become the most viewed domestic sporting competition in the world, overflowing with glamour and money. He had seen that its clubs were companies, not supporter-owned clubs like Real Madrid and Barcelona, or those in the German Bundesliga, and they were available for purchase by a menu of owners. United, Liverpool, Chelsea, Villa had all been bought; Spurs was owned via the currency speculator Joe Lewis in the tax haven of Bermuda, while Arsenal was being fought over by a Russian and an American billionaire. To Mansour and Al-Mubarak, this was more fun than oil and gas, but it was a company, a business.

“There is an opportunity we have identified and taken hold of,” as Al-Mubarak put it. “A mid-tier club will move to become a big club because of the financial resources we are able to make available. Because we see value in making that transition. And that is the bottom line.”

Over the years, I had felt, gradually and inexorably, a separation from City, the club that lit up my youth. As I came to understand how a new generation of “owners” was seeking to make money from the organisations we knew and loved as “clubs”, I felt instinctively this was wrong for football. Ownership by one billionaire sheikh is the antithesis of such mutuality. Yet with all the fortunes poured in, the Abu Dhabi regime brought a professionalism, and an appreciation of City’s heritage, that has made them, by contradiction, the most careful owners the club has had in my lifetime.

When the team they bought played on Sunday, the players were forced, ultimately, to confront the club’s “Typical City” ghosts. An agonising 2-1 down with the whole 90 minutes gone, and Manchester United waiting to claim the championship, Edin Dzeko and Sergio Agüero scored. Manchester City supporters were beside themselves then, releasing tears of triumph and belonging. Gazing out, I felt tears of my own, a clenched-fist surge of my childhood self, when I loved my football club so much and never would have dreamed that anybody could own it.

• This is an edited extract from Richer Than God: Manchester City, Modern Football And Growing Up, by David Conn, published by Quercus on 7 June at £18.99. To order a copy for £15.19, including mainland UK p&p, call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.