HemmersChess

What happens to a man who compulsively collects comics, books, records and CDs? He becomes very good at building shelves… Comedian Stewart Lee on the challenges and hazards of extreme storage

What are days for?" asks the curmudgeonly poet Philip Larkin in his poem Days, questioning the very point of living. He is unable to offer any real comfort, concluding: "Ah, solving that question/brings the priest and the doctor/in their long coats/running over the fields." For Larkin the idea of days, and what to do with them, represents the problem of existence boiled down to its barest essentials. I have a similar relationship with shelves.

I love shelves, and if only I could work out exactly which of the many books, comics, records and compact discs that I own I should fill them with, and how many shelves I require to do this, I have always imagined my life would be complete. At the age of 43, I am finally in a solid-looking house, with my solid-looking family, where I imagine, uncharacteristically, I will stay for some time. I am well on the way, through my own efforts and those of contracted shelving professionals, to having the shelving system I have dreamed of since childhood, most of it concealed in nooks, cellars and the designated shelf room, so as not to destroy the internal integrity of our long-dreamed-of living space. But even as the shelves approach their final configuration, it seems the same doubts and fears about life and its purpose linger on, as if the answer to everything did not lie in the construction of shelving systems after all. I wonder where this profound faith in shelving began.

When I was about five years old, I bought a copy of an American comic book called Captain Marvel off the lower rung of a revolving rack of True Detective, soft porn and pulpy thriller magazines, in a newsagent on the A34 just outside Birmingham. I was snagged. Not only did the tale of Captain Marvel, virtually crucified by aliens on a shiny chrome cyber-cross, blow my toddling mind, it also appeared to be part of a much wider cosmology, the Marvel universe, where thousands of colourfully clad characters wended in and out of the plots of each other's interlinked monthly comics, creating a vast, multilayered, epic storyline which I now ached to understand.

But it was 1973. Spider-Man was not the all-conquering global brand he is today. American comic books, regarded mainly as valueless filth, weren't regularly distributed. They made their way, usually to seaside towns and motorway service stations, as ballast in ships or bundles of worthlessly discounted rubbish. The dedicated comics stores were few and far between. I scouted the newsagents in far-flung estates on the borders of the suburbs for goldmine trash at marked-down prices in cardboard boxes by the door, as did so many comic fans of my age. Then I took my finds home and filed them in a complex system of boxes in my wardrobe, trying to match up the fragmented and incomplete runs of broken storylines, gaps in the action looming out like broken teeth where perfunctory newsagent distribution systems had broken down. And one summer, a doctor my mother worked for came round and hammered me up a set of shelves, upon which my comics then sat – near-complete runs of Marvel Two-In-One, Ghost Rider and Deathlok standing proudly in line as evidence of my tenacity.

Like most comic-book fans I had little to show for my life – no sports trophies, no prizes, and I never achieved anything much until I suddenly and unexpectedly passed my 11 plus – but I had scrimped and scouted to assemble this four-colour archive, and there it was, shelved. The world was a mess – war and power cuts and three-day weeks, and teeth smashed out by bullies and tussles over weekend access – but here was chaos co-ordinated.

Like most comic readers, I briefly betrayed myself in my early adolescence, abandoning comics until I was 18 or so, and finding similar absolutes and maxims to match Peter Parker's uncle's peerless advice, "With great power comes great responsibility" in literature and music. My first musical love was The Fall, which even in 1982 had a back catalogue that was uncharacteristically convoluted, and stirred the same Linnean impulse Captain Marvel had, with Saturday afternoons spent scouting the record stores of the pre-internet age, to plug the gaps.

Since then I've always been attracted to artists and genres which are ultimately unknowable and undefinable, because of the musicians' unstoppably prolific tendencies and because of the many tributaries that feed in and out of their work that must all be explored and understood in the quest for completion. By my late 20s my record collection had to be measured in feet rather than counted in terms of individual items. I have to stress that it wasn't an especially expensive acquisition. I've been getting review copies since I started doing radio and reviewing in the mid-90s, and I spent vast swathes of my 20s and 30s hanging around distant provincial towns waiting to do stand-up gigs, passing the afternoons in second-hand book shops and record shops. During the 1990s, CDs rendered vinyl largely worthless, and I'd return from northern treks laden with discs. During the noughties, MP3 technology inflicted the same body blow to the value of CDs, and everything you might ever have wanted is out there somewhere at 99p, easily traced through Amazon marketplace.

In the past decades, the long empty afternoons also yielded cut-price books by the dozen, which I acquired for an imagined alcoholic retirement. I pictured myself old and bearded and blubbery, lying on the floor drinking malt whisky and expanding my mind, a self-indulgent vision now sidelined by fatherhood. At the late, great Book Barn in Bristol, in closing-down sales across the land, and in back rooms in Hay-on-Wye and Alnwick and Sedbergh, we thrifty readers picked over the carcass of the publishing industry for hours on end, turning up forgotten 50p fiction by the plastic bagful. My only real expense was my comic habit, but I was always on hand to write features and articles on the form for newspapers and radio, I had my weekly music reviews column in a Sunday paper, I was a writer and sometime novelist myself, and so everything was professionally relevant. But gradually, over 20 years of acquisition, I was swamped. My shelving capacity could not keep up.

In a shared house in Tooting I cannibalised wine boxes and fruit crates into vinyl-shaped storage mechanisms. In an attic room in Balham I used bricks and planks dragged from a demolished building to go floor to ceiling in CD-sized strips. In a failed relationship in Finsbury Park I sawed poisonous MDF into a bespoke system filling a spare room and breathed the dust for three years in a mausoleum of recorded music. At my two-bedroom Stoke Newington bachelor pad, I inherited three alcoves' worth of chunky wooden slats, already in place, and a friendly set carpenter turned one wall into an edifice of clunky jewel cases and vinyl spines. By the time my wife moved in with me in 2006, she was required to edge around stacks of unread fiction, garish comic books, curling vinyl and clattering CD boxes. No one could live like this. And when our son was born, most of my painstakingly assembled archive went into storage, so that our child had room to live and a space to sleep.

A friend of mine, Andy, has devoted his life to literature, his enormous cranium swollen with learning. His shelves always impressed me. Books only made it on to the main section when they had been fully digested, and yet still it was crammed and carefully alphabetised. What an achievement. And yet last Christmas at the Gay Hussar in Soho, he told me he had given away all his books. He had two children. "They need places to play," he said. "A home should be a home, not a monument to my victories over books." I was crestfallen. Andy made me question myself. We were in limbo, my little tribe. The unconfirmed promise of a TV series was keeping us hanging on for the possibility of affording a family home in Hackney, otherwise we would downsize and head west towards our spiritual homelands near the Severn. But when I finally did get the finances to stay in the city, I struggled with what to do with the dead weight of cultural information I had imprisoned in its Dalston lock-up.

I calculated the scale of the problem. Those prolific genius artists were just the start of it – I had 6ft of Fall CDs, 5ft 8in of Miles Davis, 5ft 6in of Sonic Youth and its solo spin-offs, 5ft 2in of John Coltrane, 4ft 11in of the free improviser Derek Bailey, 4ft 4in of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices, 3ft of Bob Dylan, 2ft 8in of the Byrds and various tributaries, 2ft 6in of the Texan outsider artist Jandek and 2ft 4in of the saxophonist Evan Parker; I had 20ft of European improvised music, 20ft of jazz, 14ft apiece of British folk music, reggae, and blues, 7ft of Japanese psychedelia, and 6ft each of music from Tucson, New Zealand and 1970s Germany. Even after a massive cull, I reckon I still had 350ft of recorded sound which I imagined I needed to keep. And don't talk to me about iPods. They haven't built the iPod that can cope with that. And I want inlay cards, and accompanying essays and the physical contact with the physical objects and the memories they evoke.

On the print media front I had about 100ft of fiction, much of it unread; 18ft of poetry, which improves my soul; 6ft of books about stone circles; 12ft of folklore, religion and the occult, and 3ft of the forgotten Welsh mystic Arthur Machen. I've got 10ft of inky specialist music fanzines from the 80s and 90s Bucketful of Brains and No Depression that I needed for journalistic fact checking before Wikipedia. And I'm dragging probably 70ft of comics, which I am now saving for my son, who will come to despise them, and me for loving them.

And all this stuff, in the digital age, is literally worthless financially, and losing any value it had daily. There's nothing here a burglar would even bother with. I'm aware I'm a social relic from an age when you walked through the shopping centre with an unbagged album under your arm to show like-minded souls who you were, and when the book as an object was quietly fetishised. Now kids stake out their personal space with knives and guns and gadgets, and working stiffs flip falsified pages of virtual books on Kindles. I'm like a character in a dystopian science-fiction novel, holed up in a cave full of cultural artefacts, waiting for the young Jenny Agutter to arrive in a tinfoil miniskirt, fleeing a poisonous cloud on the surface, to check out my stash and ask me: "Who exactly was the Quicksilver Messenger Service? Who was this Virginia Woolf? What kind of man was Jonah Hex?" 

Negotiating my friend Andy's abandonment of his lifetime of books, and my own deranged tendency to keep everything, as if to prove that I existed, I have set myself a limit to my shelf space– a generous one by the average person's standards, but a limit nonetheless. Each month I carve out a little more length and unbox a few more treasures. It's a slow process. But there is a finite point. And the rest must go. Cool stuff rears up out of the cardboard. I had forgotten, for example, that I had every album the Volcano Suns ever made, reprints of all Barry Windsor Smith's Conan comics, and more than a dozen hardback copies of Francis Brett Young's Shropshire novels that I have never read. These finds thrill me still, just as when I was a boy. I know I will never absorb all my archive, but it's enough to bask in its glow. But philosophically I remain none the wiser than I did when I first racked my Marvel comics on the wall of my bedroom, aged eight or nine. To paraphrase Larkin: "What are shelves for? Ah, solving that question/brings the priest and the doctor/in their long coats/running over the fields."

Stewart Lee is a stand-up comedian and writer. His book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate (Faber, £12.99) is published on 5 august. His new show, Vegetable Stew, runs at the Stand in Edinburgh during August and then tours the UK (stewartlee.co.uk)

Julian Assange defends the whistleblowers' website after its publication of 75,000 leaked files of US army secrets

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has hit out at the US military, saying that it bears the ultimate responsibility for any deaths of Afghan informers in the wake of the publication by his organisation of 75,000 leaked files of American army secrets.

Assange and WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers' website that publishes leaked documents from around the world, have come under increasing fire amid accusations that publishing the files put people's lives at risk. But in an interview with the Observer, Assange said the blame for any deaths lay squarely with US military authorities.

"We are appalled that the US military was so lackadaisical with its Afghan sources. Just appalled. We are a source protection organisation that specialises in protecting sources and have a perfect record from our activities," he said.

WikiLeaks has been accused of disclosing the names of Afghan collaborators who may now be subject to reprisals. Critics also say that the information it published is unchecked and some of it may be of dubious provenance. But Assange responded to those claims by saying: "This material was available to every soldier and contractor in Afghanistan… It's the US military that deserves the blame for not giving due diligence to its informers."

Assange insisted there was no evidence that anyone had been put at risk and that WikiLeaks had held sensitive information back and taken great care not to put people at risk. "Well, anything might happen, but nothing has happened. And we are not about to leave the field of doing good simply because harm might happen… In our four-year publishing history no one has ever come to physical harm that we are aware of or that anyone has alleged."

However, he did concede that, if it was proven someone had been killed or injured because of the leak, then WikiLeaks would consider changing the way it operates. "We will review our procedures," he said. But that is unlikely to defuse the growing international row. Last week the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, branded Assange "irresponsible". The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said he might have "blood on his hands".

At the same time US authorities are broadening their investigation into how the leak happened. The suspected leaker, Private Bradley Manning, is in custody. He has already been charged with passing on a video shot in Iraq of a US helicopter attack and 150,000 classified diplomatic cables. He is also the main suspect in the Afghan "war logs" leak. Now, according to a report in the New York Times, investigators are probing whether Manning acted alone or with others. The focus of the inquiry was on a group of people in Cambridge, near Boston in Massachusetts, who might prove to be the link between Manning and WikiLeaks.

Assange said he was undeterred by the attacks, and that traditional journalism had vacated a space into which WikiLeaks was stepping. "We are creating a space behind us that permits a form of journalism which lives up to the name that journalism has always tried to establish for itself," he said.

• Findings overturn earlier research on working mothers
• Gains of being in employment outweigh disadvantages

A ground-breaking study has found that mothers can go back to work months after the birth of their child without the baby's wellbeing suffering as a result.

By assessing the total impact on a child of the mother going out to work, including factors outside the home, American academics claim to have produced the first full picture of the effect of maternal employment on child cognitive and social development. Their conclusion will provide comfort for thousands of women who re-enter the employment market within a year of giving birth.

"The good news is that we can see no adverse effects," said American academic Jane Waldfogel, currently a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. "This research is unique because the question we have always asked in the past has been: 'If everything else remains constant, what is the effect of a mum going off to work?' But of course everything else doesn't stay constant, so it's an artificial way of looking at things.

"Family relationships, family income, the mental health of the mother all change when a mother is working and so what we did was to look at the full impact, taking all of these things into account."

In one of the most fraught areas of social policy and research, several studies over the past two decades have suggested that children do worse if their mothers go back to work in the first year of their lives.

Recent research by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University found that children of mothers who went back to work within the first three years were slower learners, and a 2008 Unicef study recommended that mothers stay at home for the first 12 months or "gamble" with their children's development. The Pew Research Centre in Washington found high levels of anxiety among women over the issue.

The new study, led by New York's Columbia University School of Social Work, was published last week by the Society for Research in Child Development. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care followed more than 1,000 children from 10 geographic areas aged up to seven, tracking their development and family characteristics.

It found that, while there are downsides to mothers taking work during their child's first year, there were also significant advantages – an increase in mothers' income and wellbeing, and a greater likelihood that children receive high-quality childcare. Taking everything into account, the researchers said, the net effect was neutral.

"The effect of the parenting itself is the key factor," said Waldfogel. "It is hugely important how sensitive you are to your child's needs. Even for women who have to work more than 30 hours a week, they can make things better for themselves, they just need to take a deep breath on the doorstep, dump all the office worries behind them and go in the door prepared to pay attention to all their children's cues. This is good news for all mothers.

"I'm actually delighted to have been able to disprove earlier studies. We just had to ask some different questions and this approach of looking at the whole picture is definitely the right question to be looking at.

"This is especially good news for US mothers, who typically go back to work after three months because of the lack of maternity leave, but it equally will apply to the typical British family."

Waldfogel added that part-time work, up to 30 hours a week, provides more desirable outcomes than full-time employment. The authors attribute their striking findings to the rich data used in the study, detailing parent-child interactions, income and childcare. They also used an analytic method that allowed them to calculate the total effect of maternal employment taking into account all knock-on effects.

Parents and campaigners welcomed the findings. Siobhan Freegard, co-founder of the parenting website Netmums, said the results would be embraced by every working mother, and pointed out that many women had no choice but to work and their attitude was often "we are doing our best".

Sally Gimson, director of communications at the Family and Parenting Institute, said the quality of childcare was crucial. "Women should not feel guilty whatever choices they make – and that does not mean you have to make the choice to work. Often it is the more well-off women who have the choice, while many others have to work," Gimson said.

Sam Willoughby, 37, wanted to go back to her job at a financial services company part-time after having her daughter, Alice. "But they were incredibly inflexible," she said. She decided not to return and now runsmumandworking.co.uk, which aims to help mothers find flexible options, both full- and part-time. "So many things make working mothers feel awful, but the reality is, as this study shows, that going back to work is acceptable.

"There is a notion that mothers should spend all their time with their children but that is wrong. You need to also do things that are just for you. And a career can give you that."

Julie Wilson, 43, returned to work full time when her first son, James, was six months old. "We had a really good nursery nearby and it was absolutely fine. I really enjoyed my job and never considered changing my hours. I don't feel he missed me – he was happy at nursery. He was occupied all the time… Later on it was really educational."

When her second son, Ben, was born, she returned to work again, but went part-time. Wilson, who now works as a freelance, thinks the decision to work had no negative impact on the boys, now 12 and eight. "Looking at James now, he is a very rounded individual."

Education secretary under fire after it emerges there have been just 62 applications for free schools, less than a tenth of the number he said had shown interest

Michael Gove faced fresh accusations of exaggerating the level of interest in his education reforms yesterday after it emerged there had been just 62 applications for his "free schools" policy.

Before the election the education secretary said he wanted hundreds of parent-and-teacher groups to open their own schools. Once in government he told parliament there had been 700 expressions of interest to the New Schools Network (NSN), a charitable organisation helping to set up the scheme.

But now it has emerged that fewer than one in 10 of those who were said to have expressed interest have applied. The figure was revealed by the Department for Education in a letter responding to a freedom of information request. A civil servant said there had been 62 applications.

The revelation followed news earlier this week that only 153 schools had applied to become new academies - despite claims from Gove that more than 1,000 had done so. The figures are embarrassing to the minister following the fiasco surrounding Building Schools for the Future, when he issued a series of error-strewn lists.

Ed Balls, the shadow schools secretary, said that free schools were now the third major policy in a month that Gove had "botched, misled parliament [with] or both".

"The vast majority of parents just want a well-funded good local school and do not have the time or the wherewithal to set up their own. That's why I believe the government will follow the Swedish example by allowing private companies to make a profit from opening up taxpayer-funded schools, even where there are already enough places. That's how free schools took off in that country, with private companies touting round the country safe in the knowledge they'll get a big cheque from the government."

Alasdair Smith, national director of the Anti-Academies Alliance, said: "It is part of the spin that is emerging out of Gove's administration. They are trying to create the impression there is a tidal wave of support for Academies and Free Schools be exaggerating the figures while the reality is a groundswell of concern – if not opposition."

Representatives of Gove and NSN were quick to deny the charges yesterday, insisting the figure of 700 was accurate. Rachel Wolf, director of NSN, said: "The 700 figure was a genuine estimation of the number of interested groups. Our team went through the lists and did a lot of work to see who was genuinely interested," she said. "I think it would be unfair to say that [Michael Gove] was exaggerating." Wolf said that 62 groups making formal applications was actually quite impressive, because it took time to apply.

A spokesman for Michael Gove added: "The secretary of state has been working closely with NSN to meet the demand for more good school places. There are undoubtedly high levels of interest for setting up schools from teachers, parents and charities.""There are more than 700 groups in active dialogue with the New Schools Network who are genuinely interested in taking a project forward, the majority of whom are teachers. Many more than 700 groups or individuals have requested information."

Families forced off their land and into illegal plots as minister drafts tougher trespass powers for police

Human rights campaigners have condemned a wave of evictions and court actions against Gypsies and Irish Travellers which they say are threatening to extinguish a whole way of life.

Dozens of families face the prospect of being pushed off plots of land they own and forced to move back into illegal "side-of-the road" and wasteland camping. Children will be unable to go to school and the elderly and infirm unable to access health services, say the campaigners.

Eric Pickles, the communities and local government minister, is drafting new laws to allow police more powers to evict and arrest people for trespass on public land. Planning laws are also being changed to stop applications for retrospective permission to put caravans on private land.

Pickles has already announced the reversal of previous efforts to provide "pitches" within all local authorities, abolishing the regional planning bodies which were to oversee provision of registered sites for travellers and ease the tensions caused by Gypsies being forced to camp illegally.

The grants that had been made available to councils to provide sites have also been slashed, although an estimated £18m a year is being spent on evictions.

"Gypsies are being squeezed on all sides in this wave of intolerance and racism which is unlike anything I've ever seen before," said Gratton Puxon, 69, a founder member of the Gypsy Council.

There are around 18,000 Gypsy and Traveller caravans in England, with 80% of them on authorised sites, land they own or rent. The numbers on illegal sites is so small, according to the government's own reports, that they could all be accommodated on one square mile.

The clampdown comes against a background of rising attacks against Roma people in Europe which has led to a demand for the EU to tackle what some are calling an attempted "ethnic cleansing" of travelling people. France has intensified its crackdown on Gypsies, announcing that 300 sites would be closed down in the next three months and any Gypsies found breaking the law would be deported. In 2008 the Italian government declared its Roma population was a national security risk, while in 2009 more than 100 Romanian Gypsies were attacked with bricks and bottles in Ireland and driven from their homes.

In Essex, where the statutory requirement for the provision of sites to accommodate 104 travelling people has now gone with the abolition of the regional planning assemblies, Basildon council issued an eviction notice last week on eight families living on their own land at one site. It is also embroiled in a court battle to evict a further 70 families from a site at Dale Farm, on the outskirts of the town. At the former scrapyard, bought by Irish Travellers 10 years ago and slowly transformed into a caravan park, families have been buying tents in preparation for their eviction. The camp's 50 or so children have no idea whether they will return to their primary school after the summer holidays.

"There is a very real sense of fear and people are very worried, especially the old people. There's people here ill and infirm who can't be going back on the road and there's nowhere to go," said Margaret McCarthy, 45, a mother of two who, like many others on the site, has vowed to fight the eviction, planning blockades and protests. "They're trying to destroy our pride and our dignity. The British government is trying to do away with Gypsies. It's scandalous, but nobody is watching, so nobody will help."

"It's seen as the last bastion of racism. It's not socially acceptable to express racism against ethnic minorities, but against Gypsies and travellers it's fine," said Emma Nuttall of the support group Friends, Families and Travellers.

"We are getting more and more calls from families who are in a panic about where they can and can't go, desperately trying to find bits of land they can buy and get planning permission for before the laws change, just so their kids can go to school."

Hostility from local communities is high. The Equality and Human Rights Commission Scotland is so concerned at the way many local newspapers are presenting issues with Gypsies, and the racist remarks left on their noticeboards, that it is contacting media outlets "to remind them that moderation of online comment boards is crucial in order to prevent the incitement of racial hatred".

At Dale Farm, Mary Ann McCarthy, 69, insists on an inspection of her immaculate static caravan and says the stereotype of "dirty gypsies" is not true.

"Travellers are very house proud; you always get a few people who leave a mess but so does any community." Born in a horse-drawn caravan, she is wistful of the days when her family would be welcomed by farmers who relied on Travellers to pick seasonal fruit and at the fairs where their horses were prized.

"We have never been treated really well, but it's never been as bad as now." Additional reporting by Oliver Morrison

Security forces fear wave of terror as austerity programme provokes strikes, protests, violence – and assassination

Greek security forces have warned of a wave of violence reminiscent of the terror that stalked Italy in the seventies after urban guerillas threatened last week to turn the country into a "war zone".

"Greece has entered a new phase of political violence by anarchist-oriented organisations that are more murderous, dangerous, capable and nihilistic than ever before," said Athanasios Drougos, a defence and counter-terrorism analyst in Athens.

"For the first time we are seeing a nexus of terrorist and criminal activity," he said. "These groups don't care about collateral damage, innocent bystanders being killed in the process. They are very extreme."

The threats came from a guerrilla group called the Sect of Revolutionaries, as it claimed credit for the murder of Sokratis Giolas, an investigative journalist. Giolas was shot dead outside his Athenian home on 19 July, in front of his pregant wife.

The gang promised to step up attacks on police, businessmen, prison guards and "corrupt" media – and, for the first time, threatened holidaymakers.

"Tourists should learn that Greece is no longer a safe haven of capitalism," its declaration said.

"We intend to turn it into a war zone of revolutionary activity with arson, sabotage, violent demonstrations, bombings and assassinations, and not a country that is a destination for holidays and pleasure."

In an accompanying picture, the group displayed an arsenal that included AK 47 assault rifles, semi-automatic pistols and brass knuckledusters.

"Our guns are full and they are ready to speak," it said. "We are at war with your democracy."

The terror threat comes as Greek authorities endure a summer of strikes and escalating upheaval. Military trucks and petrol company vehicles were employed yesterday to alleviate a fuel shortage as more 30,000 lorry and tanker truck operators ignored a government order to return to work on pain of prosecution. Shortages were reported on many holiday islands and destinations in northern Greece where thousands of tourists are stranded.

The far more serious scourge of domestic terrorism was thought to have been eradicated in 2004, with the disbandment of the 17 November group.

Born out of the turmoil that followed the collapse of US-backed military rule, 17 November murdered the CIA station chief, Richard Welch, in 1975.

For the following 27 years it targeted Turkish envoys, juntists, US military personnel, industrialists and western diplomats, including a British military attaché in Athens, Brigadier Stephen Saunders, who was murdered in 2000.

Unlike 17 November, Greece's new generation of urban guerrillas has not tried to garner popular support.

The Sect of Revolutionaries emerged from the rioting after a teenager, Alexis Grigoropoulos, was shot dead by a policeman in December 2008. The men and women thought to comprise its closely guarded ranks are in their late twenties and thirties and appear to espouse violence almost for the sake of it.

"We don't do politics, we do guerilla warfare," its members announced in the proclamation placed on the boy's grave within hours of their first attack, on a police station, in February 2009. Two weeks later they sprayed the offices of a private television station with bullets. Three months after that, they claimed their first victim, Nectarios Savvas, a police officer protecting a state witness. Six people have died in separate attacks this year.

Last month another group, yet to be named, sent a parcel bomb wrapped up as a gift to the office of Michalis Chrysohoidis, the minister in charge of public security. It killed his chief aide.

The surge in violence comes amid rising social tensions over the austerity measures enforced by the government in exchange for €110bn in emergency aid, the biggest bailout in history.

Mounting social unrest, waning support for political parties and record levels of unemployment among an increasingly radicalised youth are believed to have augmented the ranks of anti-establishment groups.

"The economic crisis has most definitely played a role in aggravating the violence," Chrysohoidis told the Observer. "And the violence we are seeing is worst than ever before because society as a whole is more violent than ever before."

To date Chrysohoidis, who oversaw the break-up of 17 November during a previous stint in the same post, has ordered police to tread a fine line.

But anger is growing. Security officials say it is only a matter of time before one of the three groups currently active in Greece strikes again.

More worrying, they say, are their connections to the Balkan criminal underworld that has made access to weapons dangerously easy.

"In other European countries, home-grown terrorism has been on the decrease for years," said Drougos. "But in Greece the situation is not unlike pre-Bolshevik revolutionary Russia or Italy at the start of the terror campaign by the Red Brigades… it's very unpredictable and tourists should be vigilant."

Commons vote could be overturned in the courts if MPs were not told that bulk of the £8bn cutbacks would target women

The coalition government's emergency budget could be branded unlawful after a groundbreaking legal case was launched in the high court. Papers filed on Friday claim that Treasury officials broke the law by failing to carry out an assessment of whether the plans for heavy spending cuts would hit women hardest.

The action is being taken by the country's leading women's rights group in what is believed to be the first ever legal challenge to a British government's budget. The Fawcett Society, which believes the plans "risk rolling back women's equality in the UK by a generation", is being represented by barristers from Matrix Chambers, which was co-founded by Cherie Booth, wife of the former prime minister Tony Blair. It follows research that suggested women would shoulder three quarters of the pain inflicted by the budget.

Karon Monaghan QC, one of the country's top equality and discrimination lawyers, will argue that by law MPs should have been able to look at such a study before voting on the budget. If there was any suggestion that moves would discriminate against women, then ministers would have had to take "urgent action" to mitigate the impact.

"This is not something we would do lightly," said Ceri Goddard, chief executive of the Fawcett Society. "We are really concerned that the government did not carry out a gender equality assessment and we believe they did not. That is why we are seeking a judicial review."

Goddard argues that the government should not only have carried out the assessment but made it public for MPs to consider. "There is a point of principle here. The question is – had the government followed the proper process, would parliament have voted for the budget? If they had known that 72% of the cuts would be borne by women, would they have voted for the budget?"

Fears about the impact of cuts on gender equality were raised recently when a piece of research from the House of Commons library claimed that, of the £8bn net revenue to be raised in one financial year, almost £6bn would come from women, compared with just £2bn from men. It pointed out that women in low-paid public sector jobs would be more likely to be hit by a pay freeze and heavy job losses. Cuts in benefits and tax credits were also likely to hit them disproportionately.

Samantha Mangwana, a solicitor at Russell Jones and Walker who is taking the case, said the law was clear.

"Although public authorities have been subject to the gender equality duty for four years now, there is widespread ignorance not only about how strong these laws actually are, but also what specific steps are required to be undertaken. However, the case law is crystal clear. Firstly, an equality impact assessment must be conducted before policy decisions are taken.

"Secondly, this is not a box-ticking exercise. The impact assessment must be a rigorous analysis. Similarly, there should also be written evidence of it, since otherwise it suggests that the discriminatory impact was not properly examined."

Mangwana said the government also had a duty to take urgent action should there be any evidence of discrimination. Yvette Cooper, the shadow women's minister, described the budget as the biggest attack on women in generations. "You think it will be easier for your daughters and your granddaughters, that we are always moving forward [in women's rights]. This is more than gender blind."

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has also warned the government about its legal duties.

A spokeswoman said: "The commission recognises the serious concerns that the Fawcett Society and others have raised about the impact of the deficit reduction measures on vulnerable groups and, in particular, following the House of Commons library report, the impact of the budget on women.

"We have written to the Treasury to ask for reassurance that they will comply with their equality duties when making decisions about the overall deficit reduction, and in particular in relation to any changes to tax and benefits for which they are directly responsible."

She said the commission had the statutory power to take action or intervene if there was any suggestion the government had breached the equality legislation: "We will be monitoring the Fawcett Society's action."

A spokesman for the Treasury said he was unable to comment on legal matters.

Commentary

Yvette Cooper, shadow minister for women

After generations of progress, women's equality is under sudden and shocking attack. The new government's plans, from the budget to criminal justice, are peppered with policies that hit women hardest. At best ministers seem blind to women's lives; at worst, it's an ideological drive to turn back the feminist clock.

The budget widens the gap between women and men, reduces women's financial independence and makes it harder for women to choose how to balance work and family life. According to the House of Commons Library, £6bn of the £8bn extra direct tax and benefit changes will be paid by women.

Rolling back the state from family support – cutting tax credits and maternity support – inevitably hits women harder. Women are also affected more than men by cuts in attendance allowance and state second pensions, but benefit less from increased tax allowances. George Osborne expects women to pay three times more than men to accelerate deficit cuts, even though women still earn and own far less.

But ministers are much mistaken if they think this will go unchallenged. Already an outcry, not just from Labour MPs but from Tories, too has forced a U-turnon their rape plans. And the Fawcett Society is right to fight unfair tax and benefit changes in the courts. Laws backed by all political parties require departments to promote equality of opportunity for women and men. Yet George Osborne is doing the opposite, without even bothering to assess the impact on women's lives.

Thanks to our mothers and grandmothers each generation of women has enjoyed more opportunities and greater equality than the last. For the sake of our daughters, we must stop David Cameron and Nick Clegg reversing those decades of progress.

Givenchy's new campaign features a controversial face who has emerged from backstage onto the catwalk

At first sight, the only thing that is striking about Lea T is her beauty. With her full lips, strong jaw and dark tresses falling in cascades over her shoulders, she is the perfect high-fashion package: alluring, whippet-thin and with a face too distinctive to be considered merely pretty.

No wonder, you might think, she has gone from backroom assistant to sar- torial sensation in just months, appearing in Givenchy's autumn/winter ad campaign, smiling in Italian Vanity Fair and – as a crowning glory – posing naked for the hallowed pages of French Vogue.

But if this Brazilian bombshell is causing such a stir it is perhaps because there is more to her than meets the eye. Lea T was born Leandro and, as well as being a model and a muse, she is an out and proud transsexual.

For Riccardo Tisci, the creative director of Givenchy and the man who first encouraged his "very feminine" friend to go to a party in women's shoes, the move was obvious. For Lea, 28, however, the transition – from man to woman and from misfit to role model – has been anything but.

Not only, she says, has it turned her into someone at whom strangers feel entitled to point and stare, but it has provoked the anger of her Catholic family. It has filled her body with mood-altering hormones and brought her face to face with what she says is the inherent loneliness of transsexuality.

Despite all this, she says, the "war in her head" has been worth fighting. "The choice," she said in an interview in Italian Vanity Fair, "is between being unhappy forever or trying to be happy."

Born in 1981 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil's third largest city, Leandro or "Leo" Cerezo grew up in the privileged environs of a family that, long before one of its number graced the pages of fashion magazines, was no stranger to the limelight.

It was with undisguised glee that, once Leandro had appeared in photoshoots as Lea T, a Rio newspaper's gossip column revealed she was none other than the daughter of soccer hero Toninho Cerezo, the World Cup veteran and contemporary of legendary Brazil players like Falcão, Sócrates and Zico. He had not, the paper said, reacted well to its questions concerning his child's new existence.

"We got in touch with the former star but, irritated, he limited himself to saying that he had four children, one of them called Leandro," the newspaper reported. "When asked if the boy had starred in the Givenchy campaign, Cerezo hung up the phone." The same newspaper, Extra, noted that in a 2007 interview Cerezo, now manager of the second division club Sport, had claimed to have only three children.

Lea's brother, Gustavo, has denied claims of a family rift, insisting: "It's Lea's success, not the family's. All I will say is that we are on her side and we support her."

But the model herself has admitted that Toninho is not overjoyed by her transformation. "He doesn't even like to touch on this matter," she told Brazilian radio. In the Vanity Fair interview, moreover, she said she "never spoke directly" to her father about undergoing the hormone treatment that will, eventually, give her the body of a woman. Conversation, she said, was limited to trivialities.

This reaction, say observers, may be unfortunate, but it is not surprising. "In a macho, Latin-American, Catholic culture… [a family's response] is complete denial," Brazilian transsexual Walkiria la Roche, founder of Belo Horizonte's transsexual and transvestite association, Asstrav, said. "We are excluded when we go to primary school, but the first institution that excludes us is our family."

According to Léa, this fact that his young son was different from other boys had not escaped Toninho, even though their time together was limited to sporadic visits by the footballer. "When papa came home he would look at me and say there was something wrong with me. In the years to come, everyone started to pray that I was gay. It would have been the lesser evil for a religious family used to rules and type of colonial, rigid way of life," she said.

Even as an adolescent at a European school, in Italy, however, Lea knew her situation was not that simple. She had been attracted to girls and boys and remembers feeling she had no "defined sexuality, or a precise direction to follow". However, it was a big leap from that uncertainty to embracing the idea that she might be happier as a woman. "When I discovered transsexuality, I was curious then recoiled with fear, telling myself, 'I am not like that,' she said.

It was only later on, when she met Riccardo Tisci, a young graduate of Central Saint Martins art college, London, that Lea began to consider the prospect for real. With his penetrating artist's eye, Tisci, then an aspiring young Italian designer, recognised his friend's inherent femininity. "One night he encouraged me to wear pumps to a party," she recalled in French Vogue. "We went shopping for 'drag queen' shoes and we bleached my eyebrows. It was a revelation."

Fast forward several years and Tisci is now a star of the fashion world at Givenchy. But he has never forgotten his old friend, employing Lea as his personal assistant and using her as his fit model behind the scenes of the prestigious couture house. He is unstinting in his praise of her to the industry bible, WWD: "She's a true goddess. She's always been very feminine – super-fragile, very aristocratic." When, in a reflection of a growing industry trend, Tisci decided to base his autumn/winter collection around the idea of androgyny, there was one person he wanted above all, and – to his delight – she said yes.

"I agreed to pose in the name of all my transsexual friends," Lea has been quoted as saying. In a sign of her increasing self-confidence and determination not to hide her transsexuality, the French Vogue photograph is unashamedly bold. With one arm around her waist and another only partially covering her male genitalia, it leaves little to the imagination.

Carine Roitfeld, the magazine's formidable editor, is known for her desire to shock – to use fashion to push the boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not. In the past she has featured Karen Elson tied up in a "glamour bondage" shoot and Eva Herzigova as a blood-spattered butcher lovingly fingering a meat cleaver.

Some commentators have dismissed both Tisci and Roitfeld's use of Lea as a "gimmick". But others welcome the boldness of the gesture, regardless of the motivations behind it. "Carine Roitfeld consistently leads in advancing our international discussion of human sexuality," remarked one US blogger, adding that the French Vogue picture "would never run in a fashion magazine in America."

In Lea's hometown, too, reaction has been positive among activists who see her fame as a step towards greater tolerance. "It's a good, positive example and this is very rare," said La Roche, who heads a government department fighting for transvestite and transsexual rights and claims to be one of only three transsexuals working in government around the world. "It is important to have Lea in a magazine. All positive press shows society that we are capable of things other than prostitution or being hairdressers."

The enduring difficulties which people incur when they choose to switch sex are all too familiar to Lea. From the every day humiliation of being laughed at by strangers to the disorientating effects of sex change drugs – "I would wander the streets, full of hormones, depressed, with people laughing behind my back" – she is proving to be an eloquent ambassador to what remains a globally marginalised and misunderstood community.

Even now, with her education and privileged background, and all the comforts that come from her burgeoning celebrity status, Lea is under no illusions about the emotional challenges that lie ahead —and not only from the intense media interest, which has been relentless since the Givench ads were launched.

Lea, who says she "cannot allow [herself] the luxury of being in love", is pessimistic about her chances of finding happiness with someone else. Those transsexuals who do enter into serious relationships, she says, often do so by keeping their past from their partners.

"They live as hypocrites; it is a variation on solitude," she said. "We transsexuals are born and grow up alone. After the operation we are born again, but once again alone. And we die alone. It is the price we pay."

Gavin Grant's five-year career with Millwall, Wycombe and Bradford ended when he was convicted of a 2004 shooting. The north London estate where he grew up is now transformed, but his Old Bailey trial shed light on its notorious history of gun crime

Gavin Renaldo Grant had potential. An aspiring professional footballer, he was never going to give Cristiano Ronaldo competition, but he possessed, in the words of one fan site, "lightning pace and tricky wing play".

A journeyman footballer who could play as a striker or winger, Grant started his career in 2005 with his local non-league club, Tooting and Mitcham in south London, scoring 10 goals in 16 matches – an impressive haul that attracted interest from clubs in higher divisions. Between 2005 and 2010, he had spells with Millwall, Wycombe Wanderers, Gillingham and, at the end of last season, was turning out for Bradford in League Two.

"He's got bags of potential and he's a good finisher," said Peter Taylor, who managed Grant at Wycombe and Bradford. "He's got an eye for goal, he's quick, he's an athlete and he will get better."

Taylor's words, spoken in 2008, sound hollow now. Grant's attempt to escape the drug-fuelled violence of the London estate where he grew up for the glamorous world of professional football ended last week when he was jailed at the Old Bailey for a minimum of 25 years, convicted with two others for the murder of his former friend, Leon "Playboy" Labastide, in May 2004.

The trial, the culmination of a six-year investigation by Operation Trident, the Metropolitan police unit that investigates black-on-black killings, heard how Grant, now 26, Gareth Downie, 25, and Damian Williams, 32, had orchestrated an execution-style killing, one of a series of tit-for-tat shootings in the Stonebridge Park estate in Brent, north-west London, in the 1990s.

Once an intimidating fortress of tower blocks, Stonebridge supplied the labour to a giant industrial estate, home to employers including Wall's, the ice-cream maker. But as the firms moved out, unemployment soared. Stonebridge became home to large migrant populations and assumed a reputation among Trident officers as a "hot spot".

Stonebridge looms large in the story of Grant's descent from promising athlete to killer. A lawless, no-go area of poorly lit alleyways and concrete walls, it was the perfect breeding ground for crime. The estate became enmeshed in a turf war fought between gangs battling to control the supply and distribution of crack cocaine. The violence was so bad that in 1995 John Major, then prime minister, cancelled a speech he was due to give there over fears of being shot.

"There were always problems between Stonebridge and the [nearby] Church End estate," said Detective Inspector Steve Horsley, who led the investigation into Labastide's murder. "You couldn't go from one estate to the other because different gangs ran it." Gangs from neighbouring Kensal Green and Wembley were also vying for control, while Jamaican Yardie gangsters overseeing the importation of the crack into the UK were never far away.

In August 2005, Rohan "Chunky" Chung, a Yardie drugs importer, tied up a stepfather and two sisters in their flat on the estate and shot them in the head. Chung was furious that the sisters' brother, one of his "mules", had disappeared with 4kg of his cocaine.

Today Stonebridge's towers are gone, replaced by award-winning low-rise housing, interspersed with communal areas, trees and street lights – a committed attempt to "design out" crime. A Stirling prize-nominated children's centre is a visual testimony to the area's £225m renaissance. Crime is down dramatically. Prostitutes, junkies and guns are no longer ubiquitous. Much is down to the success of Trident working in conjunction with local police and the community. When Grant and those involved in the revenge attacks were arrested, shootings on the estate plunged by 50%, according to some reports. These days Stonebridge is regularly held up around the world as a success story when it comes to transforming problem estates.

"The area is transformed beyond belief," said Chinyere Ugwu, who has lived on the estate for 13 years and is managing director of Hillside Housing Trust, which runs Stonebridge. "The residents are actively involved in the community and are running things for themselves."

But Grant's trial shone a light on the days when Stonebridge was notorious. As the prosecution suggested at the start of the trial, it was "more the law of the jungle than the law of civilised England". Grant, though, had a better chance than some of avoiding being sucked into its gang culture. An impressive athlete in his early teens, he signed schoolboy terms with Watford when he was 14. Money, fame and girls beckoned. He could earn more in a week than his friends could in a year if he made it big.

But, like thousands of other hopefuls, Grant was let go by his club at 16. With no qualifications, he took a job at Tesco. But, as his trial was told, Grant was impressionable and revelled in the kinship of gang culture. It was suggested that Williams's "larger personality" had been a huge influence on him. It was Williams, the Old Bailey jury heard, who convinced the other two that Labastide must have been involved in a burglary at the flat of his cousin, Romain Whyte, Grant's best friend and someone he looked up to.

Days before he was shot, Labastide, a member of a rival gang, had seen Whyte crash his motorcycle outside his house.Sensing an opportunity while Whyte was incapacitated, a gang, rumoured to be led by Labastide, raided his house and stole £20,000 of what the court heard was suspected drug money. As the gang piled into Whyte's flat, its three occupants – Whyte's girlfriend, Sabrina Edwards, his sister Melika, and a 16-year-old girl – jumped out of a first-floor window, fearing for their lives. Two of the women broke legs in the fall.

Williams was incensed. Grant, who was best friends with Whyte, was similarly furious. In the warped world of Stonebridge, they considered the fact the burglars had carried guns "disrespectful". Labastide had often eaten at Williams's mother's house. "How could he do that?" the three accomplices raged.

Urged on by Williams, Grant and Downie, armed and wearing motorcycle helmets, went looking for Labastide. They found him outside his mother's house talking on the phone to a friend and shot him six times. Grant was heard boasting about the shooting hours later.

The killing unleashed a wave of violence. Typewritten letters accused Whyte and others of killing Labastide. "YOU WILL NOT GET AWAY THE PAST WILL HAUNT YOU," they proclaimed.

Sean "Fusey" Cephinis, a friend of Labastide, was suspected of writing the letters. In a case of mistaken identity, gunmen looking to silence Cephinis killed Jahmall Moore in January 2005. Two years later Whyte and Grant were tried and acquitted of the shooting.

After the acquittal, Grant must have been hoping to turn his back on his murderous lifestyle. Stonebridge was being transformed and Grant had a fresh opportunity, too. By the time Moore died in a hail of bullets, ambushed by four gunmen while in his car, Grant had been signed by Gillingham. As the defence at last week's trial observed: "Whatever he did in the past, he had turned his life around by the time it [the murder case] was resurrected."

But the Trident officers had a theory. They had noticed the burglary at Whyte's flat and were aware that the day before it occurred Whyte had come off his motorbike in front of Labastide's house. Were the incidents connected? "We got an indication things were not quite right," Horsley recalled after questioning the three young women who had jumped from the window. He suspected they might be holding something back.

Then, in 2008, new intelligence prompted the Trident officers to reopen their files and track one of the women to the south-west of England where she admitted hearing the three men plot the murder. "She was almost relieved that someone wanted to ask her," Horsley said. "She had held it in since she was a girl of 16."

Appearing under a pseudonym, "Susan Norwich" supplied the testimony at a first trial and then a retrial in which Grant's conviction was secured. "She was a brave little girl to have done it twice," Horsley said. Her decision to testify was startling. Criminologists say it is rare for the police to receive such co-operation. Horsley agrees. "You can imagine you're a witness to a gun crime and the people who have done it are seriously bad guys. You have got to worry about your own safety, especially if you are from that community. We have to disclose names to defence and names will come out [in court], but we do our best to protect people."

Grant's conviction was a stunning success for Trident officers. In two earlier related trials they had relied on evidence from Britain's first black-on-black supergrass, Darren Mathurin, a drug dealer, whose testimonies failed to convince the juries.

As he was sent down last week Grant was seen to weep. Only months before he had been playing professional football, trying to resurrect a career that had stalled when he was 16.

"Because he hadn't made it with Watford he went back to Stonebridge and hung around with friends and family there and got into the wrong things," Horsley said. "Then after the shootings he tried to sort himself out."

But it was too late. Far too late.

A new breed of PR gurus is evolving to combat digital disaster areas

Haunted by a revealing photograph from your drink-mad office party posted on Facebook? Berated by an ex-lover on a blog posting? Or is your business being skewered online by a vindictive customer? Then Gary Powers is waiting to hear from you. He can help.

In the modern digital age where seemingly everything and everyone is online, a new industry is emerging to "manage" the internet footprint that people and businesses leave online. "Reputation managers" can clean up and shape a person's online history: burying the damaging stuff and promoting the good.

Given the numbers of famous people who arguably are in need of such a service, and the millions of others leaving an online footprint around the world every day, the potential market is dazzling.

Kate Moss is already rumoured to be using online brand reputation management to make sure Google searchers come to positive stories first. By contrast, due to recent online leakings of abusive rants about his ex-girlfriend, actor Mel Gibson's fourth result on a Google search is a negative gossip story.

The same goes for Paris Hilton, the socialite and heiress. The fifth result on a Google search for her brings up disputed claims that customs officers in Corsica had found marijuana in her purse and had briefly detained her. A good reputation manager might be able to push that story down Hilton's Google results chain. Lindsay Lohan, currently in jail, is famed for use of her Twitter account where she frequently sends out ill-advised updates. A reputation manager could help to suppress those Tweets or even try to get them deleted.

Powers, who works for a US company called Reputation Defender, is paid to help promote the positive, hide the negative and even have hostile internet postings removed altogether. Fees vary across the industry. For $15 (£9.50) a month, Reputation Defender will work with a client to clean up and monitor their internet reputation. They can also send you an alert whenever a new reference to your child is posted anywhere online. For $30, you can subscribe to a service that will try to destroy hostile internet content. In 2008 the firm raised $2.6m in investment funding.

"We get people from all walks of life," said Powers, the company's "head writer". People who come to the firm for assistance range from professionals, like lawyers or doctors, to those involved in the entertainment industry; anyone who is concerned that someone, somewhere, might search for them online.

Increasingly the results of a Google search can affect the most important elements of people's lives. A recent Microsoft study showed that 78% of job recruiters conducted internet searches on their clients in order to check out their backgrounds. Experts say that the huge growth of the internet has in effect created a "permanent memory" online that can be searched by anyone. Embarrassing statements, and photographs, or angry attacks by spiteful ex-friends once faded away. But no longer. Anyone can be judged forever on a moment of madness or bad luck.

There are now many firms offering help in keeping people's online history safe. They include companies and websites like Online Reputation Manager, Reputation Professor and Reputation Management Partners. It is an industry that has arisen almost overnight. Reputation Defender was founded in 2006 and now employs dozens of people from its base in Redwood City, California. David Thompson, chief privacy officer at Reputation Defender, sees the sector as involved in an "arms race" with web developments that erode people's privacy. "If they are building a better gun, we are building a better bullet-proof vest," he said.

Some developments can be potentially scary. Facial recognition software will allow the internet to recognise – and make potentially searchable – any photograph in which someone appears, even if only in the background (say at a riot, protest or orgy). Experts warn that everything we do on the internet can be collected and collated digitally. All that information is tracked, gathered and used by marketers who then build up a detailed profile of the consumer.

Professor Joseph Turow, of the University of Pennsylvania, believes this "unknown reputation" that everyone has will eventually lead to people having very different experiences online. "People will be defined by marketers in ways they know nothing about, and this is a process that is getting bigger and bigger," Turow said.

Turow spoke in front of the US Senate last week appealing for government regulation. "Most people do not have a clue this is going on. They don't even know they have a reputation online that is being used in this way," Turow said.

Eventually, experts predict, millions will employ someone to manage the traces they leave, perhaps even those who work in reputation management.

Does Powers employ someone to manage his own online history? Not yet. Instead he cuts the problem off at the source, trying not to leave a trace in the first place. "I have a very low profile. I kind of like that," he said.

Survey shows big shift in attitudes to 'talking therapies'

Almost one person in five has consulted a counsellor or psychotherapist, while almost half the population know someone who has, according to a survey by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), which suggests that the stigma attached to "talking therapies" is disappearing. The association says that attitudes towards counselling and psychotherapy appear to have changed markedly since it conducted a comparable investigation in 2004.

The current survey found that 94% of people now consider it acceptable to have counselling and psychotherapy for anxiety and depression, compared with just 67% in 2004. Similarly, public acceptability of therapy for divorce or relationship breakdown has risen from 52% to 85% over the past six years.

The survey found that 88% of people believe that counselling and psychotherapy should be available to all on the NHS, compared with 68% who share similar views towards IVF treatment. More than nine out of 10 believe that it is "more acceptable to talk about emotional problems than it was in the past".

"This survey represents a significant shift in people's attitudes towards therapy – practically a revolution – at a time when mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression are far more common than was realised," said the association's president, Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University. "Mental health conditions currently affect one in six of the population at an annual cost to England alone of £77bn. It's no accident that the growth of the problem has encouraged mass support for more effective treatments," said Cooper.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 1.3 million people a year receive treatment for mental health problems. The ONS also estimates that 0.5% of people have "probable psychotic disorders" such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or severe depression which need intensive treatment. The ONS found that those with neurotic disorders were more likely to be women, aged between 35 and 54, who were separated or divorced and living alone or as single parents. One study estimated that seven out of 10 people on incapacity benefit have mental health problems.

The BACP's findings are likely to once again focus attention on the debate over how best to treat mental health problems at a time of budget cuts. Some 39 million antidepressant prescriptions are issued each year in the UK, leading to claims that doctors are overly relying on pills that only treat the symptoms, not the cause, of depression.

The survey of 1,400 adults, conducted by an independent polling agency, found that 83% believe it is better to talk to someone about their problems than to take medication. "People with mental health problems still face long waits and the therapies available are not necessarily suitable to their condition," said Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity Sane.

"We are concerned also that the pressures on mental health budgets will mean that this form of help is rationed even more, particularly for those needing long-term treatment for serious underlying conditions such as anxiety disorder or depression."

The survey also found that people are no longer leaving it to the last minute to seek professional support. Most now accept that getting help can stop their condition from deteriorating. This view is shared almost universally – nearly 95% of those polled believe that "it is a good idea to seek counselling or psychotherapy for a problem before it gets out of hand", while 88% thought that "people might be happier if they took action to talk to a counsellor or psychotherapist about their problems".

Novelist Patrick Neate and the Observer's associate editor Robert McCrum debate the merits of the Booker longlist, announced last week

Patrick Neate: Like 99.9% of the population (in fact, probably the whole UK population, less literary editors of broadsheet newspapers), I haven't read most of the Booker longlist, but it looks like a pretty interesting bunch to me. The books on it I have read (Skippy Dies, The Betrayal and The Stars in the Bright Sky), I loved, and there are plenty of other writers (Mitchell, Carey, Levy, Galgut etc) whose previous work has knocked my socks off. Best of all, there are a couple of writers who are new to me – Tom McCarthy, Emma Donoghue. Of course, a few big names (Martin Amis, say, and Ian McEwan)are missing. But the very fact they are "big names" ensures I'm not going to miss them. After all, it's not like their work needs the oxygen of publicity. In fact, it's arguable that's the very last thing it needs.

Robert McCrum: I think it's good to look at the prize – as you've done – from the point of view of what used to be called the common reader (aka the British reading public). For them, the issue is: what's new and interesting? On that basis, this is not a bad list, and will expose readers to some interesting new novels. For me, Booker's problem – not a bad one to have – is its high profile. It is so much the premier prize, it is seen as providing a litmus test for British and Commonwealth literary culture as a whole. As such it gets asked to give an end-of-term report on new books by the likes of William Boyd and Ian McEwan – and, inevitably, Martin Amis.

PN: "Seen as providing a litmus test" by whom? The "common reader" doesn't think, "Gosh! Look at the Booker list: what a bad year for British and Commonwealth literary culture!" Rather, he (or more likely "she") sees a new name or two placed front and centre in the local Waterstones and decides whether or not the titles, covers and blurbs beneath the strap "shortlisted for the Booker" appeal. At a time when the noble art of browsing a bookshop appears to have fallen out of fashion, this is all the more reason to cheer when any longlisting, shortlisting or, indeed, winner comes out of left field.

RMc: Yes, the Waterstones browser will see "shortlisted for the Booker" and be impressed, but he/she will also be aware that there is a group of "names" – senior writers who are still at work – and we, the punters, want Booker to give us a read-out on that.

Last week the critic Gabriel Josipovici dismissed the "big names" of the postwar British literary tradition as "limited, smart alecky, arrogant, and self-satisfied", but I dispute that. Amis, Barnes, McEwan, Naipaul and Rushdie have produced a bibliography of the imagination whose influence has gone round the world. Booker, which is also global, needs to acknowledge that.

Perhaps it is impossible, even meaningless, to compare the latest Rushdie novel with Christos Tsiolkas, but if Booker does not make the attempt to survey the scene, who else has the authority?

PN: You say it is impossible, even meaningless, to compare the latest Rushdie novel with Tsiolkas, but that is what the judges have to do. I'm glad they've gone for Tsiolkas. It's about a barbecue, isn't it? It sounds fun. And it's not Rushdie. Personally, and I say this with all humility and fully acknowledging his status as one of the finest postwar writers, I rather gave up on Rushdie after Fury, and that was a decade ago. Fortunately for Rushdie, I'm probably in a minority. His reputation is secure and his numerous fans will carry on reading his books. But if, say, Rushdie had bumped Tsiolkas (or McCarthy or Donoghue or Murray) from the list, it would have deprived the UK reader the chance to enhance or reject a new reputation. So I say, read the book about the barbie!

RMc: Isn't it better for the "new voices" to be challenged by the "old guard", grizzled reputations and all? I say, let's have a clash of generations. The integration of cultural innovation with cultural continuity is bound to be a messy, Darwinian process. But why the hell not? It might even be entertaining. Booker judges should take their onerous responsibilities seriously, but shouldn't they have some fun en route to the Guildhall?

PN: Of course I have no problem with the "old guard" and the "new voices" going head to head. But I also have no reason to suspect the Booker judges made their selection based on anything but literary merit, do you? If they have gone out of their way to select "new voices", I imagine Howard Jacobson, pushing 70, must be giggling into his cornflakes.

RMc: Who knows how the Booker jury operated this time? It's interesting to speculate. Each year one hears some judge or other protest his/her devout belief in "literary merit", but the smell of many shortlists is too often of compromise, cowardice and crowd-pleasing. And to introduce an old note of dissent, the real problem with Booker in an age of global fiction based on the Anglo-American tradition is its absurd omission of American writing. This looked odd when the prize was set up in 1969. Now it seems bonkers.

PN: I agree. That said, off the top of my head, I'm not sure I can think of an American novel that clamours for inclusion.

RMc: The prize has also had some notorious blind spots. Nothing for Beryl Bainbridge; nothing for William Trevor. In good years, I think the prize has contrived to provide a really useful snapshot of the way we (might) read now. In less vintage years (and 2010 may be one of those) it comes up with a fuzzy Xerox.

PN: William Trevor! Well, there you go. Any argument for the merits of the Booker is ended by his name. For me, the rather sad thing about the Booker is its limited impact on popular culture. If it's really literature's premier prize then surely it should be enjoyed by a broader audience?

Instead, serious literature is seen as hifalutin and exclusive. Can I blame the "old guard" for that? Perhaps I can. Back to Rushdie. Midnight's Children is a novel of extraordinary imagination and erudition that anybody might enjoy. Fury, by comparison, is arch and spiky and seemingly deliberately verbose. Sometimes, one can't help but suspect that the big guns of the older generation write at one another and expect the rest of us to watch, rapt.

Two novels I have read: The Da Vinci Code and Skippy Dies. I would happily bet that the majority of people who bought the former would enjoy the latter every bit as much if it was put in front of them in the right way. I don't want to dumb down literature, but how I'd love to smarten up popular culture! And this is what the Booker should do – provide the oomph, the glitz, the X factor… I'll wait for Simon Cowell's call!

RMc: But let's not despair. This is only the longlist. We can hash over this ground again with the shortlist. That will be the test of this jury. I'll see you on TV.

Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City columns inspired some dire chick lit, but also a generation of more serious young writers

Emily Gould still finds it irritating when she gets stuck behind a group of women walking four abreast along a New York pavement, intent on imitating the infamous Sex and the City line-up. "Really, two of you should walk behind and allow other people to walk past," Gould says with a groan. "It's one of many things that upsets me about Candace Bushnell."

But for all that she might get annoyed by those high-heeled women on the sidewalk, without Sex and the City, there would arguably have been no Emily Gould. The 28-year-old has just published her first confessional memoir, And The Heart Says Whatever. In 11 pithily written essays, Gould, a former co-editor of the Gawker gossip website, charts her experiences as a young adult in New York, working in jobs she loathes, facing up to failed relationships and going to parties attended by people she dislikes. Her debut has already attracted praise from the likes of Jonathan Franzen, while Curtis Sittenfeld, the author of American Wife, has hailed it as a modern-day version of The Bell Jar. Gould is one of a new generation of female confessional writers who, according to Sittenfeld, "speak, in our often phoney and cheesy culture, to the truths of women's lives".

Before Candace Bushnell, books like Gould's that sought to capture the dilemmas and dichotomies of modern womanhood with a wry, humorous honesty, were almost unheard of. For decades, the experiences of ordinary women had been largely overlooked by the literary world: either it was recounted in fictional terms (as in Mary McCarthy's The Group) or it was relayed anonymously by feminist polemicists and social historians (Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique). Bushnell changed all that. When she started writing her first-person columns for the New York Observer in 1994, she won a considerable following for her acerbically witty portrayal of the Manhattan singles scene, with its Martini bars, non-committal men and cruel, almost Whartonesque mating rituals. The newspaper columns based on the sexual experiences and romantic intrigues of Bushnell and her three friends became a bestselling book, which in turn became a hit television show and then spawned a film franchise that has evolved into a multi-media juggernaut of product placement and tie-in beauty products.

For a while after Bushnell's extraordinary success, the publishing industry assiduously attempted to sniff out the next Sex and the City and a motley assortment of chick lit writers of varying talent found their books marketed with bright pink covers and an illustration of a pair of sparkly Manolo Blahniks. "Sometimes great parents have really terrible children and it's not really their fault," concedes Gould, who lives in Brooklyn. "I think that's what happened with Candace Bushnell. She paved the way for good and bad things. She opened things up for female writers but she also gave rise to this chick-litty stereotype of the single girl having a romantic storyline. That kind of stuff bores me, to be honest. There are only so many ways that that story works out."

But Bushnell was also at the vanguard of a different type of confessional writing, one that was both unsentimental, smart and unapologetically female; that did not shy away from uncomfortable truths or from tackling the subjects women previously only talked about behind closed doors. Now, 17 years after the first "Sex and the City" column was published, a new wave of confessional writers is picking up where Bushnell left off.

As well as Emily Gould, there is 40-year-old Meghan Daum, an acclaimed newspaper columnist whose third book, Life Would be Perfect if I Lived in That House chronicles her obsessive fascination with real estate and has just been published in America. Sloane Crosley, 31, whose first collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, became a New York Times bestseller has also just written her second book, How Did You Get This Number, in which she tackles a dizzying array of subjects from living with an anorexic flatmate to buying stolen upholstery as a means of getting over a heartbreak. And the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, in which she charts a year travelling around the world after the failure of her marriage, opens next month, starring Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem.

According to Neill Denny, the editor-in-chief of The Bookseller, the sudden rash of confessional memoirs is partly attributable to the rise in popularity of blogging and reality television. "It's the idea that everyone's got a story to tell and everyone is a star, a media brand in their own right," says Denny. "It's the Big Brother phenomenon, where we are led to believe that our own stories are valid and have resonance. The world of the web has definitely opened up the market in a way that wouldn't have been conceivable 15 or 20 years ago. The things people would have written in a diary for themselves, they are now writing in a diary in a book. That has combined with a big tectonic shift in our society talking openly about sex and I think it has been led from America."

In the UK, we are still slightly discomfited by the idea of baring all in a confessional essay, partly, one presumes, because we are restrained by a sort of cultural prudishness, but also because we do not wish to appear self-indulgent. "American writers of that type are prepared to lay more on the line," agrees Denny. "The British are good at producing plenty of gripping, hardcore misery memoirs or they tend to write confessionally about the past."

British writers who address the experiences of modern women tend to do so in a fictional format, following the example of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, which also started off as a newspaper column. In America, says Meghan Daum, there is more of a tradition for non-fiction examinations of what it is to be female, inspired not only by Bushnell but also by writers such as Joan Didion. "Joan Didion is incredibly veiled and meticulous," says Daum, a graduate of Vassar College who now lives in Los Angeles, where she writes a weekly column for the LA Times. "She keeps the reader at arm's length even though she gives the impression of being totally candid.

"To me the word 'confessional' is problematic because it connotes a kind of over-sharing or perhaps unconsidered sharing. I try to let the reader feel like they are learning everything about me, but actually my goal at the end of the piece is that they know everything about the narrator but nothing about the author."

According to Daum, one of the major problems with dubbing a piece of writing "confessional" is that it now immediately gets lumped in with the breathless prose of sub-standard chick lit. "I think in the realm of fiction women have painted themselves into a corner. Bridget Jones's Diary I consider to be a brilliant, hilarious, subversive book, but a lot of people knocked it off and reduced it and this chick lit genre emerges and there's no meat or nuance there at all."

In many ways, says Daum, women's confessional writing is a victim of Bushnell's success: "Publishers tend to be more willing to take personal work that is not as good because you know you have an in-built audience of female readers. Because something is relatable, there's not as much emphasis on craft, and publishers know that more women buy books than men."

In fact, the allegation most often levelled at a confessional essayist tends to be that they are writing in a trite and essentially superficial way about themselves: the literary equivalent of navel-gazing. In an article for the National Review last year, journalist Katherine Connell wrote that: "Excessive self-regard is the essence of this type of confessional writing, in which significant others figure only as supporting actors in the author's personal drama – as stepping stones on the road to their self-actualisation."

And when a woman does this kind of thing – particularly a young, attractive woman – there is often a critical presumption that they are nakedly selling themselves, rather than analysing anything more profound. "If a woman writes about herself, she's a narcissist," says Emily Gould. "If a man does the same, he's describing the human condition." Or, as Erica Jong, the author of seminal feminist novel Fear of Flying (published in 1973), once put it: "It's often called confessional writing by male reviewers, but I think the word confessional in this instance is a put-down. It implies that what these women are doing is just sort of spilling out whatever they have in their guts and that there's no craft involved in the writing."

When Gould wrote a lengthy article for the New York Times in 2008 about her compulsion to reveal details of her private life online – she coined the term "oversharing" – more than 1,200 irate comments were left on the Times website condemning her "self-exposure" and calling her everything from a "moronic juvenile" to an "unfeeling, self-absorbed unsavoury clod". It did not help that the article was illustrated with a cover photograph of Gould sprawled suggestively across a bed – a decision she now says she regrets – but, still, it was hard to imagine that a male writer would have attracted quite the same level of vitriol. "Yeah," agrees Gould. "And there was one review of the book that was headlined 'Emily Gould: all dressed up and nowhere to go'. I mean, dressed up in what? In words?"

Partly as a consequence of her New York Times experience, Gould decided "very consciously to let go of whether or not anyone likes me". In And the Heart Says Whatever, she deliberately resists the urge to mould each story along a neat, narrative arc with a cleverly packaged ending. "I don't tie everything into a little bow and say: 'That's what I've learned'," she explains. "I think a lot of women writers go around apologising, saying: 'Oh stupid me, oh the goofy things I did when I was young and didn't know any better' but I set out specifically not to do that… I think a lot of the stories I told were about having agency, about what you're going to do with it and maybe you're going to do something bad. That's not to say I'm prickly or hard to get along with, I just want it to be OK for women to be complete people, to have sides to themselves that aren't whitewashed or palatable."

So it is that Gould writes unabashedly in one chapter about having sex with a 14-year-old boy when she was 17. She is honest, too, about her own shortcomings: "I can look back and recognise the things I've done and said that were wrong: unethical, gratuitously hurtful, golden-rule-breaking et cetera," she writes in the introduction. "But I did these things because I felt the pull of a trajectory… I would be lying if I said I was a different person now. I am the same person. I would do it all again."

In the same vein, Meghan Daum sees her writing as a corrective to the tradition of women's magazines that talk about relationships, diet or body image in a redemptive fashion, plotting each minor self-improvement along a wider trajectory of personal growth. "I tend to be very honest and my goal is to identify something people think but are afraid to say," explains Daum. "That's not the general cultural expectation of women."

Sloane Crosley's books, although different in tone to those of Gould and Daum – she self-mockingly writes of her own comic misadventures in a manner heavily influenced by David Sedaris – share a similar aspiration. "I think different essays of mine have different points to them and are crafted in different ways, which is why I hate Jane Austen," says Crosley, who lives in New York and works as a publicist for Random House, where she represents authors including Dave Eggers, Toni Morrison and Jay McInerney. "Has anyone noticed that she's just changed the names in Emma and turned it into Sense and Sensibility? It's just the same story.

"You want to say something larger, to say something cohesive, to impart a truth in a way that is beautiful. It's like taking medicine with apple sauce. The label 'confessional' makes me alarmed because although my writing is confessional, I think you have to write something that's structured and is an attempt at art, even if it's not a successful attempt. It worries me if you just write a diary or a blog and then publish it. You can't just hand it over and reach literary absolution because you've confessed everything." Crosley's first piece of confessional writing sprang from an email she sent to a group of friends recounting an incident where she got locked out of the same apartment twice in the same day – the email found its way to an editor at the Village Voice who encouraged her to rework it as an article. After the publication of her first anthology in 2008, Crosley was touted as a 21st-century Dorothy Parker. "Those comparisons are flattering but not accurate," she says. "I know I'm not Dorothy Parker but I also know there's another layer to my writing and that it's not just about shoes."

For Daum, who spent much of her 20s in Manhattan before moving to Nebraska (the 1999 New Yorker essay she wrote about the move earned her comparisons with Didion), the framework of a confessional essay enables her "to use myself as a vehicle to get into the layers of a subject". But, she adds, the subject "has to be something universal"; it has to carry some kind of meaningful weight beyond how to make the perfect Cosmopolitan and it also has to be truthful to the extent of making the author look bad. In My Misspent Youth, Daum admits that her stories are "all about the way intense life experiences take on the qualities of scenes from movies. They are about remoteness. They are about missing the point."

By giving the impression of accessibility and writing about topics that can be easily related to by the average female reader, the new generation of confessional writers seeks to communicate different depths of experience that take the reader beyond the stereotypical tale of a single woman obsessively on the hunt for the ideal mate. For all that Candace Bushnell might have broken down barriers for female writers by writing with clear-eyed candour about previously taboo subjects, Sex and the City was, essentially, shaped by this same, age-old assumption that a woman's life could only ever be complete once she had settled down with the perfect man.

"I'm more interested in a narrative that doesn't put a man at its centre," explains Gould, who says she made a conscious decision to concentrate on "the characters on the sidelines" – the personal assistants who never get asked for their opinion or the glassy-eyed waitresses whose job it is to flirt for tips. "It's quite scary to men to know what that person is thinking. It's much more convenient to imagine that they aren't really people."

In the same way, one imagines it might be easier to dismiss the work of female confessional authors as being somehow facile and glib because, on the surface, they deal with the small moments of everyday experience rather than dealing with the grittiness of big ideas. But this would be to do them a disservice. By engaging with their readers and speaking to them on their own level with humour and candour, Gould, Daum and Crosley seek to illuminate broader truths. They might not always succeed but at least they aim for something bigger; for something that is hopefully a little more nuanced than the endless search for Mr Right and a world viewed through the bottom of a Martini glass.

Grin and share it: American confessional classics

After four outings, Bushnell's Sex and the City column, started in 1993 in the New York Observer, was bought as a book and in 1996 sold to HBO as a series. Charting the shopping and mating rituals of Manhattan's female socialites, it became not only a bestseller but an era-defining work responsible for introducing lingo such as "toxic bachelor" to women worldwide.

Extract "I like my money right where I can see it… hanging in my closet."

Elizabeth Gilbert Eat, Pray, Love (2006)

Aged 34, reeling from a disastrous divorce, journalist and author Gilbert set off on a year-long trip to Italy, India and Indonesia. Her engaging and brutally honest memoir charting her breakdown and recovery became a global phenomenon, endorsed by celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Sophie Dahl to Julia Roberts (who stars in the forthcoming film version).

Extract "Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You need to be certain it's what you want before you commit."

Nora Ephron I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (2006)

Best known for depicting the trials and tribulations of women in screenplays such as When Harry Met Sally…, Ephron has also written several highly successful essay collections on womanhood. Her latest, a New York Times bestseller that began life as a Vogue piece, is a frank exploration of ageing in a society that prizes youth.

Extract "You can put make-up on your face... you can shoot collagen and Botox and Restylane into your wrinkles and creases, but short of surgery there's not a damn thing you can do about a neck."

Julie Powell Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (2005)

Bored of working in dead-end New York jobs, in 2002 Powell began a blog chronicling her attempt to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. As much a diary of her private life as a document of her struggle with lobsters and lard, the blog gained a huge following and became a hit book, then a film written/directed by Ephron, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.

Extract "It was not until the second harvesting (they actually call it 'harvesting'; fertility clinics, it turns out, use a lot of vaguely apocalyptic terms) that I realised I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, which sounds absolutely terrifying, but apparently just meant that I was going to get hairy and fat and I'd have to take all kinds of drugs to conceive."

Imogen Carter

Joann Sfar's bold debut is a highly enjoyable – if low on detail – life of the charismatic French singer Serge Gainsbourg

In the 1930s Warner Brothers developed a serious line in earnest, inspirational films celebrating great scientists, liberators and social benefactors, usually played by Edward G Robinson or Paul Muni, dedicated to Longfellow's lines in his "A Psalm of Life": "Lives of great men all remind us/ We can make our lives sublime/ And, departing, leave behind us/ Footprints on the sands of time." But Variety's contemptuous neologism "biopic" stuck, and biography has never had much standing in the cinema – unlike the literary world where, under the larger rubric of "life writing", it's a serious matter both to practise and study.

Orson Welles's Citizen Kane in the 1940s and the Italian Marxist Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano in the 60s attempted to find an inventive form that would give cinematic biography the status of its literary equivalent. But while popular epics such as Lawrence of Arabia and Gandhi have won Oscars and provided prize-winning roles, critical condescension has continued almost unabated.

Recently, however, as popular culture has come to be taken more seriously than it was when 20th Century-Fox made colourful showbiz biopics 60 years ago, a succession of movie lives of rock stars have done away with traditional narrative forms. Mostly made by independent film-makers, they've mixed documentary and fiction, fantasy and reality in an attempt to get at complex, vital truths: one thinks for instance of British pictures about Ian Curtis, Ian Dury and John Lennon, as well as Todd Haynes's American masterwork I'm Not There in which six different actors play faces and facets of Bob Dylan.

To this category belongs Gainsbourg, aka Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque), a portrait of the French singer Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991). It's an altogether bolder film than La vie en rose which brought an Oscar to Marion Cotillard as Édith Piaf, though it too has a central performance, from Éric Elmosnino, that is remarkable both physically and aurally. It's the feature debut of the 38-year-old writer-director Joann Sfar, a comic-strip designer who, like Gainsbourg, was born in France of Jewish parents, and he finds Serge's "Rosebud" in his Jewish background.

In a pre-credit sequence the young child Serge (born Lucien) is rejected as "too ugly" by a little girl on a summer beach. The film then switches to his wartime childhood in German-occupied Paris. There he reacts against his father's ambition for him to become a classical musician, and against the authorities that force him to wear a yellow star pinned to his chest. He mocks and puzzles the French collaborators by the heavily ironic gesture of being the first to turn up and demand his star, before others start forming a queue. But the atmosphere of the time makes an indelible impression. From the antisemitic posters that line the streets two images continue to haunt him: a Humpty Dumpty grotesque and a mocking beak-nosed caricature that becomes his aggressive alter ego. The movie is rather vague in its treatment of the war, as about much else, though it does have a touching episode in which Gainsbourg lives secretly under the protection of a Catholic boarding school in the countryside, which evokes Louis Malle's autobiographical Au revoir les enfants, a key work in the cycle of French movies dealing with Jews during the Occupation.

In one of the best early sequences Serge's precocious interest in music, painting and sex come together when he attends a life class where he's supposed to keep his back to the nude model his elders are drawing. He subsequently chats up the model and takes her to a bar for a soft drink, where he encounters an elderly music hall chanteuse and exuberantly sings along with her to her biggest hit, a risqué number called "Coco". After the war the central role is taken by Elmosnino as the charismatic, chain-smoking, heavy-drinking Serge – lover, composer, performer in an ever-changing variety of genres and rebel with a mission to épater les bourgeois. His first two marriages don't figure in the film, chief attention being given to his affairs and collaborations with Françoise Hardy, France Gall, Brigitte Bardot and of course Jane Birkin. Laetitia Casta is priceless as Bardot, prancing around Serge's apartment wrapped in a sheet, charming Serge's parents. The late Lucy Gordon is a fetching, playful Birkin, and there's a highly amusing scene in the late 1960s when Serge's music producer (played by Nouvelle Vague director Claude Chabrol) tells them that their erotic duet "Je t'aime… moi non plus" (here, unlike most of the other numbers, performed in the original version) could land them in jail.

The self-destructive aspect of Gainsbourg is touched on impressionistically. The cops pick him up dead drunk in the street and transport him in a black maria not to jail but to a concert engagement. Most remarkably, we see him record his reggae version of "La Marseillaise" with a Jamaican group (as aggressively provocative in its way as Jimi Hendrix's treatment of "The Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock). It's followed by right-wing veterans threatening to lynch him before being drawn into joining him in a straight version of the song.

This enjoyable, handsomely designed, somewhat ragged film brings us close to Gainsbourg as a personality. But it won't help anyone to a high score on Mastermind with "The Life and Work of Serge Gainsbourg" as the specialist subject. Nor will an average British audience come away understanding what François Mitterrand meant when he reacted to Gainsbourg's death saying: "He was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire. He elevated the song to the level of art."

Stability and an economic boom have made the president the overwhelming favourite to be re-elected next week, but the opposition has been brutally silenced

It's a hot afternoon in the southern rural district of Nyaruguru. On a dusty clearing overlooked by a hill already swarming with people, tens of thousands of supporters have been gathering since early morning to get a glimpse of their hero. Among them are peasants, pregnant women and toddlers, all wearing the red-white-and-blue T-shirts of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and dancing to the rhythm of a famous local singer, Masamba Intore. Suddenly a convoy of black cars appears in the distance. The crowd explodes in cheers of joy when a tall, slender figure slowly makes his way to the podium. Ready for another mass celebration of his uncontested rule of this small African country, the president of Rwanda and former liberation fighter, Paul Kagame, finally appears, greeting his supporters.

Triumphal rallies like this one are becoming a daily routine in the presidential campaign of the Rwandan strongman. On 9 August the RPF leader will seek another seven-year mandate in an election widely seen as a formality. With a huge budget advantage over his three opponents, Kagame is expected to win as smoothly as in 2003, when he gained more than 95% of the votes. The only female among the contestants, Alvera Mukabaramba, has already accepted the inevitable defeat. "Beating Kagame is almost impossible," she acknowledges. "He has done so well for this country, rebuilding it from scratch after putting an end to the bloodiest page in our history."

Sixteen years after the genocide, the fates of Rwanda and the RPF are still deeply connected. The party is credited with having stopped the 1994 massacres in which 800,000 Tutsi were killed by the paramilitary Hutu militias and the former Rwandan army. It has ruled the country since then, constantly strengthening its grip on the society thanks to a policy based on development, order and transparency. But a series of recent disturbing events have highlighted what the RPF might not yet be ready to promote: democracy.

In recent weeks human rights organisations have repeatedly accused the government of dirty tactics and attempts to silence the media and prevent political opponents from competing in the elections. Victoire Ingabire, a politician who recently asked for an acknowledgment of the Hutu sufferings during the genocide, is now under house arrest, charged with denialism, genocide ideology and links with the FDLR, a rebel group based in nearby Congo and made up of former génocidaire troops.

Umuseso and Umuvugizi, two of the main Rwandan tabloids, have been banned for six months for "inciting public disorder" which will prevent them from covering the elections.

At the end of June Umuvugizi's editor, Jean-Leonard Rugambage, was killed in front of his home in Kigali, the capital, by two gunmen. Rwandan general Kayumba Nyamwasa, who had fled the country after an alleged falling out with Kagame, almost succumbed to the same fate when he was shot and seriously wounded in Johannesburg.

"At the beginning we were willing to start a political process. But it seems we are now simply negotiating to save our lives," said Frank Habineza, a former member of the RPF and now the leader of the Democratic Green party of Rwanda. One of the opposition parties that have mushroomed in the past year, the Greens cannot participate properly in the August elections because of police bans on its meetings. On 14 July, the party's deputy president, André Kagwa Rwisereka, was found dead on a river bank close to the border with Burundi, his head almost completely removed from his body. According to Habineza, the two men arrested in connection with the killing were released after a few days in custody. "Kagame is a soldier who never finished the war and never gave up military methods," he says. "He sees criticism as an open threat to his rule".

While Rwandan authorities have denied any role in the killings, RPF insiders concede that the recent bans are suspicious. They might betray the worries of a party afraid to lose control of a society still deemed politically immature after the traumas of genocide. The RPF policy of cancelling Hutu and Tutsi identities and embracing everyone as a Rwandan is widely thought to be working, but will take time. "If allowed to act without restraint, people would still vote along ethnic lines and Hutus would regain power, something we are not ready to accept now," admits a local RPF member who wished to remain anonymous. "Rwandans are voting for Kagame because they don't want problems, but the society remains tense."

Loyal to its president's credo that democracy is an empty box if people are not provided with food and basic services, and conscious that a former Tutsi rebel group cannot yet have a lasting base in a country where 85% of the people are Hutu, the RPF are betting on improving the living conditions of the people, hoping that this will do enough to silence opposition inside the country.

Rwanda is certainly developing fast. "Today everyone here can enjoy free primary education and health insurance," explains Jean Paul Uwizihiwe, a GP in Kigali. "The government even subsidises free anti-retroviral medication for HIV-positive patients. This means that people who would die in almost any other African country can live a normal life."

Rwanda's economy has boomed thanks to foreign investors. Roads and new infrastructure have boosted exports and tourism, while poor rural areas have benefited from loans given to co-operatives and aid programmes including "one cow per family" .

"Efficiency and delivery" are the motto of a political party born and bred according to the military discipline of its leader. Corruption is rare and poorly performing officials are quickly removed from their offices. As a result, Rwanda is one of the few countries where the public sector is more efficient than private industry.

"As in China, democracy will come naturally with the economic empowerment of the people," explains John Rwangombwa, the minister of finance and economic planning. "Our society is still fragile. We can't allow a total freedom of expression when some politicians and part of the society are ready to use the racial card to achieve power."

According to a prominent member of the opposition who asked to remain anonymous, the RPF reasoning has a point. When asked about choosing between Kagame and Ingabire for president, he replies without hesitation. "I would choose Kagame. Ingabire is clean, but she is still supported by scary people linked to the previous regime. They have a bad agenda. They still have the old Rwandan flag in their office. I'm proud to wear the new one."

The shortcomings of the opposition are undeniable, but RPF critics still argue that the party's attitude is making things worse, preventing people from speaking about problems that are bound to resurface. For all the economic development guaranteed by the RPF, the unresolved questions of this country's troubled past still cast a shadow over the future of Rwandans. Many acknowledge that relations between Hutus and Tutsis are slowly improving but remain difficult. They can go out to drink beers and speak about women, cars and football, but some subjects remain taboo, genocide among them.

"Rwandans never tell you what is in the heart," explains Sylvestre Mupenzi, an artist. "We always say that everything is OK, but in reality we are scared and wary. We can't trust each other."

While Tutsis remain understandably bitter towards the perpetrators of genocide, Hutus think it is time to address the killings carried out against them during the civil war that followed the ethnic cleansing.

As a consequence of this endless cycle of guilt, fear and resentment, there remain two paramount needs: peace and security, things that the Kagame administration has provided. But when asked if this country may then need an "enlightened dictator" to solve its problems and continue on the road to recovery, Habineza rejects the option. "It has worked in the first years after the genocide," he admits. "But in the long run, development is not sustainable without democracy."

The Sweden of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson - all shadowy rightwing conspiracies and prostitution rings – might not be so far from the truth

If there was ever a real-life policeman who came close in progressive Swedish affections to Kurt Wallander, the bestselling creation of Henning Mankell, it would probably be Göran Lindberg, chief of police of Uppsala, the city north of Stockholm that is home to Sweden's most prestigious university. Although he lacked Wallander's humility and reticence, Lindberg was concerned, like Wallander, with the marginalised and neglected in Swedish society. He was the sponsor of a sanctuary for abused juveniles, for example, and was at the forefront of the campaign to institute a more sympathetic response to rape victims.

In particular Lindberg was a staunch enemy of sexism in the police force. He argued with colleagues, made speeches and built up a reputation as a tireless proponent of women's rights. So vocal was Lindberg that he ruffled the epaulettes of fellow policemen. "His colleagues," says PJ Anders Linder, political editor-in-chief of the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, "were obviously not quite as obsessed with the issue as he was. He seemed to be like a civil servant who had decided that this was how he was going to make his mark."

And he did. From early in his career, Lindberg was seen by the authorities as a policing role model and was duly made the national spokesperson on sex equality in the police force. Pretty soon he established a reputation as Sweden's leading progressive policeman. So renowned was Lindberg for his political correctness and sensitivity towards women's issues that he was nicknamed "Captain Skirt". In spite of the jokes, he was rapidly promoted, becoming the dean of the police training college and eventually the police chief of Uppsala.

In January this year, following a six-month investigation, Lindberg was arrested. At the time of his apprehension he was allegedly on his way to meet a 14-year-old girl in a hotel encounter that was also due to feature a number of other men. It was said that in his car was a bag containing leather whips, handcuffs and a blindfold.

What had originally alerted the police to Lindberg's predilections was an incident in July last year in which a multimillionaire 60-year-old man was found dead beneath a balcony in a salubrious Stockholm suburb. According to police, the man had been running an illicit sex network delivering women to groups of men. Apparently on the day of his death he had been expecting the arrival at his home of an 18-year-old girl. Instead a gang of men turned up and issued a vicious beating. Shortly afterwards the man either jumped, fell or was pushed from the balcony. On the dead man's desk, investigating police found the phone number of the police chief, Lindberg.

It all reads like a plotline from Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy or a Wallander novel, with the striking exception that in this case it was a Wallander-style policeman who was the architect and not the detective of the crime. "The villains in Mankell's stories are all of a piece," says Lars Linder, chief cultural critic on the daily paper Dagens Nyheter. "They are scoundrels and usually connected to very wealthy or fascist networks. Whereas the thing about Lindberg is that he's so absolutely politically correct on the outside and kinky on the inside."

Last week Lindberg was jailed for six and a half years on charges of rape, pimping and procuring. He accepted that he bought sex, which is illegal in Sweden, but had denied the other charges. After Lindberg's arrest, a woman, calling herself Linda, was quoted in Swedish newspapers. She claimed to have been sexually abused by several men. "The police chief called me 'Daddy's girl'," she said. "I was told that he was important and that he would frame me if I told anyone." Again, she sounds as if she emerged, fully formed, from the pages of Mankell's fiction.

Lindberg was found guilty of aggravated rape, rape, assault, 28 counts of purchasing sex, and one of being an accessory to procurement. He was cleared of the attempted rape of a minor. As well as jailing him, the Södertörn District Court ordered Lindberg to pay 300,000 kronor (about £26,000) in compensation to three victims.

The news of Lindberg's secret life rocked Sweden. While a certain scepticism about the police is common enough in intellectual circles, the notion that the foremost advocate of women's rights in the police was in reality a serial user, and abuser, of prostitutes was enough to stun even the most grizzled cynic.

Lindberg's colleagues, and particularly his female supporters, were dumbfounded. Beatrice Ask, the justice minister, spoke of the "devastating and distressing" effect of the news. While Cecilia Malmström, who is Sweden's EU commissioner and was a member of Uppsala police board when Lindberg was police chief, said: "I have no words. I am extremely shocked. This is a man who has dedicated his career to fight for women's rights. I feel physically sick when I think about this."

In late July Stockholm was a postcard of relaxed health and vigorous prosperity. Along the spotless avenues and in the city's many green spaces, the kind of people who look as if they have escaped from a yoghurt advert took the opportunity to laze in the sunshine. The southern archipelago lightly baked under cloudless skies. Surrounded by inlets of deep blue water, the Swedish capital seemed to sparkle with a crystalline sense of benevolent purpose.

Here is the image of Sweden with which we've grown familiar, an image of which the Swedes themselves are understandably proud. It's the utopian vision of the Folkhemmet or "people's home" that, in one way or another, the Swedes have been conscientiously cultivating and exporting for almost a century.

But in recent years a darker, more disturbing picture of a failed utopia has also made its way around the world. In the 1980s Sweden began to pull back from the enormous state intervention and social reform that had guided the country for the previous half-century. And early in that transformation, on 28 February 1986, the prime minister, Olof Palme was shot and killed in the street by an assassin who has never been found.

Ever since that period, talk of a sinister underbelly, the nasty truth lurking beneath Sweden's shiny surface, has afflicted the national conversation, particularly in the cultural realm. In the novels of writers such as Mankell and Larsson, as well as the films of Lukas Moodysson, corruption, vice and despair run rampant.

All three artists (Larsson died in 2004) are avowedly leftwing and in their different ways they tell the tale of a dream betrayed, and an outcome in which the most vulnerable citizens are abandoned to a ruthless system. It's also notable that all three employ the archetype of the abused prostitute as the prime symbol of capitalist exploitation.

Moodysson's Lilya 4-Ever, made in 2002, was an unremittingly bleak account, based on a true story, of a 16-year-old girl from a former Soviet republic who is tricked into travelling to Sweden, where she is raped, held against her will and prostituted, before she commits suicide. Similar helpless victims appear in the fiction of Mankell and Larsson, where they are explicitly shown to be at the mercy of hidden, well connected and malevolent forces within Swedish society itself.

Of course, Mankell and Larsson are thriller writers, with the necessary artistic licence the genre demands, but both have made it clear that their political motivations shape their creative intentions. Mankell has said he began writing his Wallander novels, in which a world-weary detective battles with entrenched powers, as a response to the "xenophobia and racism" he saw in Sweden in the late 1980s. "The issues," he's said, "were always more important than Wallander himself."

And one of those issues was sexism. In this regard, it's not as if Mankell was a lone voice, ploughing the remote field of fiction. Even without Mankell's huge domestic and international success, the debate on these issues would have dominated Swedish cultural politics during the 1990s. And consequently, in 2000, a commercial sex act was passed that was seen at the time as a victory for radical feminism. It was made legal to sell sex, but illegal to buy it. In other words, criminality shifted from the prostitute to the punter, which in most cases meant from the woman to the man.

At the time, it was heralded as a major defeat for street prostitution and sex trafficking, and many countries, including Britain, have looked at copying the new Swedish model. In the wake of the law, the police had to refocus their attentions and also re-examine many of their attitudes in relation not just to prostitutes but to women in general. The most active and outspoken policeman in the battle for a less patriarchal perspective was, of course, Lindberg.

Many Swedes I spoke to suggested that Lindberg embodied a widespread cultural disconnection between official rhetoric and individual behaviour. As one well-placed observer of the Stockholm scene put it to me: "Some of the most outspoken male politicians on gender equality are also renowned as the most active pursuers of women."

But Gunnar Pettersson, a Swedish writer and commentator who lives in London, had a different take on the problem Lindberg represents. "Sweden has two elites," he told me. "The political elite is internationalist and neutralist in outlook, whereas the other elite, the military-industrial, is essentially nationalist and west-supporting. The two have left each other alone very largely, especially throughout the 20th century when the Swedish model was built up. The thing about Lindberg is that he adopted the rhetoric of the political elite but he belonged by nature and biology to the military-industrial elite, where these things are just horseshit. You just say it to get on in your career."

Whether Lindberg is a split personality or simply a flagrant opportunist is perhaps a question for psychiatrists to settle. What's arguably more significant is the hole his case exposes in the logic of political correctness. The theory behind the PC view of the world is that if you change the language, you change what the language describes, because perception alters reality: non-sexist expressions, for example, help to foster non-sexist thoughts. But what if the prescribed opinion is a false consensus? What if language is a disguise, a means of conformity that serves to conceal the underlying and more disturbing truth?

That would involve a novel variation on the longstanding Swedish preoccupation with deep-lying corruption. But not one that you'll find in the novels of Mankell or Larsson. Subtlety has never been either writer's strong suit, and some Swedes find their Manichean vision of Sweden rather limiting.

"I have always been suspicious and critical about people like Mankell and Larsson," says Lars Linder, "because I'm not a fan of this conspiracy theory. I'm an old leftist too, but I don't like when they pick out the old social democratic Sweden as paradise, and now the bad guys have taken over with all their hidden connections. It's simplistic and nostalgic. The kind of power abuse you see with Lindberg is much more interesting."

Mankell insists that The Troubled Man, published in Swedish last year and due to be published in English next year, is definitely his last Wallander novel. The plot once again features rightwing extremists as the antagonists. Sweden is renowned for its comprehensive social welfare, progressive liberalism and egalitarian spirit, and it's also consistently ranked by Transparency International as among the least corrupt nations in the world. So it seems perverse that when the country holds a mirror up to itself it so often sees female abuse, rightwing conspiracies and systemic corruption. Yet they remain emotive issues in Swedish culture.

A few days after Lindberg appeared in court, the employment minister, Sven Otto Littorin, tendered his resignation when he learned that a newspaper was about to run a story claiming he paid for sex with a prostitute four years ago. His unnamed accuser said she was inspired by the Lindberg case to try to prevent the powerful from escaping the consequences of their actions. He denies ever having paid for sex and the paper, Aftonbladet, offered no evidence, other than that the woman had seen Littorin on television and recognised him. And subsequently several observers have cast doubt on the woman's account, which is said to be filled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies.

But nonetheless Littorin resigned, citing press intrusion into his personal life. For the first time in decades Sweden found itself with a political sex scandal, something which the Swedes believed was a strange preserve of the British. In fact many observers find the Littorin saga more representative than the Lindberg case of the social changes under way in Sweden. For Petra Ostergren it marks a pronounced shift in Swedish public morals and illustrates how a narrow consensus has been effectively imposed. A feminist who is an outspoken critic of the commercial sex laws, Ostergren has been ostracised by many of her onetime allies in the women's movement.

"Fifty years ago Littorin would have had to resign if he was gay. Now we have not only criminalised the buying of sex but we've also stigmatised it to such an extent, he has to resign just because of the mere suspicion. Just as the gay man has been normalised, so the heterosexual buyer has been pathologised. To satisfy society's need for normality, you need something that is not normal. Now that is the sex buyer."

Naturally, that is not how many other feminists would see the situation. For them it is a matter of inequality and coercion. The sex worker, according to conventional intellectual wisdom, is in a weak position, socially and financially, and lacks power in any transaction with the consumer. Therefore she can't be said to be acting of her own free will, particularly, of course, if she has been trafficked and effectively held prisoner.

Ostergren counters that the vast majority of sex workers don't correspond to that description, and in any case forced and elective prostitution are entirely separate propositions. "We can distinguish between consensual and non-consensual or forced marriages," she says. "Why can't we make that distinction with prostitution?"

In answer to her own question, Ostergren outlines the questionable morality that informs some strategic social and political initiatives in Sweden. Fundamentally, she believes, what many Swedes dislike about prostitution is its transgressive, unhygienic, uncontrolled nature. She cites the substantial sterilisation programme overseen by the Social Democrats right up until the 1970s as evidence of an impulse among progressives to clean up and forcefully remove undesirable aspects of society.

"It's all part of the long project towards perfection and being modern," she says. "There is no room for drug addicts, prostitution or men who buy sex. It's an undercurrent of wanting to be a superior nation. We enjoy exporting that image. We love being on moral high ground."

The keys to Sweden, Kjell Nordström told me, are equality, modernity and consensus. A tall, bald professor of economics, Nordström is a kind of business guru who runs a consultancy on "funky capitalism". I visited him at his large apartment, worthy of a Wallpaper* magazine spread, on the leafy island of Djurgården that sits in the middle of Stockholm. It's a magnificent location whose panoramic views, it must be said, do not include the dark underbelly of fictional repute.

Nordström is another critic of the commercial sex law, on the practical basis that it doesn't work. According to some statistics, prostitution is almost back up to the level it was at when the law was introduced. But Nordström was also interested in a practical means of Swedes finding agreement on the issue.

"Conflict," he noted amiably, "is just not possible here. We've had 202 years of peace, and peace makes you a little bit weird." The inequality of prostitution, and therefore its backwardness, was what offended Swedes, he explained. To reach agreement on the issue, therefore, "You need to treat commercial sex in a very gender-neutral way."

I tried to imagine what that might involve, but I was defeated by the old-fashioned gender division of male and female. So Nordström spelt it out: "You have to have a whore house with men and women working alongside one another. You have to show that you've changed the concept to gain acceptance. People are not against sex here. It's a society where you can really talk about sex, it's easy to have sex with people. But you can't have exploitative sex because by definition you have used your power to buy another person. You owe an explanation on how it's not exploitative."

Unlike many Swedes, especially among the intellectual elite, Nordström does not believe that the Swedish project is floundering. He ran through a potted history of the economic miracle that powered the progressive reforms of the 20th century. In the 19th century Sweden was very poor and one in three of the population was an alcoholic. "We were a mini-Russia." In the 1920s a cradle-to-grave idea of social democracy was born in which an alliance between industrialists, unions and the state would produce universal social welfare. This was when the idea of the "people's home", a social democracy in which industrial wealth was redistributed for the communal good, first began to gain currency.

After the war, in which Sweden remained neutral, unoccupied and unbombed, it was one of the few countries in Europe with its manufacturing industry in full working order. Exporting everything from ball bearings to telephone exchanges, it rapidly embarked on a prolonged rise to prosperity. By the 1970s it was ranked as one of the three wealthiest nations in the world. As the money poured in, it was directed to building perhaps the world's most ambitious welfare system, with generous childcare, healthcare and pensions. In 1973, coinciding with a period of prohibitively high taxation, the oil crisis hit the economy. Three decades of growth ground to a halt and by the 1980s the government began to loosen its tight control on markets.

Rejuvenated, the economy expanded again but a disenchantment had entered the Swedish psyche, especially among the utopian left. The disparate doubts and grievances seemed to cohere with the killing of Olof Palme, which remains the defining event of postwar Swedish history. Its impact was bigger, relatively speaking, than the Kennedy assassination. Mankell once wrote a Wallander short story, entitled "The Pyramid", which examined the anxieties unleashed by Palme's murder, and Palme also turns up in The Troubled Man. Later this year, Mankell is also staging in Stockholm a play he has written about Palme, entitled Politik.

Palme was a curious figure. Born into an upper-class family, he assumed the clothes of modesty and frugality, yet at the same time retained a patrician sense of entitlement – he famously demanded that a ferry should return to port when he missed the last one on a trip to his holiday home. He was an internationalist who was fierce in his defence of Sweden's interests, and a neutralist who wooed the Soviet Union while discreetly favouring the west. He stood at the intersection of two different, and often contrary, strands of liberalism – the dual thrusts towards benign state intervention and increased personal liberty.

Walking home one night with his wife along Sveavägen – Stockholm's equivalent of, say, Piccadilly – Palme was killed by a mysterious gunman who vanished into the night. In the absence of a suspect, and incubated by a disastrous police investigation, a mass of conspiracy theories was hatched – some encouraged by the police – which fingered everyone from Kurdish gangsters to Saddam Hussein and the CIA.

Matters were not helped by the fact that the main witness – Palme's widow, Lisbet – refused to co-operate fully with the court, for reasons she has never explained. Her testimony led to the conviction of a violent street thug and alcoholic called Christer Pettersson. Pettersson had a previous conviction for murder for which, in a typically liberal piece of Swedish criminal justice, he had been sentenced to just six months in prison. He was sentenced to life, but was soon released when the judgment was overturned by the court of appeal.

The failure to apprehend the real culprit meant that Sweden's wound, or "national trauma" as it's often called, remained open for many years afterwards. Even now the scar tissue – the stubborn conspiracist paranoia – continues to impinge on various bones of political contention.

The most symbolic of these is the ongoing controversy over submarine incursions into Swedish waters during the 1980s. The provenance of the submarines that were known to hide off the coast of Sweden has been a subject of lengthy dispute. Much of the media believed they were Soviet vessels, while others suspected they belonged to Nato. Once again the troubling image recurs of something untoward lying beneath the smooth surface. Mankell is not alone in his opinion that these incursions, to which he refers in both The Troubled Man and Politik, amounted to a major national scandal. But if so then it may be Palme, the great hero of the left, who was at the centre of the embarrassment. There is growing evidence that some, if not all, of the incursions were Nato submarines, and persistent rumours in diplomatic circles that Palme knew of and agreed to their presence, as a means of affording protection from the Soviet Union.

Certainly Palme was a flexible politician when he needed to be, not least in the realm of sexual politics. Back in the 1970s news leaked out that his minister of justice, Lennart Geijer, was a major user of prostitutes. Although the information was accurate, as Palme knew, the prime minister strenuously denied the facts and the paper that published the story was forced to print an apology. Significantly, one of the villains in Mankell's novel Sidetracked is a minister of justice from the 1970s who is part of a sex ring that sexually and physically abuses women – much like Lindberg is accused of being. The character, who bears a resemblance to Geijer, is blamed for killing the idealism in Swedish politics. It will be interesting, therefore, to see Mankell's judgment of Geijer's boss, Palme, in his new play.

Kjell Nordström maintains that the nostalgia for the Palme era is a yearning to return to a simpler Sweden of greater state control. "There are people who miss the good old times when you could have a meeting, negotiate and then implement the decision. But we're no longer a small homogeneous country. We had to find other ways."

He also suspects that this harking back to a mythical golden age of integrity is partly a function of a Swedish male identity crisis. "Men are losing their position. Women have taken massive steps forward in the last 40 years. There are a number of areas today where it's difficult to be a man, where once there was a male language and now there are strong, powerful women, backed by law."

Lindberg's boss was a woman, he points out, and he was surrounded by women at work. "But," says Nordström, pouring me another glass of chilled wine, "he was not trained by the police university to exist and manage under these conditions."

That, in a nutshell, is the Swedish analysis that ultimately wins out over the conspiracist angst and liberal hand-wringing: here is a problem, let's establish better training and solve it. In many, perhaps most, ways it's an admirable attitude. After all, it bespeaks a progressive belief in the improvement, if not the perfectibility, of humanity. But such a pragmatic approach to problem-solving can also focus on the solution without really addressing the nature of the problem.

In this respect the Swedes who worry about the subterranean darkness might actually be on to something. It's just that they're looking in the wrong place. It's not necessarily in the system, or the state, or the police, or under the sea. It may just be in themselves. Whatever the reason Chief Lindberg may have been driving along with whips and handcuffs on his way to meet a teenage girl, the one certainty is that it was not because he lacked the appropriate training.

If we can stop the physical deterioration that comes with age, molecular biologist Aubrey de Grey sees no reason why human beings shouldn't live to be 1,000

With his beard and robust opinions, there's something of the Old Testament prophet about Aubrey de Grey. But the 47-year-old gerontologist (who studies the process of ageing) says his belief that he might live to the very ripe old age of 1,000 is founded not on faith but science. De Grey studied computer science at Cambridge University, but became interested in the problem of ageing more than a decade ago and is the co-founder of the Sens (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in the US.

What's so wrong with getting old?

It is simply that people get sick when they get older. I don't often meet people who want to suffer cardiovascular disease or whatever, and we get those things as a result of the lifelong accumulation of various types of molecular and cellular damage. This is harmless at low levels but eventually it causes the diseases and disabilities of old age – which most people don't think are any fun.

Is this the biggest health crisis facing the world?

Absolutely. If we look at the industrialised world, basically 90% of all deaths are caused by ageing. They are deaths from causes that affect older people and don't affect young adults. And if we look at the whole world, then the number of deaths that occur each day is roughly 150,000 and about two-thirds of them are because of ageing.

Why does the world not recognise this?

People have been trying to claim that we can defeat ageing since the dawn of time, and they haven't been terribly successful; there is a tendency to think there is some sort of inevitability about ageing – it somehow transcends our technological abilities in principle, which is complete nonsense.

And when people have made their peace with this ghastly thing that is going to happen to them at some time in the distant future, they tend to be rather reluctant to re-engage the question when someone comes along with a new idea.

Is it that our bodies just stop being so proactive about living?

Basically, the body does have a vast amount of inbuilt anti-ageing machinery; it's just not 100% comprehensive, so it allows a small number of different types of molecular and cellular damage to happen and accumulate. The body does try as hard as it can to fight these things but it is a losing battle. So we are not going to be able to do anything significant about ageing without hi-tech intervention – which is what I'm working on.

Ageing involves the process of metabolism, and then deterioration, and then pathology – is that right?

Basically, that's right. Metabolism involves a vastly complicated network of biochemical and cellular processes that are linked and that succeed in keeping us alive for as long as they do, but they have these side effects.

The side-effects start even before we are born, they go on throughout life and they are manifested as, for example, the accumulation of various types of molecular garbage inside cells and outside cells, or simply as cells dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells. Gradually those changes at the molecular and cellular level accumulate and accumulate and eventually they start to get in the way of metabolism, and that's where pathology comes.

You've identified seven particular areas of cellular decay that might be combated. Can you give examples?

I just mentioned cells dying and not being automatically replaced, that's one. Another is cells not dying when they ought to – certain types of cells are supposed to turn over and sometimes they lose the ability to respond to signals that tell them to die.

A third is cells dividing too much – they may be dying when they are supposed to but dividing too much, and that is what cancer is.

We've known what causes cancer for some time but we are a long way from being able to cure it, aren't we?

I certainly don't claim that any of this is easy. Some of it is easier – but I've always viewed cancer as the single hardest aspect of ageing to fix.

You've talked about enriching people's lives, but isn't it the very fact of death that gives our lives meaning?

That's nonsense. The fact is, people don't want to get sick. I'm just a practical guy. I don't want to get sick and I don't want you to get sick and that's what this is all about. I don't work on longevity, I work on keeping people healthy. The only difference between my work and the work of the whole medical profession is that I think we're in striking distance of keeping people so healthy that at 90 they'll carry on waking up in the same physical state as they were at the age of 30, and their probability of not waking up one morning will be no higher than it was at the age of 30.

You've said you think the first person to live to 1,000 may already be alive. Could that person be you?

It's conceivable that people in my age bracket, their 40s, are young enough to benefit from these therapies. I'd give it a 30% or 40% chance. But that is not why I do this – I do this because I'm interested in saving 100,000 lives a day.

Can the planet cope with people living so long?

That's to do with the balance of birth and death rates. It didn't take us too long to lower the birth rate after we more or less eliminated infant mortality 100 or 150 years ago. I don't see that it's sensible to regard the risk of a population spike as a reason not to give people the best healthcare that we can.

Yousaf Raza Gilani's comments follow cancellation of trip to Britain by Pakistan's spy chief

Pakistan's prime minister hit back today at remarks by David Cameron linking the country to the export of terrorism.

Yousaf Raza Gilani, the normally conciliatory premier, used a speech to make the highest level response from Islamabad so far to Cameron's comments during his trip to India. Reports suggest that an official from the British high commission in Islamabad, possibly the deputy chief of mission, will be summoned tomorrow by Pakistan's ministry of foreign affairs for a formal dressing down.

Gilani's intervention follows the abrupt cancellation by Pakistan's spy chief, General Shuja Pasha, of a planned visit to the UK for talks with his British counter-terrorism counterparts.

Co-operation from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, headed by Pasha – which was accused of aiding the Taliban in the Afghan war logs published last week by WikiLeaks – had previously been presented as being crucial to stopping numerous terrorist plots aimed against Britain.

There are fears that a long-planned visit to the UK this week by Pakistan's president, Asif Zardari, could be overshadowed by growing anger at Cameron's remarks among the one million people of Pakistani origin living in Britain. Media outlets and opposition politicians in Pakistan are urging the president to cancel the trip, while demonstrators burnt an effigy of the prime minister on the streets of Karachi.

There is particular anger, shown by Pakistanis yesterday in burning an effigy of the prime minister, that Cameron made the comments on a trip to India.

Gilani focused on the issue in today's speech in Punjab province. "In India, he [Cameron] has given a statement that we in Pakistan promote terrorism," he said. "We want to say to him, we've had good relations with you for 60 years."

He contrasted the issue raised by Cameron with the situation in Kashmir, the Himalayan region mostly held by India, which has been in open rebellion for 20 years. "In India, you [Cameron] talk about terrorism but you don't say anything about Kashmir. You forgot about the human rights abuses going on there. You should have spoken about that too, so that we in Pakistan would have been satisfied."

While Pakistan has frequently been asked to do more in the battle against extremists, Cameron's remarks are seen in Pakistan as going further than any western leader in criticising the country's record and commitment.

An editorial in Dawn, Pakistan's leading English-language daily, said: "No one, with the exception perhaps of New Delhi and Kabul, had ever accused Pakistan of exporting terrorism. In doing so, was Mr Cameron attempting to bracket Pakistan with countries that have been or still are anathema to the west?"

An officer at the ISI said: "Do you make such remarks when visiting a third country, a country we consider an enemy? It was done to appease [India]. You can sit in England and say what you want, but sitting in India gives it a completely different connotation."

A senior Pakistani civilian official said: "Cameron's remarks show a political immaturity, lack of foreign policy experience – and talk about a choosing a bad venue to deliver the message. Being the youngest British prime minister in two centuries isn't necessarily an advantage."

The Cameron intervention came as Pakistan was reeling from the disclosures in the US intelligence documents made public by WikiLeaks. The apparent evidence of ISI collusion with the Taliban from the WikiLeaks material had already been seized on with glee by Indian officials, as confirmation of New Delhi's charge that the Pakistani state sponsors terrorism.

The shadow foreign secretary, David Miliband, said: "Diplomacy is about making friends and influencing them. Today's announcement by the ISI sadly proves that Cameron has failed to make friends and failed to influence them. We need to support Pakistan's intelligence services, not undermine them – their work protects the people of Britain as well as the people of Pakistan. We have a strong Pakistani community in Britain and we have troops in Afghanistan – the stakes are simply too high to go hunting headlines with thoughtless remarks.

"We need a prime minister that understands the complexity of diplomacy and so far Cameron has failed to prove himself as the standard-bearer we need around the world."

Travel expert Riaz Dooley, who has worked to encourage British Asians to take a greater interest in political life, warned that Cameron risked alienating British-Pakistanis. He said: "David Cameron is going to lose the Pakistani vote over this, because he has not apologised. It is not fair to say that Pakistan promotes the export of terrorism, he doesn't have any proof."

Labour MP Khalid Mahmood agreed that the Pakistani community in the UK was angry about Cameron's comments. He said the prime minister had failed to reflect how much the country had sacrificed in the war on terror. "They have taken a huge amount of casualties in the north-west province and there have been a huge number of bombings in Pakistan.

"They have suffered enormously in terms of their own people's lives and to suggest this counts for nothing is very, very insensitive."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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