The Guardian's Blog, page 187

The Guardian Literary clock - add a quote

Times a ticking, so help us to create a very special timepiece

Back in April 2011, we embarked on a mammoth task; to build a 24 hour literary clock. The project was put to one side for a while, but now it's back!
The idea of creating a clock made entirely from quotes from books, was inspired by Christian Marclay's film installation, The Clock. Marclay's piece is made up of thousands of different film clips which feature a specific hour and minute, spliced together in chronological order to create a 24 hour continuous film perfectly in sync with real time. We liked the concept so much that we thought we'd have a go using books. How hard could it be, joked a member of the books desk.

Many of you suggested quotes for the clock when we first kicked it off, but we were forced to put the project on hold because at the time we couldn't find the right place to show it off. Now we've found just the venue: the Guardian's literary clock will make it's debut at the Edinburgh international books festival. Not bad hey? And particularly timely, as this year the festival celebrates its 30th birthday by looking back over the past three decades, and considering what the coming years have in store.

So, we have the venue, we have the technology, now all we need are the quotes and for this we need your help.

Marclay's project took three years to build. We have two weeks to fill in all the gaps in ours. We like a challenge. We started this project together and I'm confident we can finish it in time to see it take pride of place in Charlotte Gardens when the festival opens on 8 August, but, we need to work quickly.

Here's what we need you to do: look at the times and quotes that have already been submitted, rack your brains, rummage through bookshelves and, using the form below, give us a quote from a book or a play that relates to a specific time. For example: 'It was 12:56 A.M. when Gerald drove up onto the grass and pulled the limousine right next to the cemetery.' Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.

After submitting your quote your work is done and all you need to do is sit back and wait for your name to appear in the artwork. We only need one quote for each minute, though, so please no more midnight action. Every quote we use will be credited with the the name of the book, the author and the person who submitted it.

Thank you to everyone who entered a quote back in 2011. Your hard work has not been lost and the majority of lines will be featured in the finished artwork.

I'll leave the comment section open in case there are any questions or comments. As I said, we're against the clock so on your marks, get set, go!

Edinburgh festivalHannah Freeman
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Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewing

Hello good book people. All well I trust? Apologies that this blog is a day later than usual but I've been on holiday. I hope that gets me off the hook.

Thanks to everyone who shared their holiday reading lists and their thoughts on books recently finished. Here's a selection of your comments:

Mitchum:

Sunday afternoon I opened Karl-Ove Knausegaard's 'A Death In The Family' and with a very sore shoulder and back sometime into early Monday morning I closed it. A stunning read. As compelling as anything I've read since my teens (those years when we do our best reading, perhaps?) & indeed it filled me with nostalgia for own awkward teen years.

For my upcoming holiday I've ordered 'The Spectre Of Alexander Wolf' on foot of the recent review. Sounds like my thing...and I've found one can't go wrong with Pushkin Press.

lukethedrifter:

I'm about to go on a very short holiday tomorrow, just a few days, but I need to take several books, just in case: I've already covered about one third of Hotel Bemelmans by Ludwig Bemelmans, which is fantastic - funny, warm, insightful. Though I do think Anthony Bourdain does himself injustice by claiming Bemelmans did Kitchen Confidential before he did. They fill different niches.

thedukeorlando:

I currently have 17 books on the go (I know, I know), amongst them works by Dorothy L. Sayers, Lillian Faderman, and George R.R. Martin, but at the moment I'm focusing on Alison Weir's 'Elizabeth the Queen', though what with the new White Queen series being broadcast, and partly thanks to the brilliant performances of Amanda Hale (Margaret Beaufort) and Janet McTeer (Jacquetta of Luxembourg), I have a feeling I'll end up buying the last two books in the Cousins War trilogy, The Red Queen and Lady of the Rivers, despite how much Gregory's writing style annoys me.

Trevor Edward Walder:

Just finished. A Corruptible Crown by Gillian Bradshaw. Brilliant, a love story, set during the latter stages of England's Civil War. A conscripted Blacksmith separated from his printer wife. A worm's eye view of history.

And, just before we move on to our review list for this week, I'd like to say farewell to alanwskinner who is taking what I hope will only be a short break from TLS:

My current books are way overdue and I should probably stop reading completely until I finish them.

Recently, I announced on my blog that I was quitting social media; that is, no more blogs and no more Twitter[...] I don't know if there is a help line for recovering addicts of the Guardian Books pages but even if there were, I wouldn't want to be distracted by that, either. So, no 12 steps for me. Just cold turkey. It won't be easy. I can feel myself weakening already. It is a nice community here, with so many interesting and intelligent people and their thoughts.

So, alanskinner, a fond farewell. Perhaps when you've finished writing your book, you'll return?

Our review list

Non-fiction:

• What Do Women Want? by Daniel Bergner
• Ten Billion by Simon Emmott
• Sleepless in Hollywood by Lynda Obst
• Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials That Shape Our Man-made World by Mark Miodownik
• Undercover by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
• The Bling Ring by Nancy Jo Sales
• Alexandria: The Last Nights of Cleopatra by Peter Stothard

Fiction:

• Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
• Taipei by Tao Lin
• A Bright Moon for Fools by Jasper Gibson
• Perfect by Rachel Joyce
• In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge

Children's:
• The Child's Elephant by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers
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Guardian First book award 2013: help us find the 10th title

The publishers' submissions are all in, but there's still one slot to fill on the Guardian First book award longlist. Can you help us find this year's most brilliant literary debut?

The publishers' nominations are all in for the Guardian First book award 2013, with our panel of judges already hard at work to select books for nine of the slots on this year's longlist. But now it's your chance to fill the 10th by letting us know about a debut which demands inclusion on the most exciting literary longlist of 2013.

Last year we found Sarah Jackson's Pelt, a collection of poems that explores childhood and memory, while in 2011 it was Juan Pablo Villalobos's Down the Rabbit Hole – the first title from And Other Stories. But what will it be this year?

We're looking for first books across all genres – from poetry to philosophy, from popular science to science fiction. Past winners of the award include a biography of cancer and a graphic novel, an account of the Rwandan genocide and a study of a very English modernism. But they have to be first books published in the UK in English between 1 January 2013 and 31 December 2013 – translations must be within five years of publication in their original language. For further details, take a look at the terms and conditions.

And we're particularly keen to hear about smaller and newer publishers, about authors from outside the mainstream, about new voices who find it hard to be heard among the 150,000 titles published in the UK every year.

To make your nomination, all you have to do is review it on the site, and then add a link in the comments below before midnight on 14 July 2013. For anyone not yet familiar with the reviewing tools on the site, here's a handy step-by-step guide:

1 Find the book on our database and click through to the book page

2 Hit the button "Post your review", or if you're already signed in to the Guardian, just start typing into the review box – we'll need a couple of hundred words or so to get an idea of the book and why it should be on the First book award longlist

3 Post that review, click on the link called "share" and copy the link

4 Come back over here to the comments, write "Nomination" and then paste in the link to your enlightening, entertaining and informative review

If your chosen title doesn't appear (yet) in our database, just let us know and add your review in the comments here.

That's all there is to it – so let us know about the best of this year's debuts. Let the search begin!

• Terms and conditions for recommending a book

Guardian first book awardRichard Lea
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Readers take control in a new age of print

The broadening scope of literature in a digital world is encouraging readers to make their voices heard in deciding prizes

It's not just the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury. All over Britain, the festival – indeed the cultural – scene is changing. Last weekend I drove westwards to attend the Chalke Valley History festival. When it started, three years ago, this clever, offbeat book festival, the brain-child of former bookseller James Heneage, was confined to a marquee, a cricket pavilion, and a field in the middle of nowhere (actually, just outside Salisbury).

Despite, or perhaps because of, the recession, Chalke Valley is still in the middle of nowhere, though I hear it's negotiating to come closer to civilisation next year. But, at the same time – with enhanced sponsorship, and Heneage's manic enthusiasm – it's rocking. More speakers than ever, attendances booming, and book readers from across the south-west flocking to its fluttering standard.

Chalke Valley offers a mixture of books, authors, food and drink, celebrity and ideas, but its bedrock is the extraordinary boom in reading that's been detonated by the digital revolution.

The age of the laptop, the iPad, and the Kindle has sponsored, among many changes, a phenomenon that can only be described as a golden age of reading. We are now consuming more print, in more formats, than ever before. Moreover, this unprecedented appetite for print is having an impact not just on literary festivals. The individual formerly known as "the common reader", now enfranchised by the world wide web, has begun to demand access to the once closed world of books.

Last week, in a sign of the times, the Asia-Pacific Writers and Translators Association launched a new book prize in which ordinary readers will have a dominant voice. "Everyone is fed up with book prizes where professors of literature choose books which are great reads, but only for professors of literature," said Nury Vittachi, chairman of the Asia-Pacific Writers' and Translators' Association. "What about books for the rest of us?"

The idea for the World Readers' award came from a noisy meeting of writers and translators in Bangkok last October, when participants from all over the world, including North Korea, expressed their dismay at the unimaginative way book prize panels made predictable choices.      

Vittachi and his colleagues decided to organise a prize in which the narrow format that underpins most book awards would be broken open. "As the world becomes a more level playing field, the next JRR Tolkien or Ian Fleming will likely be a female from Asia," said Jane Camens, executive director of the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators Association. "This prize gives her a chance."

The World Readers' Award will have new criteria for entry. While you need a US passport to win the Pulitzer, and a British or Commonwealth passport to win the Man Booker, judges of this new prize won't consider your nationality at all. The idea is to encourage writing set at least partly outside global literature's Anglo-American heartland.

Now, this departure could be a recipe for the worst kind of literary populism. Involving ordinary readers is no guarantee that the final verdict will be "better", however you choose to define that – possibly the reverse. But one thing is certain: Mr Vittachi and his co-conspirators have served notice on the literary prize world. In the golden age of the reader, Pulitzer, Booker, Costa and the rest will have to acknowledge that the borders of the literary world can no longer be policed in the traditional way.

FestivalsRobert McCrum
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Poem of the week: The Man by Maitreyabandhu

A quiet portrait of isolated life uses coolly observed, ordinary details to build an unexpectedly suspenseful narrative

This week's poem "The Man" is by the Buddhist writer Maitreyabandhu, whose first full-length collection, The Crumb Road, has just been published by Bloodaxe and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Typically, it's a poem which seems to present a reassuringly ordinary and familiar scenario, while slowly making the reader aware that something unusual is going on. The images in a Maitreyabandhu poem may be drawn from life, and not obviously symbolic, but they're so arranged to denote a re-ordered reality, together evoking a sometimes dreamlike, inexplicable significance beyond the reader's initial expectations.

It's tempting to see the isolation of "the man" in the poem as the chosen solitude of a contemplative. But, if so, it's an edgy, distracted solitude. If this were a self-portrait by an artist, the artist in the picture would not be its whole subject, not a sharply-seen face, but a figure sharing the scene with other objects.

At first, we see him framed by the kitchen window. It's not clear at this point whether the view shown to the reader is seen from outside, or from the kitchen, or from inside the man's head. The view is not menacing, but disconcerting. It's as if the man had projected his own distractions onto the birds, with their nervous movements and "gestures of defiance". Somehow, all the birds in the poem, even the ladybirds, are emblematic, more than they seem, though their behaviour is not markedly extraordinary.

The pheasant is subdued, "his copper coat restrained". This may be the man's perception, but it's presented so as to suggest an act of self-control on the bird's part, a determination, paralleled by that of the setting sun, not to be picturesque. It's then we learn what the man is actually looking at: he's watching the ladybirds inside. We get the impression that there are, unusually, a lot of them – almost a swarm.

The man, as I've suggested, it not at the poem's centre. He's presented unnamed, the member of a species co-existing with other species. They all seem somehow to be caught between overlapping but inaccessible worlds: the ladybirds huddling by the lights and, in a startling simile, falling "down on their backs as if they'd taken ether", the nervous birds, the man who sits by the window and almost obsessively watches the ladybirds in a kitchen which, we increasingly sense, is not his own.

The middle stanza begins by drawing back to unfold a larger perspective of place and time. We see there's a field surrounding the house. Outside and indoors, time seems telescoped, one day merging with many. There are "always" the woodpigeons and the robin. The word "squadrons" gives the woodpigeons an uneasy, greyly militaristic presence. And though the robin's song might seem domesticated as it's conjured by the phrase, "as bright as teaspoons", the sweet, metallic sound so perfectly evoked is both joyous and a little menacing. Now time really speeds up. In a pair of beautifully economical lines, the sun rises and sets, as if seen through a time-lapse camera. The man is shown performing two simple activities, making two cups of coffee and taking off his glasses before sleeping. It's implied that these are regular activities. What else does he do? Does he eat? Is he fasting? Perhaps the poet has chosen to focus on those particular rituals because they are central to the man's sense of identity.

"Nothing/happened inside the house." Like a prisoner, the man goes out for exercise. He "walked around/the garden with his scarf around his neck". The repetition of "around" evokes entrapment. The robin and the scarf-wearing suggest the season is winter (perhaps the ladybirds were seeking places to hibernate?) All the details, so sharply observed, heard, tasted and felt, add up to a repetitive cycle which has a faintly desperate quality about it. Philip Larkin's question, "Where can we live but days?" comes to mind.

The human "signs of life" the man wishes for are auditory, and seem very quiet and intimate, particularly "the sound of someone … slipping on a jacket." These wishes might be memories, rather than the imagining of what another's presence might be like. When I first read the poem, I wondered if the man had lost a loved partner or close friend. But this stanza doesn't actually rule out another presence. It may be one which lacks discernible "signs of life". The man may be deluded about what is and isn't alive or present.

The brightness of the sunlit kettle recalls the robin's song earlier. The "patch of sunlight" seems to move fast ("swivelled") while the man ceases to move much at all. He "lay down and wrote inspiring things/on little scraps of card". Perhaps the reader should resist the temptation to mutter, "Aha. He's a poet." There's no certainty that the inspiring things are poems. The man may be writing anything, the judgment purely subjective. "Inspiring" is a word which tends to carry an ironic undertone.

The man no longer looks or goes outside. He imagines the sounds of the creatures beyond the house, but isn't sure if he's really heard them. The last line-and-a-half close the narrative abruptly and dramatically, the point of no return emphasised by the distant "spout/out" rhyme. Suddenly, the man is without the basic means of survival. He may be a practicing ascetic, but he will be forced to confront anew his human vulnerability. The poem simply says what happened: the man is now out of the picture. The reader supplies the gasp of dismay. But what if it's the moment of liberation?

The poem's slow tempo, its relaxed but precise diction, and the detached yet not unsympathetic manner, grounded in the use of the third-person perspective, create a mood of possibility, not necessarily negative. Importantly, the narrative is in the past tense. This helps build suspense, and adds a flavour of parable. It's impossible to read the poem without sharing the solitary man's own heightened perception. Even at the end, I felt obscurely that I wanted to go living in the poem and sharing the experience, however extreme it had become.

Both alert and bored, a creature of habit and of patient vision, "the man" is everyman. His story could be one that takes place in the future, at the moment when human civilisation begins to crumble. He may die or he'll go on, as Auden said, "To further griefs, and greater,/ And the defeat of grief." Beyond his lifespan, there will still be birds and animals, nights and days. Or so the poem encourages us to hope.

The Man

The man was sitting by the kitchen window.
Outside, the trees were full of nervous birds,
nodding their heads or flicking up their tails
in gestures of defiance. A pheasant walked
along a hedge, his copper coat restrained,
even the sun held back behind the trees.
The man was watching ladybirds climb up
the windowpane: so many on the walls,
so many huddled near the lights! They fell
down on their backs as if they'd taken ether.

The house stood in the corner of a field
with woodpigeons, always woodpigeons, in twos
or squadrons in the trees; and a robin singing
from a post, his song as bright as teaspoons.
The sun rose in pale and broken stripes,
then set in a perfect orange ball. Nothing
happened inside the house. The man took off
his glasses when he slept, drank two strong cups
of coffee every day, and walked around
the garden with his scarf around his neck.

He wanted signs of life: the sound of someone
closing a drawer or slipping on a jacket;
but no-one pressed the gravel drive or opened
the kitchen door. A patch of sunlight swivelled
round the room, brightening the kettle's spout.
The man lay down and wrote inspiring things
on little scraps of card. He thought he heard
a hare snuffling in the grass, an owl
hooting in the night. But then the taps
ran dry and the blue pilot light went out.

PoetryCarol Rumens
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Five science fiction novels for people who hate SF

The genre's denser stories can seem rebarbative to 'general readers', but these books tell immediately relevant, compelling tales

Science fiction is all around us, from clandestine electronic surveillance to robots taking our jobs, from death-dealing drones in the skies of Pakistan right through to the second industrial revolution unleashed by 3D printing. It's more than a century since writers began charting the technological dream of human civilisation we now live in, but some readers are still put off by a writer who reaches into the future, a novel with a spaceship on the cover.

Like any enduring cultural experiment, science fiction has evolved its own codes, its own logic. Some of the genre's most intense and visionary work talks in a shared language of concepts that can be hard for the uninitiated to penetrate – works Samuel Delaney's Dhalgren or James Tiptree Jr's Ten Thousand Light Years From Home, for instance, would be a forbidding place to start. But if you want to catch up with the literature of our shared future then where can you begin?

It would be hard to find a better starting point than Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. Mankind receives a signal from space, music from the alien world Rakhat. The first to respond are not governments or even corporations, but the Jesuit missionary order, who send a private expedition in a hollowed out asteroid to make contact. The novel is told in retrospect through the eyes of the only surviving crew member, priest Emilio Sandoz. If this scenario sounds at all oddball to you, please put those feelings aside. The story of the first encounter between humankind and alien life that Russell creates is both devastating and an awe-inspiring treatise on man's relationship to our universe.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson is quickly becoming historical fiction. It so astutely pinpointed the emerging trends in technology in 2003 that a decade on from its publication it reads more like a documentary record than a work of SF. Cayce Pollard is a 30-something hipster immersed in the new media world of global corporate brands, who finds herself drawn in to a dangerous conspiracy as she tries to track down a mysterious set of video clips on the internet. Gibson's seventh novel pre-empted the YouTube revolution by mere months, and is still required reading for anyone trying to understand the fractured reality of our media-saturated world today.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin is among the first major works of feminist SF, alongside Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Joanna Russ's The Female Man. I could in fact have included any of Le Guin's novels in this list, but The Left Hand of Darkness arguably marks the point where SF came into its true political strength. Genly Ai is an envoy sent to the planet of Winter to petition for its entry to the Ekumen. But Winter is a world unlike any other, its inhabitants neither male nor female. The construction of identity – of gender, race and class – is at the heart all of today's political and social struggles. Le Guin's genius was to show how SF could be a powerful tool for dissecting and reconstructing those identities.

The Player of Games by Iain M Banks takes at least a little inspiration from the masterworks of Le Guin. The Culture is a galaxy-spanning civilisation that lives in perfect utopia. Nothing amuses the humans and computer Minds who run the Culture more than messing around with less evolved, more barbaric civilisations. Jernau Gergeh is the Culture's greatest game player, dispatched on a mission to the Empire of Azad, a brutal set of distant planets whose political system is structured around the game of Azad itself. The strength of Banks's writing is as much in its wit and bombast as its smart political thinking, but readers will find plenty of big ideas to get their teeth into.

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F McHugh is perhaps the most mundane of my five picks here. Rafael Zhang is mixed Chinese and Puerto Rican, living in a near future where China has become the political and technological global super-power. Zhang is also gay, a cause of major problems as he tries to advance in a conservative world. The young man's attempts to qualify as an engineer are continually frustrated by a world of social hierarchies, oppressive government and rapacious corporations reaching into the lives of individuals. China Mountain Zhang is a reminder that for all its galaxy-spanning ambition, sometimes SF gives us as accurate description of the present day as anything you can find in the mainstream.

Science fictionFictionUrsula K Le GuinIain BanksWilliam GibsonDamien Walter
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Ken Loach: We need a new movement to defend the NHS

'Current politicians have betrayed the principles of the NHS. In my view they are not worthy of our vote'

'The reform of the Health Service is, of course, to bring it back into the market place and degrade it back again into making healthcare a commodity – so it's not reform at all."

"If we don't understand that we have got to do everything, up to and including breaking the law, to defend the National Health Service, then we are finished."

First the words of a distinguished GP, then those of a former Liverpool dockworker. Across society, there is a realisation that the National Health Service is one of our greatest social achievements and that to keep it is an enormous political challenge.

Politicians of all parties, to a greater or lesser extent, have prepared the way for privatisation. It is a familiar pattern. The process in the health service began in the early 1980s, with the sub-contracting of cleaning services. Why have we taken so long to respond? Are we so gullible that we believe politicians who say that the NHS is "safe in their hands", when all the evidence is to the contrary?

In order to fight back, we need to understand the reasons for the attack on the NHS. This is an ideological issue. If it were simply a matter of finance, there are solutions to hand. There are billions of pounds in unpaid and uncollected taxes. Trillions, we are told, are kept offshore, beyond the reach of national governments. The wealth that is created by the work of ordinary people is siphoned off so that it cannot be used for the common good. If the political will to sustain a publicly funded health service existed, a way would be found.

It is a battle for ideas. To some, the drive for profit is a necessary discipline. Private business will see a need, provide the service in the most cost-effective way, and make money in the process. Greed is good. When everyone pursues their own self-interest, so the theory goes, we all benefit.

Except that we don't. When the need can't yield a profit, the need goes unanswered. The NHS and care services provide many examples of people's requirements not being met. Those who work there could fill many pages with their stories. Further privatisation will widen the care gap and the so-called austerity programme diminishes every aspect of our life.

The resistance to this has been very weak. The organisations that should be our first line of defence have let us down. The trade unions, crippled by Thatcher's government and abandoned by the Labour Party, have barely made an intervention. The Labour Party itself has followed the same path as its Tory predecessor in government. While trying to present a more humane face, it has continued the policies of privatisation and deregulation. When Labour adopted the slogan "Labour Means Business" it was not immediately apparent that they meant it literally.

This has left a political vacuum. Who puts forward the idea of working together for the common good? That we should be our brother's and sister's keeper? That we have the technology and the knowledge to provide a decent life for all, but we are in the grip of an economic ideology that makes that impossible?

Yet there is a fightback taking place across Europe. Strikes and direct actions are being seen in the countries hit hardest by mass unemployment and other consequences of economic failure. In Greece, France and Germany there are new political movements on the left, putting forward alternatives. It has not happened yet in Britain. When people ask who they can vote for to defend the NHS, what do we tell them?

Current politicians have betrayed the principles of the NHS. In my view they are not worthy of our vote. If ever there were a time for there to be a broadly based movement, democratic and principled, that stood for the interests of the people against the demands of business and the politicians who speak for them, that moment is now.

• Ken Loach has written the foreword to NHS SOS: How the NHS Was Betrayed – and How We Can Save It, edited by Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis.

NHSHealth policyPoliticsPrivatisationKen Loach
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Why is 'across the piece' suddenly all over the place? | Steven Poole

That great source of ugly neologism, office jargon, has released a new abomination into general usage. Blame Ed Balls

When Ed Balls seemed to announce the other week that a Labour government would cut pensions, he said: "The majority of most welfare spending is in fact going to people over 60. That's the truth and we should look across the piece."

Across the what? The piece of what? Commenter glamorganist said: "I know it's off-topic but I can't concentrate when I have to read phrases like 'across the piece'." Frankly, nor can I.

The peculiar "across the piece" has become common office jargon, though it is rather mystifying. It means simply "throughout" or "everywhere", but it seems that no one knows quite why. The variant "across the piste" is often heard, presumably not implying that people or fencers make a habit of skiing or fighting sideways, but this is a minority variant of much more recent origin: it's probably a simple mishearing, or an attempt (ironically incorrect) to sound more sophisticated.

Synonymous with the business use of "across the piece" – and much more familiar — is the phrase "across the board", whose origin is said to lie in an each-way bet in horse-racing. But why "board" might have given way to "piece" in modern office-talk is mysterious, unless "board" was thought offensive to wooden people, like Tolkein's talking trees, the Ents.

What seems the likeliest origin is the sense of "piece", venerable in English, that means an area of enclosed or otherwise demarcated land (as in the park in Cambridge called Parker's Piece). The phrase "across the piece" is used in such a sense in William Gilpin's Observations on the River Wye of 1800, where he points out glumly that Nature rarely offers a completely harmonious composition to the eye:

Either the foreground or the background is disproportioned; or some awkward line runs across the piece; or a tree is ill-placed; or a bank is formal; or something or other is not exactly what it should be.

Slightly later, "across the piece" was also used in the context of practical matters, such as in an 1807 printing patent (which offers variation of the pattern "by changing the order of figures across the piece"), or in Edward H Knight's 1874 The Practical Dictionary of Mechanics, which defines a "traverse-saw" as "a cross-cutting saw which moves on ways across the piece". Perhaps from there "across the piece" came to mean "covering the whole width" – of anything at all, rather than just a piece of lumber.

As Balls's use shows, "across the piece" is one example of office jargon that has gone viral in the world of politics too. Language-spotters should tip their hats in particular to the virtuosic under-secretary at the Ministry of Justice, Jonathan Djanogly MP, who managed in a single answer to the Public Administration Select Committee's 2012 hearings on justice administration to use "across the piece" an impressive four times. He understood why people wanted "to have some kind of policy format across the piece"; he reported that "we can look across the piece in terms of where these tribunals actually sit" and that "we now have the ability to look across the piece in terms of judicial careers"; and he reassured the committee members that "we are now looking at courts and tribunals across the piece".

Balls could easily have said "We should look at all options" or "We should consider everything." Unfortunately he said, as though it came quite naturally to him, "We should look across the piece" – and in doing so, he might well have alienated not a few voters who are constitutionally allergic to the cliquey argot of managerialese.

Written languageLanguageEd BallsSteven Poole
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Choose July's Reading group book

Heroes are the theme next month, so there's vast amounts of fiction and non-fiction to consider. Please vote below for what you'd like to read

The best new book I have read so far this year is Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, and I'll be very surprised if I read a better one in the remaining five months. If it wasn't a debut novel (he had already published a short story collection), I'd be tempted to call it the work of a master at the top of his game. As it is, I just have to say that it isn't surprising that Fountain spent a good 20 years perfecting his craft before this book was published. It contains prose so good that it left me purring with delight, not to mention roaring with laughter. The story too is compelling and beautifully constructed. It tells of a a company of troops who have returned to the US as heroes after they were filmed taking on Iraqi insurgents in a fierce against-the-odds firefight - and who are now being paraded at a halftime show during an American football game. In detailing the desperate need for heroes that everyone displays around this troop of baffled and increasingly drunk young men, it investigates one of the fundamental cravings in our society. And it captures a fundamental contradiction in showing how unsettling the heroes find the situation, and how attitudes towards them change as soon as they demonstrate that they are normal men rather than mythical beings. Heroism is a tough business.

Just as I was finishing Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, the terrible events in Woolwich took place. Fountain's narrative rang true in all sorts of uncomfortable ways. It wasn't just that Lee Rigby was wearing a Help For Heroes t-shirt when he was attacked, it was the story of Ingrid Loyau Kennett. When I first read about her bravery I found myself welling up, immensely grateful for this sign that humans can do good things as well as bad, eager to discover as much as I could about her story. But, of course, she found it strange and unsettling to be part of the media storm, declaring even that she felt "like a fraud". And so, I suppose, it has always been. We love stories of heroism – but heroes themselves are often less certain about their role, less sure they want to be pushed onto such a precarious pedestal.

The unease of heroes can lead to great stories showing the best and worst of humanity, and illuminate our fundamental confusion about most things. Naturally, it is a mainstay of literature. It's been a big theme ever since Achilles decided that he didn't like the pressure of being the number one Trojan-basher and opted out of Agaememnon's army (a story most recently explored in Madeline Miller's Orange prize-winning The Song of Achilles). It should provide rich fodder for the Reading group, taking in everything from Hemingway's broken heroes to Atticus Finch to Frodo Baggins.

And then of course, there are the anti-heroes: Raskolnikov, Ignatius J Reilly and, of course, Don Quixote. We don't need to stick to fiction either. As you might expect, the most moving stories of heroism are generally real. A few years ago Penguin released a great series of true-life second world war stories such as George Psychoundakis's The Cretan Runner. On that topic there's also Ill Met By Moonlight, as well as less likely heroes such as Eric Newby and his wonderful Short Walk In The Hindu Kush …

But now I'm getting over-excited and starting to reel out a great long list – and that's your job! So please leave a nomination and ideas about heroism below.

I have one last contribution: a few days ago I received a copy of She Landed By Midnight, a new book from Carole Seymour-Jones telling the astonishing story of Secret Agent Pearl Witherington. This was a woman who organised a secret army in France and played a crucial role in ensuring the success of the D-Day landings by delaying a Panzer division's progress to the beaches. She was astonishing, by the sound of it. But had you heard of her? And there lies another sadness of heroism: that so many remarkable people have been forgotten and so many remain unsung. We can help right that wrong in a small way today by giving away 10 copies of She Landed By Moonlight to the first 10 people to nominate a book they'd like us to discuss next month – and to post an "I want" alongside that nomination. If you're in the first 10 you will get a copy, so long as you also remember to email your address to Ginny.Hooker@guardian.co.uk - we can't track you down ourselves.

FictionHistorySam Jordison
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Why so few women in the London Review of Books?

I'm assured that the marginal exposure of women in an otherwise worthy journal is a 'complicated' question. Is it, really?

I emailed a nice man at the London Review of Books. My subscription had lapsed and I'd decided, quietly, not to renew.

Was there a reason I wasn't renewing? Well, now that you mention it, yes, there was a reason, absolutely. And since they were asking, I wrote back and told them.

The problem was the game my partner and I played every time a new edition arrived in our letter box. We call it Guess the Ladies. How many this week? I'd ask, trying not to sound jaded.

Four. Reviewers or reviewees? Both. Out of 20. Oh. So now I'm jaded.

You can play along at home if you happen to have a subscription to one of the UK's premier literary review journals. If not, you can review the contents online at your leisure.

Having been asked, I told them: the ridiculously low number of women who are represented in each edition of your otherwise worthy journal is, well, ridiculous. The reply: It's complicated, "as complicated as it gets". The response was genuine in its bafflement and its hand-wringing consternation, and ended by stating that the editors at the LRB were desperate to change the situation.

To which I replied: then change it.

And then I posted the exchange on my blog, where it was retweeted and picked up by Salon.com in the US. Many people responded with, "I've been thinking that for ages." We might be the only household where Guess the Ladies is played, but we're clearly not alone in our frustration with the gender balance of the LRB.

Indeed, the US lobby group for women in the literary arts, Vida, has been doing its own, slightly more statistically exacting version of Guess the Ladies for books coverage across the print media for some years (including the LRB). When the first survey, complete with pie charts, was published in 2011, there was widespread consternation at the striking gender imbalance. Two years later the Guardian looked at gender balance in the books pages, and I'll leave you to guess how little the picture at the Review has changed.

Although there's been no reply to my follow-up emails (no phone calls, no flowers, nothing), an LRB editor, Deborah Friedell, wrote to Salon, explaining, "we're getting better, particularly when it comes to promoting and publishing the next generation of female critics". She noted that the Review already publishes esteemed women writers. What I've lamented is the proportions, which are consistently low, though great for Guess the Ladies.

Indeed, in its latest innings, Guess the Ladies scored 14 male contributors and three female. Of the books reviewed, eight were by men and three were by women. By publishing a literary journal with about 70% male contributors in every edition, the implicit message is that male writing is better than female writing. If you believe this to be the case, have the courage of your convictions and admit it, so that we can acknowledge what the argument really is. If however, you believe that women writers are equal to male writers, then try harder. It isn't complicated. It's simple.

My LRB correspondent explained that "men vastly outnumber women among writers proposing pieces", but then went on to confirm that it is the editors who approach contributors – so, surely, in this case, the complication lies with the editors themselves. Is it more complicated to commission a woman than to commission a man? I want journals like this to succeed. I want to celebrate literature being taken seriously, being given proper space for reflection. However, I don't believe that serious literature is confined to male writers.

The response to my blogpost brings to mind the Arthurian tale of the Fisher King, in which the knight Parsifal rides to an unknown kingdom where he meets a king with a festering leg wound. As the king reclines on a hammock, groaning in agony, the courtiers party around him, all too polite to mention this suppurating sore. So Parsifal, being well brought up, keeps his mouth shut too. At the end of the evening he rides home to his wife who berates him for not caring enough to mention the king's very obvious wound. So Parsifal (who has learned to listen to his wife) trots back to the kingdom and enters the palace. There he is, the king, lying on a hammock, groaning. "You're wounded," Parsifal says, "What ails you?" And his question – his concern – heals not only the king but the entire kingdom.

Silence doesn't help. Pretending that there is no problem doesn't mean that there is no problem. It simply means that a collection of cats have got our tongues. Are we too shy, too scared, too awkward to say: this does not look good, my liege, best get some antiseptic on that?

Deborah Friedell concluded her letter to Salon.com by saying "We're trying; we'll try harder." Great. Try harder sooner, please.

London Review of BooksLiterary criticismGenderWomenKathryn Heyman
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