The Guardian's Blog, page 206

Reader reviews roundup

This week readers have travelled to Ireland, gone Romantic and raked over the ruins of empire

Julian6 has been to Ireland this week, with John McGahern's "quietly impressive" Memoir of life before the second world war – a universe which "seems as remote from our lives as if it were two hundred years before".

This is a land held in the iron grip of the church, a theocracy where hierachy is all, and this permeates the lives of families like McGahern's: the father as the head - the mother as the heart.

McGahern shows us the "terrible rages" of his father Frank, a former IRA man "for whom violence towards his whole family is almost second nature". But according to julian6, McGahern's account is alive to the contradictions implicit in a society where the church can be at once "repressive", encouraging "abuses in the home and at school" and at the same time a "luminous beacon of hope".

While the depiction of childhood is "richly imagined in all its physicality and sensuous beauty", the second half of the book "seems more sketchy" before McGahern comes to a close that is "calm and softly elegiac". For julian6, "McGahern is a writer to admire but also to love."

LynnRobertsPoet has been examining Lynn Shepherd's A Treacherous Likeness, which sees detective Charles Maddox tangling with Romantics when he is engaged by Percy Bysshe Shelley's family to safeguard the reputation of the late poet.

It rapidly becomes evident, however, that beneath the burnish the metal is vilely dark and pitted by corrosive emotions.

The story moves between Charles and the bed-ridden Mary Shelley in the 1850s, LynnRobertsPoet continues, and Charles's great-uncle Maddox, who was employed by the Shelleys in 1816.

Maddox is plunged, despite himself, into the involved loves and hates of the Shelleys, Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, Harriet Shelley, and the variously engendered offspring. He discovers a pit of interrelationships so dark, murderous, incestuously interwoven and infectious that he is hideously compromised and buries the whole matter – until his great-nephew comes digging.

Bodies and dysfunction aplenty are uncovered in a fractured, multi-layered narrative which is "extraordinarily clever and satisfying", culminating in a resolution "which marries historical fact to themes in Shelley's own writing".

There may be a little too much in the way of coincidence for some, adds LynnRobertsPoet, but "only the most carping of critics would object to some extra smoke and mirrors in this imaginative castle".

And finally a brief hat-tip to Harry Dadswell, who heads over from the Cambridge Humanities Review to offer reviews of Mark Binelli's The Last Days of Detroit, Sunil Khilnani's The Idea of India and Pankaj Mishra's "timely and welcome" From the Ruins of Empire.

According to Dadswell, Mishra turns swiftly from familiar figures such as "Gandhi, the future Atatürk, Nehru, Sun Yat-Sen and Mao Zedong" because he argues "many of Asia's more long-lasting political and intellectual tendencies originate in the theories of lesser-known Asian intellectuals".

The two main protagonists of this book, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) and Liang Qichao (1873-1929), are figures largely unknown in the West outside specialist historical circles. Al-Afghani was a peripatetic intellectual and polemical journalist whose intellectual heritage has been claimed by everyone from pan-Islamists to left-wing secularists. Liang Qichao on the other hand was one of China's foremost intellectuals at the turn of the century, involved in the attempts to reform the late Qing dynasty and witnessing its subsequent collapse into the chaos of early Republican China.

Dadswell salutes Mishra's account of their lives, but laments his "two-dimensional" treatment of their ideas, arguing that the author is too concerned with "the question of how these intellectuals evaluated the west as a model"

Having proven his capabilities as a polemicist we can perhaps expect more from him as an intellectual historian.

Dadswell regrets Mishra's focus on the "the imperial age" and his leap to the present day, "leaving much of the intervening history of the post-imperial age evoked rather than explored". "Let us hope that this path-breaking work inspires others to follow in its wake," he says.

If you're inspired to follow in Dadswell's footsteps and add your own review to our ever-expanding database, then find the book of your choice and click on the button helpfully marked "Post your review". Or if we've mentioned your review here, get in touch with me at richard.lea@guardian.co.uk, and we'll send you a surprise from the cupboard.

Richard Lea
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Poster poems: Chocolate | Billy Mills

Rich, but not in this instance unhealthy, this month I want to binge on your sweetest poetic treats

What with Easter falling in March this year there's only one kind of egg I have in mind for this month's Poster poems; I'm talking about chocolate eggs, of course. There are many aspects of the European conquest of the Americas that are to be deeply regretted, but few of us are so pure in our scruples as to be able to lament the introduction of chocolate into the Old World.

When it arrived in Spain in the 16th century, chocolate was very much a luxury and its consumption was to remain the preserve of the wealthy for 200 years or so. It is hardly surprising, then, that in its early appearances in English poetry it serves as a symbol for everything opulent. In the second Canto of Pope's "Rape of the Lock" it is associated with the luxury of Belinda's morning toilet where its scent serves as an ironic mock-heroic equivalent to the fumes of hell that accompany the punishment of Ixion.

In "To Mr F Now Earl of W", Pope's friend and fellow-poet Anne Finch uses the dark nectar as shorthand for the Augustinian beau monde, a world of indolence and disdain for such a theme for poetry as a woman's devotion to a mere spouse.

By the time Thomas Hood was writing, chocolate was a more affordable everyday commodity, thanks in the main to the efforts of a number of Quaker families: Rowntree, Cadbury, and Fry among them. Hood's "A Friendly Address To Mrs Fry In Newgate" concerned a member of one of these families, Elizabeth Fry, née Gurney, a social reformer who set up a school in the old women's prison and campaigned against capital punishment. Clearly Hood did not approve of Mrs Fry's reforming zeal, but he couldn't help a passing word in praise of the family chocolate.

Perhaps because of its relative novelty, chocolate plays a peripheral role in these poems. By the early 20th century, chocolate had become an everyday treat for most residents of the western world. This newfound ubiquity can also be seen in the more prominent role the sweet stuff plays in poems where it is mentioned. "Harlem Sweeties" by Langston Hughes is a confectionery litany in praise of Harlem girls in all their glory. Chocolate is moving centre stage.

Michael Rosen's "Chocolate Cake" introduces another note, that sense of guilt that often accompanies a major overindulgence, especially a furtive one. How many of us can honestly say that we never sneaked down to the kitchen in the middle of the night to indulge our taste for sugary, milky cacao only to wake up regretting it next morning? Or is that just me?

You might argue that chocolate cake is not, strictly speaking, chocolate at all, but I prefer to take a more inclusive view. If you like chocolate, then you're almost obliged to like chocolate cake, ice cream, biscuits and, if you're Ron Padgett, chocolate milk and the pleasure of watching someone make it for you.

But of all the poets I've come across in my chocolate poetry egg-hunt, the one who was most straightforwardly celebratory is Dorothy Porter. Her poem called, simply, "Chocolate" is another love poem in which chocolate and the beloved become as one. In "Lawns", the speaker, who is "off the wagon" on a four-bars-a-day habit, declares "chocolate/is my valium", a shield against the stresses of a world bemired in incomprehensible order.

And so this month the theme of the challenge is chocolate in its multifarious splendour. Solid, liquid, hot or cold, by itself or as an ingredient in your favourite dessert, for its own sake or as a symbol for something else: chocolate poems are for sharing. And if you're one of those rare souls I've heard of who don't like chocolate, you could write a poem explaining your extraordinary reasoning. Now, there's a challenge.

PoetryBilly Mills
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Why Hilary Mantel deserves another prize | Sam Leith

The David Cohen prize is not just for her Cromwell novels, and as a judge it was only fair to recognise her broader achievements

✒This week the £40,000 David Cohen prize for a lifetime's achievement in English literature – the closest thing British letters has to a Nobel – was awarded to Hilary Mantel. Yes, I'm afraid so: her again. But I think I speak for all my fellow David Cohen judges in saying: we're not sorry.

The questions were asked and (relatively) easily answered. Was it wrong to heap yet another prize on Mantel when she's had so many already? Well, no. The brief is to look at the work, and the work alone. Was it too soon to give a lifetime achievement award – which can't but feel retrospective – to a novelist far from old, and with the third part of a trilogy to deliver? Again: the brief is to consider a substantial body of work, not reward the writer least likely to produce anything else or most likely to croak before the 2015 David Cohen.

The brief, it should be admitted, is slightly insane in any case. After an initial top-of-heads shout-round to establish a longlist – playwrights, biographers, historians, poets, essayists, novelists or critics – we had 20 bodies of work to come to a view on: cartloads of apples to compare with cartloads of oranges. But such apples and such oranges!

I'm not able to write about our longlist, which remains confidential (though an enterprising gossip columnist might get some way to reconstructing it from a trip to my local Marie Curie shop). But be it said that, after a mild procedural controversy in the final judging meeting led to a second round of voting, Mantel – ahead by a hair – actually gained votes.

One of the special virtues of this prize is that it's for a body of work. So if Man Booker (and Costa, and Costa again, and Man Booker again, and the rest) gave Mantel's historical fiction a wider public, here was an opportunity to look at her career in the round. Many people now think of Mantel as a historical novelist, which she is. But she isn't only or even mainly that.

She's the astringent comic fantasist of Fludd and Beyond Black. She's the beady and accomplished memoirist of Giving Up the Ghost. She's the author of the precision-tooled short stories in Learning to Talk. She's a fierce and subtle essayist. She can do more or less everything we ask of prose. To use the technical vocabulary of literary criticism … damn, she got game. This was a chance to say so. And, as I say, we're not sorry.

Hilary MantelWolf HallFictionAwards and prizesSam Leith
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Rereading Stephen King: week 17 – Cycle of the Werewolf

Very well-made, and very well-illustrated by Bernie Wrighton, this is also a notably slight piece of work

There was a time when I was far more obsessed with material things than I am now. When I was a teenager – when every bit of my income (pocket money) was essentially expendable, and when I had the time to do nothing with my weekends and evenings other than indulge in the stuff I loved – I was able to read every book I wanted from the library, listen to every album that my friends copied for me, and rent those terrible films from the video shop that were, frankly, a waste of everybody's time. And a lot of the King novels that I took out of the library I then wanted to buy, because I thought I'd read them again and again, to soak them in.

I wanted to buy Cycle of the Werewolf, but it was just so expensive. So I saved. I bought it over Misery. That's not a choice I'm necessarily proud of, now. Now, I realise, it's almost the very definition of a book that would have been better off staying in the library. Not because it's bad or anything, but because it's just so slight. (In the comments of the last Rereading, somebody wished me luck writing about this for an article. I get their point: I'd forgotten what a slip of a book this actually was.)

So: 1983, King, wrote what really only amounts to a short story but was sold as a novella about a werewolf. It's structured really neatly, actually: there are 12 chapters, one for each month of a year, and each chapter features a single incident during the lunar cycle where the titular werewolf attacks somebody. So it's a countdown – and we know that King loves his countdowns – as we go from January to December. Each month brings with it a new victim, a new (very) short story about them, and so the body count and the threat of the werewolf rises. And it's also nearly a puzzle, as the characters that are killed interact with the werewolf. In some circumstances, characters see the werewolf change, and they know who it is before we do. When Alfie Knopfler, the owner of the local diner (The Chat'n'Chew) sees the werewolf first, his narrative refers to the character who changes as "the customer". So it's a puzzle, but irritatingly, not one that we can solve: the narrative just outs the werewolf as being Reverend Lester Lowe, the town's priest. From then on, it's a matter of following him towards his death at the hands of 10-year-old paraplegic Marty, the closest thing this story has to a protagonist.

It's a conventional, well-told tale that would have made a perfectly fine short story in one of the many collections King would ultimately put out. So why was it published by itself? Well, it's illustrated. There's are some pieces of art by Bernie Wrightson in the book, one for each month of the cycle, and they show key moments of action – almost all involving the werewolf about to dig into that month's victim, and all in a style that's part fine art, part comic book. But they're still essentially markers, and the bulk of the text – if that's the right word – is the story itself.

So, the content is fine, the package is nice, it was expensive for what it was: so why did I buy it? I think the answer lies in the question, why does this exist in the first place? King fans wanted more. We wanted everything. I was into comics, and it felt like King had somehow found a way to slip between the worlds of the things that I liked. And I was indicative of a larger audience that King had: those who wanted the traditional horror, who wanted to be scared or chilled. It made sense that this man who wrote Salem's Lot and Cujo would one day write a werewolf story. King, for his part, was in his furious writing phase – addictions and all – and churning the stories out. It makes sense he would want to get them onto shelves. He puts them out, we buy them. It's how publishing works.

What's most interesting to me is this, however: I didn't begrudge it. At the time, I didn't question the value of this. The art, the story – and I do really like it – they were a package I enjoyed. It's mid-tier King, clearly, and it's hard to find in a lot of bookshops, so maybe my initial reading experience was the right one: that this is something to take from a library to read in the 20 minutes it'll take you, to admire the art and how closely it mirrors the world King has created, and how evocative it can be when mixed with your own imagination. For Collectors Only sometimes gets used as a slur, but it shouldn't be. This is a book collectors and King superfans will love. Everybody else might just wonder what the fuss is about.

One last thing. I don't want to harp on about King's addictions, but it's hard not to, when you know they were there during the writing. This was mid-addiction, and there's something basic and obvious about it when you know that: a mild-mannered man, turned into a monster by forces out of his control. And what hits hardest is the Reverend Lowe's explanation of why this happens. It's not that he was bitten, he explains: he simply picked some flowers. He picked some flowers to put into a vase, and they died far too quickly – as soon as he had them in his hands. After that, he lost all control. He found notes to himself, written in his own hand, that he couldn't remember writing, notes that suggested he was better off killing himself. "Why don't you end it all?" one note read, because that way, he would be protecting others from himself.

It's one of the frankest depictions of King's addictions you'll find in his books. It's blunt, it's almost lovely, and it's quite devastatingly sad.

Next time: King writes a parallel world post-apocalypse with his horror novel chum Peter Straub: The Talisman.

Stephen KingHorrorJames Smythe
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Want to marry a fictional character? You could do so much better

Tweeters have been getting very excited over #FictionalCharactersIWantToMarry, but I can think of a lot of just impediments

I am highly concerned about the tweeter who picked Holden Caulfield as the fictional character they'd most like to marry. Do you really think he'd make good husband material? Because I don't. But put him alongside Christian Grey, or Legolas, or Edward Cullen – all other suggestions as the #FictionalCharactersIWantToMarry hashtag became one of the top trending topics on Twitter yesterday – and he starts to look a better option. At least Holden's not a violent sadist, or a vampire, or an elf. And he does love his sister.

Female characters with whom tweeters were keen to walk down the aisle were in shorter supply, and one hopes those who mentioned Hermione Granger, Luna Lovegood or Dora the Explorer were tweeting from their parents' computers. But really, people – Sophie Neveu from the Da Vinci Code? Although I guess she is descended from the divine, which would add a bit of intrigue to the family tree.

Wedding a fictional creation is an extremely serious issue, and one I've pondered before. Then, I mentioned Georgette Heyer heroes, Rhett Butler and Gilbert from Anne of Green Gables. Today, I'm feeling more in the mood for a bit of French piracy, topped off with a little philosophy. Enter Jean-Benoit Aubéry, stage left. But how about you?

FictionTwitterAlison Flood
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What are you reading today?

The weekly space to talk about the books you are reading and what you'd like to see covered on the site

Welcome to this week's blog. If you are visiting for the first time, TLS is a space where you can discuss authors, share interesting links to other bits and pieces you've found on your travels around the web, and talk about the books you're reading.

If you'd prefer to show us what you are reading, you can do that too by uploading a snap of the cover to our Flickr group, like mjeshenton, who is responsible for the picture at the top of the blog. Thanks mjeshenton and hope you had a good, uneventful flight.

Here's a roundup of what you were reading last week and what you thought of your choices.

ISWilton:

I've just finished a super novel about the poet Edward Thomas. It's called 'A Conscious Englishman' by Margaret Keeping. It deals with the last few years of his life - when he's attempting to write poetry for the first time, and his friendship with Robert Frost. But what I really love about this novel is that it is also very much about his relationship with his wife Helen. Part of the narrative is in her voice and this really works well.

monkeyman57:

I'm re-reading a book I finished not long ago: 'Keep it Dark' by Will Jonson. Best thing I've read this century, but hardly anyone else has heard of it & I've seen no publicity at all.

DanHolloway:

I've also been involved in drawing up an alternative to Granta's Best Young British Writers list, which has been very interesting and raised lots of fascinating questions. (My list is here - I would wholeheartedly commend all the writers on it to everyone here.

writersden:

Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian." The first time I read it I thought of it as a "Western," but after recently rereading the book of Genesis I decided to see if I could get a bit deeper with it. It's like reading a totally different book. The wandering in the desert, humanity at its most primitive, the constant confrontation with a nature that is pitiless and overwhelming...incredibly powerful.

Here's the list of books we'll be reviewing over the coming week, subject to last-minute changes, of course.

Non-fiction

• The Story of Music by Howard Goodall
• The God Argument by AC Grayling
• The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon
• Noise by David Hendy
• Vow by Wendy Plump
• British Writers and MI5 Surveillance by James Smith

Fiction

• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
• Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw
• The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier
• Lenin's Kisses by Yan Lianke
• Motherland by William Nicholson
• The Secret of Death by Andrew Taylor

Cultural OlympiadHannah FreemanGuardian readers
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Writing for love. And money | AL Kennedy

The really valuable returns for an author are emotional, spiritual even. Though it's great when the bills get paid too

I began my literary career with short stories. Or rather, I began with monologues. I wrote them for myself and my friends so that we could trot off and perform in auditions without exhausting the, if I recall correctly, 12 available bits for women that were in any way kind and supportive to the would-be thespian. Once I had become a permanently resting ex-drama-and-theatre-studies student (easily done) I also became someone who sat up in bed to keep warm and made small, voice-based things which eventually became short stories. There was a lot of becoming – that often happens with the arts. And eventually, way back when there were barely Amstrads, I banged together my first anthology of short stories and a publisher actually inflicted it on a waiting world, rather than asking me to save it until after I'd managed to produce something more financially prudent like a novel, or some porn.

This was all good news. Someone trapped in a recession with an odd skill set had discovered a way to be useful and, indeed, fulfilled. Given that short stories are so horrifyingly demanding technically, the anthology was an opportunity to give my prose its initial experience of proper training. I had earned myself a chance to take my voice to its next level. I won some prizes. My work came to the attention of the wider literary scene and was able to shamble further forwards and discover some more opportunities. The first novel was treated gently and coddled probably more than it deserved to be. This wouldn't happen now. The short story anthology as a first book is rarer than unicorn pie. (May contain traces of horse.) The hope of making even 50% of your income as a published author any more in the UK has probably also gone – unless you are lucky enough to produce a bestseller, preferably involving porn. This may change when UK publishers discover that the production of ebooks reduces overheads as well as cover prices. Who knows – it does tend to take a while for UK publishers to notice most things. I worry in case, for example, their offices catch fire and they all burn to death over a period of weeks, coming and going, sadly unable to realise that their coffees are boiling away to nothing in their melting cups. And this is, of course, a hard time for all industries, from the sprightly to the moribund.

So why do it? To be rather more specific, why do we write? Why do we choose to work in forms like the short story, the literary novel, the essay, the sonnet – forms which have very little commercial value? It's easier to say why we don't write. It can be really very easy to say we don't write for money and, of course, I hope we don't. We produce writing, we produce art, because we love to, because it feels good, because we can't help it, because it rewards us in a self-perpetuating cycle with varieties of emotional and even spiritual contentment. The money we earn is what we use to have more time to do what we love to the best of our ability. And we have bills and possibly loved ones who depend upon us for food, clothes, floorboards, bus fares – money is handy for that stuff, too.

Being clear about the primacy of quality over money, rather than money over quality, is practical – as well as moral, if you want to get into that area – because it means we can't be bought and can continue to improve our craft. The usual conversation you may have with employers, patrons and the like (you have to do this, say this, compromise horribly here, lie down and let us get away with this in your name there) becomes – it's that verb again – pointless. You do the work for the sake of the work and if the money, or the prestige, or whatever shiny toys are on offer won't help the work, then you skip them and arrange to work elsewhere.

Do I always remember this? No, not always. Am I always happy about this? No. There are times when – like everyone, particularly now – I would like to be able to rest more and work less, when I'm tired of endlessly touring and typing and folding the timetable into origami so I can manage everything (everything, that is, but seeing the people I love and giving them proper care and attention). This can make me forget to appreciate the fact that I have a very wonderful job and still get to do it. Every day. I can forget how very wonderful this job is.

But people remind me. Not so long ago, I was on the usual type of panel discussion at a literary festival, far from home and the people whose hands I prefer to be holding. The format was the fairly standard: four authors and a chairperson chat about something vaguely to do with the event title. Over the years, I have slid from being one of the token new writers to being one of the token scraggly old ones. The young novelist sitting beside me began a description of how he had efficiently and effectively planned his first book to be commercially successful, adaptable for movie purposes and generally a money-making machine. The plan worked. He made money. (I quietly began to dislike him.) And then he talked about writing his second novel and the way he'd written that one for his friends. He'd cared about it. At which point he cried. Right out on stage, he wept big authorial tears of sheer bloody happiness. He had accidentally done something which had made him deeply happy – he had written for love. The only thing better than sitting next to that level of joy is having it yourself. Every day. Onwards.

Short storiesFictionCreative writingAL Kennedy
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March's reading group: Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada

Our Berlin book will be Hans Fallada's powerful tale depicting one man's struggles with the Nazi regime

The hat has chosen Alone In Berlin by Hans Fallada, as has seemed inevitable all along. It's a great choice, even if I'm slightly disappointed that my gentle efforts to sway the vote to Len Deighton came to nothing.

The book itself is moving and fascinating and will provide a great deal to talk about as a testament to human bravery and for the moral questions it provokes. It might also be interesting to discuss its publishing history and how it came to be a hit so many years after it was written – and how readers and journalists (like me!) stumbled across it. There's also the intriguing story of its author; an addict, an outcast, in many ways a failure, in others a hero …

But all that is still to come. For now, let's get reading, and please feel free to suggest anything you feel we should be discussing. To further whet your appetite, here's the Guardian review of the book from James Buchan and a great Rereading feature from Helen Dunmore.

We've also got 10 copies to give away. The first 10 people from the UK to post an "I want please" below the line will get a copy. Although, don't forget to email in to ginny.hooker@guardian.co.uk afterwards, letting us know your address and your user name. We can't track you down ourselves!

Hans FalladaFictionSam Jordison
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Is the BBC ditching books coverage?

The marginalisation of The Review Show is of a piece with a general wish to shunt the subject from the schedules

Originally a meagre compensatory bone thrown to culture vultures after the nightly arts magazine The Late Show ended in 1995, BBC2's Friday-night cultural discussion programme flourished for a while as Newsnight Review (with regular panellists Tom Paulin, Allison Pearson and Tony Parsons), a weekly highbrow soap opera. But first Mark Lawson and his panel (three novelists or novelists-to-be and a poet) dropped away one by one, then it was renamed and bafflingly shunted off to Glasgow, and this week it was announced that The Review Show will be relegated to BBC4 and become monthly.

The move was explained with telling ineptness. When Night Waves presenter Anne McElvoy revealed in the Evening Standard that the programme was being sidelined on BBC4, "pending a decision about its future", she added that this was "executive code for likely death". If the switch to BBC4 reflects that channel's "increased focus on topical arts" (as the official rationale clumsily put it), why impair the show's topicality by dramatically reducing its frequency?

What The Review Show's relegation symbolises is a dual current BBC unease: about books – or, more accurately, all cultural forms except art and music – and about criticism on TV. It's no accident, after all, that its other weekly arts review show, Film 2013, is also ailing, also suffering from executive mistreatment (in the week of Lincoln's UK release, its slot was 11.50pm), and also talked of as a dead programme walking.

When the tone increasingly required of presenters, in arts output as in science or history films, is boyish or girlish enthusiasm, even attempting neutral analysis, let alone voicing dissatisfaction, means you seem a sourpuss. In radio, on the other hand, the prevalent tone is drier, and critical discussion – in Saturday Review, Front Row, Night Waves and sometimes Start the Week – still thrives.

As for books, they form only one element of The Review Show, but its downgrading is another sign of their incremental marginalisation – with BBC1, BBC2 and BBC4 all long averse to having a durable dedicated books show, unlike Radio 4 and Sky Arts, coverage is confined to one-off specials, short seasons and segments of multi-arts series.

Rival artforms do markedly better. Cinephiles have Film 2013, at least for the moment, and Mark Kermode. Music fans are catered for by Jools Holland's Later …, BBC4's weekend mix of rock and classical offerings, and annual festivals and competitions.

The visual arts are always prominent in The Culture Show, where two of the presenters are art critics, and feature in a stream of documentaries. The press release in which The Review Show's future was buried announced no fewer than 11 such projects, with all the rest of culture represented only by a theatre season, and no apparent awareness of how laughably excessive this degree of bias might appear.

With no comparable reliable space for literature in the brainier channels' schedules, avid readers are entitled to feel unloved – TV executives seem close to outsourcing the trying task to radio.

Yet there's a paradox here, as the BBC has perhaps never been so dependent on literature. If one of its dramas isn't crime or fantasy, it will probably testify to a growing addiction to adaptation: Call the Midwife, Parade's End, Restless and Blandings are recent examples, and forthcoming projects include (Philippa Gregory's) The Cousins' War, Death Comes to Pemberley, Jamaica Inn, The Lady Vanishes, The Moonstone, The Musketeers (Dumas updated), Wolf Hall and War and Peace. While one arm of the organisation appears ever more prone to view books as a non-visual nuisance, the other can't do without them.

BBCJohn Dugdale
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Baghdad's 'Street of the Booksellers' is reborn in Manchester

John Rylands Library plays host to tributes from artists and writers to al-Mutanabbi Street, where freedom of expression was targeted by bombers five years ago

Six years ago a bomb blew free speech to smithereens in the Street of Booksellers in Baghdad, an institution whose roots ran right back to the House of Wisdom in the 9th century Caliphate where the learning of the classical world was preserved and enhanced.

The explosion killed 26 people and wounded over 100 but stood out particularly from the general misery of Iraq at the time as a vengeful and deliberate assault on a place of learning and debate which had survived repression and dictatorship for centuries.

A survivor told a Washington poetry festival in 2010 how he lay wounded in the storeroom of the bookshop where he worked and staring up through a hole blown in the roof at "thousands of small gray ashes—pieces of paper, books, newspapers—floating down from the sky." Those ashes did not, however, die. They proved to be embers which have made the street more famous outside Iraq than ever before.

Although the actual buildings, reopened by Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki five years ago, now contain many toy stores and fewer bookshops, a parallel and much larger version has been created internationally in the minds and work of writers and artists. The winding lane's actual name of al-Mutanabbi Street honours a tenth century poet whose pen was silenced by an enemy insulted in one of his verses; the bomb, whose perpetrators remain unknown, was a similar attempt at censorship which free spirits resolved to challenge.

Their work has been co-ordinated by a group called the al-Mutanabbi Coalition which was prompted in the immediate aftermath of the attack by a poet and bookseller in San Francisco, Beau Beausoleil, whose network of contacts responded with zest. Gatherings, debates and memorials both written and artistic followed, and now the biggest collection of them has gone on show in the UK, which is a centre for a singularly appropriate tribute: the Artist's Book.

Approaching 150 of these fill exhibition cases in Manchester's John Rylands library and more are arriving there every day. The collection, entitled An Inventory of al-Mutanabbi Street – Building with Books, moves on to San Francisco and New York later this year and thence to Switzerland, Canada, Egypt and eventually the Iraq National Library in Baghdad. But the John Rylands is an approriate starting place.

Built to enshrine free thinking and public access with the money of a Liberal cotton merchant by his Cuban widow, it co-operated enthusiastically with the Coalition's first initiative, a set of 130 international 'broadsides' which responded to the bomb in the vigorous tradition of 16th century Tudor pamphleteers. Encouraging these, Beausoleil drew unconsciously on a metaphor which the poet Muttanabi also used. He spoke of writers 'biting into the page' in defiance and anger. Muttanabi warned in his day: 'If you see the teeth of a lion, do not imagine that they are smiling at you.'

A John Rylands series of events around the broadsides in 2011 included a talk entitled Any Street, Anywhere by Sarah Bodman, the UK curator of the current exhibition and senior research fellow for Artists' Books at the University of West England in Bristol. Sorting through the exquisite little tributes, which use ash, blank pages, excerpts from the classics and scribbled messages, she calls them: "A resounding echo, a compassion for our fellow community of writers, artists, printers, booksellers, browsers and passers-by on al-Mutanabbi Street."

The tributes include much anger but also a gentleness which is equally powerful, for example in a correspondence which is fictional but based on the reality of the street during some of modern Iraq's worst times. The Welsh book artist Noelle Griffiths submitted Beloved Bashir, in which an ageing Baghdadi woman posts requests to her bookseller such as: "Please bring me a copy of the magazine Vogue. I want to remember what it feels like to be attractive."

Bodman says that the glory of the street was not only its rare reputation for free political debate but the availability of the sort of huge hotch-potch of publications which have made a similar name for places such as Greenwich Market or Charing Cross Road. The Iraqi writer Lutfia Alduleimi, whose first book was published by al-Jahiz printers on the street, echoes this. She says:

Who among us had not been enticed by the magical stacks of books on the pavement and in carts, or walked awestruck, browsing titles and sniffing the scent of the pages? Who could forget the pleasure of buying new books in the 1970s, or banned or xeroxed books in the nineties during the period of sanctions?

Others went to buy pencils, children's exercise books or comics, or just to have tea of coffee in one of the many cafes whose lineage was almost as old as the booksellers'.

The exhibition is at Manchester until 29 July, with free admission, and at the Newcastle Lit and Phil library in August, and will repay repeat visits because books keep being added. Bodman says:

One set of books will go to the national library in Baghdad within the next few years but we have no idea when the international tour by the others will finish. Probably never. Because this attack, part of a long history of attacking the printed word, was an attack on us all.

You can see Christopher Thomond's picture gallery on the exhibition for the Guardian Northerner here.

IraqLibrariesArt and designManchesterGreater ManchesterSan FranciscoMartin Wainwright
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