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Sun Apr 24 04:26:31 EDT 2011
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New Irish terror groups pose UK threat, warn police -

Intelligence officials say dissidents are capable of mounting mainland attack, as fears grow of 'Easter offensive' in Ulster

Dissident republicans have developed the capability to mount an attack on the British mainland, according to the latest security assessment. Senior counter-terrorism sources confirmed the threat from dissidents attacking the mainland "now goes beyond an aspiration" and that they now possess the means to mount an attack across the Irish Sea.

Amid rising tension in the province and fears of an "Easter offensive" by dissident groups, police in Northern Ireland also warned that anti-ceasefire republicans were plotting to kill more police officers.

The increased threat from republican dissidents is certain to heighten security concerns during the build-up to the royal wedding on Friday, although there is no intelligence suggesting a specific plot related to the event.

On Friday another dissident grouping, styling itself "the IRA", issued a public statement claiming responsibility for the murder of PC Ronan Kerr in Omagh this month. The group, comprising former members of the Provisional IRA, vowed to embark on a bombing campaign. It is understood that the new group includes veteran paramilitaries who were involved in transporting and later detonating the bomb that exploded at London's Canary Wharf in 1996.

Intelligence officials monitoring dissident activity point to a growing sophistication in bomb-making techniques and a widening range of attack techniques as evidence of expanding capability. A senior intelligence source told the Observer: "We feel there is capability to attempt some form of an attack on Britain. Based on our assessment, it goes beyond an aspiration." Dissident groups have recently deployed command-wire explosive devices, van-mounted weaponry, car bombs and vehicle booby traps, as well as more orthodox military equipment such as hand-grenades. Several individuals are believed to be under surveillance.

The mainland has not experienced an Irish republican attack since car bombs exploded at the BBC Television Centre and Ealing Broadway station in London in 2001. The head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, said last September, however, that dissidents posed a "real and increasing security challenge in Northern Ireland" and could be planning attacks elsewhere. According to MI5's Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, the official threat level is "substantial", meaning an attack is a "strong possibility".

On Saturday a man appeared in court facing charges in connection with the murder of Kerr. Gavin Coyle, 33, from Omagh was charged with possession of explosives, firearms and articles likely to be of use to terrorists. He was remanded in custody. The court heard he was linked to a footprint found at a major dissident republican arms dump in Coalisland during investigations into Kerr's murder. Police have also revealed details of a substantial haul of guns and ammunition found in a vehicle stopped by officers in Keady, near the Irish border, on Friday.

Attention has concentrated upon the Real IRA and the smaller but technically able Oglaigh na hEireann, which has improved its explosives technology over the past two years. Analysis suggests that the explosives material being used by dissidents may have originated from a onetime Provisional IRA stockpile whose whereabouts were known by former quartermaster general Michael McKevitt – who formed the Real IRA.

Police in Northern Ireland said yesterday that fresh violence was expected. "Dissident terrorist groups are continuing to identify officers and target them with the single objective of killing them," a spokesman said.

In further evidence of growing confidence among extremist republican groups, a leading figure in one of the dissident groups' political wings announced that the Queen should be considered a "legitimate target" during her visit to Ireland in May. The general secretary of the hardline Republican Sinn Féin party, Josephine Hayden, said she would have no problem with a sniper targeting the Queen. "You might say that she is just a little old grandmother," said Hayden, "but it is what she represents, what she symbolises that counts. She is a legitimate target."

The Observer has learned that a radical republican group known as Eirígí: for a Socialist Republic is planning to occupy Dublin's Garden of Remembrance 48 hours before the Queen is scheduled to attend a reconciliation ceremony there.

Republicans in Dublin say the splinter group plans to establish a tented camp on the Sunday prior to the visit, creating the possibility that the Garda Siochána will have to forcibly remove protesters before the royal tour begins on 17 May.

On 5 May, Northern Ireland is braced for trouble to mark assembly elections and the 30th anniversary of the death of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. Future trouble could depend on the reaction from the loyalist community, described by sources as "relatively restrained" until now. A 40-year-old Belfast man was, however, arrested on Saturday in connection with loyalist terrorist activity.

Deal to hand power to deputy within 30 days accepted by opposition parties, but with reservations

Yemen's embattled president has agreed to a proposal by Gulf Arab mediators to step down within 30 days and hand power to his deputy in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

A coalition of seven opposition parties said they also accepted the deal but with reservations. Even if the differences are overcome, those parties do not speak for all of the protesters seeking President Ali Abdullah Saleh's removal, and signs were already emerging that a deal on those terms would not end protests.

US state department spokesman Mark Toner said Washington welcomes the proposal for ending the crisis and called for immediate dialogue by all sides on a transfer of power.

"We will not speculate about the choices the Yemeni people will make or the results of their political dialogue," he said. "It is ultimately for the people of Yemen to decide how their country is governed."

Later, the White House urged all parties in Yemen "to move swiftly to implement" a deal transferring power.

The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council has been seeking to broker an end to the crisis in Yemen.

Under the latest draft, Yemen's parliament would grant Saleh legal protection from prosecution. The president would submit his resignation to lawmakers within 30 days and hand power to his vice president, who would call for new presidential elections.

Opposition spokesman Mohammed Kahtan described the Gulf council's initiative as "positive" and said the leaders of the opposition parties have all agreed on it.

Kahtan, however, listed several reservations. He said the opposition rejects the draft proposal's call for the formation of a national unity government within seven days of the signing of a deal and wants to see Saleh step down first.

"We would have to swear an oath to Saleh, who has already lost his legitimacy," he said.

They are also against giving Yemen's parliament – dominated by Saleh's party – the power to approve or reject his resignation.

Mohammed al-Sabri, another spokesman of the opposition, said if the parties sign the initiative it does not mean the mass protests will come to a quick end.

"We don't represent everybody in the squares. We only represent the political parties," he said.

A spokesman for the youth movement that is one of the key organisers of street protests said any deal that protects him from prosecution is unacceptable.

He should be held responsible for the killings of protesters and corruption, said Khaled al-Ansi.

"The youth of the revolution reject any initiative that gives immunity to the president, who collaborated in killings of civilians and in corruption," he said. "The GCC initiative is actually violating the basic principles of justice."

Hamdi denies driving Mohamed Bouazizi to take his own life, as all charges of striking the Tunisian stallholder are dropped

It was the slap that started a revolution. When the Tunisian street trader Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, was slapped in the face by a female municipal inspector last December, he burned himself alive in protest and sparked a wave of anti-government riots that engulfed the Arab world.

True or false? The woman at the centre of the controversy has now denied hitting Bouazizi and claims she was wrongly imprisoned for four months. Fedia Hamdi, 46, who has not spoken publicly about the incident until now, told the Observer that she had been used as a political pawn by the former Tunisian president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. "I feel I was a scapegoat," she said. "I feel there has been a grave injustice and it hurts me to think that no one wanted to listen to my story."

After 111 days of incarceration, Hamdi was freed by a tribunal in her hometown of Sidi Bouzid last Tuesday after defence lawyers demolished the case against her. Hamdi was found innocent of all charges when it emerged in court that only a single person claimed to have seen the slap – a fellow street trader who bore a grudge against her – while four new witnesses testified that there had been no physical confrontation.

"I would never have hit him [Bouazizi]," Hamdi said, speaking from her parents' home in Meknassy, approximately 50km from Sidi Bouzid where the alleged incident took place. "It was impossible because I am a woman, first of all, and I live in a traditionally Arab community which bans a woman from hitting a man. And, secondly, I was frightened … I was only doing my job."

The tale of Bouazizi's self-immolation rapidly became the stuff of legend in the early days of the jasmine revolution. It was reported in media outlets across the globe that Bouazizi, a fruit and vegetable seller, had set up his stall as usual on the morning of 17 December in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid.

At about 11.30am Hamdi, accompanied by another municipal official, approached the market trader to insist that the regulations did not allow him to sell his wares without a permit. It was reported at the time that Hamdi confiscated Bouazizi's electronic scales and his cart when he refused to pay a bribe. When he became agitated, it was alleged that she slapped him across the face. Hamdi, who is unmarried and has no children, denies this.

What is indisputable is that when Bouazizi tried to retrieve his cart from the police station, he was turned away. He then asked to see the local governor, but was also refused entry. At about 1pm he set himself alight. He later died of his injuries in hospital.

Within hours of Bouazizi burning himself alive, a crowd of 4,000 people had gathered in Sidi Bouzid to protest against his public humiliation. For many, Bouazizi's death became a potent symbol of an ordinary individual who struggled to make a living under President Ben Ali's corrupt regime. It was the spark that ignited a series of revolutions across the Arab world – most notably in Egypt, Yemen and Libya.

But for Hamdi, the reality was rather different. "I was just doing my job," she says now, sitting in a large front room surrounded by her seven siblings and elderly parents. "The only thing I was trying to do that day was to apply the law and the law doesn't allow market traders to go in a public zone. When I asked him to leave, he refused and he grabbed hold of my hand, hurting my finger. He was angry with me, so I let it go, but as a penalty I confiscated some of his bananas and peppers and gave them to a charitable association… Afterwards, I went back to my work and then I went home at 1pm and I didn't do anything else."

According to Hamdi, Bouazizi was "hysterical" when she left him. "He was almost unaware of what he was doing." One resident of Sidi Bouzid, speaking on condition of anonymity, claimed that Bouazizi poured petrol on himself "as a threat. He didn't mean to kill himself". Several of Hamdi's colleagues, some of whom set up a Facebook group to campaign for her release, suggest Bouazizi set himself on fire by accident while lighting a cigarette.

Whatever the truth of the incident, in the days after Bouazizi's self-immolation, the atmosphere in Sidi Bouzid was extremely unstable. President Ben Ali, wishing to avert any further protest, ordered Hamdi's detention on 28 December. She was kept under house arrest for three days before being taken to a civil prison in the town of Gafsa, 50km away. Hamdi was put in a group cell with other prisoners.

As the revolution raged beyond her cell door and Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia to the jubilation of the Tunisian people, Hamdi refused to reveal her identity for a month for fear of reprisal.

"I was so scared," says Hamdi, tears falling down her cheeks. "And it made me sick to my heart that everyone refused to listen … I felt I was facing so much injustice."

Who does she blame? "The media – for me, that is the root of the problem. Not so much the Tunisian media, because they came under pressure from the government, but the reaction of the international media shocked me because they have a reputation for honesty." Does she feel anger towards the former president for his actions? "Of course," she says. "Like the rest of the Tunisian people."

In prison, Hamdi went on hunger strike for 15 days until doctors intervened. She remains traumatised by her experience, her hands tremble and she walks with a stoop. She has not been able to sleep since her release and finds eating difficult.

"It's true that I have suffered," she says. "But my family and my colleagues suffered much more because they were rejected by the community. They tried to tell their story but no one would listen … In prison, I missed my family so much. When I saw them again after I was freed, I felt newborn. I feel so thankful."

In spite of all that she has been through, Hamdi insists she welcomes the deposition of the former president and her part in his downfall. "I am happy about the revolution," she says. "I am a religious woman. All that happened was so hard, but it was my destiny and I am proud of my destiny. It was given to me by God." As for the Bouazizi family, who continue to revere their son as a martyr: "I do not want to talk about this family any more. I want to move on."

Does she eventually want to return to work? "Yes, absolutely," she replies. "I'm convinced that justice is important. We should all believe in the law."

The full version of Elizabeth Day's dispatch from Tunisia will appear in the Observer magazine in a forthcoming issue.

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Nasser al-Hariri and Khalil al-Rifae walk out of parliament as unease grows over government's violent tactics

At least 12 mourners have been killed in Syria as pro-democracy protesters buried their dead after the bloodiest day yet of an uprising against the country's authoritarian government. Two politicians also resigned from parliament in a sign of growing unease at the government's use of lethal force.

Nasser al-Hariri, a member of Syria's parliament from Deraa, told al-Jazeera Arabic TV: "I can't protect my people when they get shot at so I resign from parliament." Minutes later a second politician, Khalil al-Rifae, also from Deraa, resigned live on the channel.

The resignations – the first during this crisis – were a significant sign of unease at escalating violence. Security forces again opened fire at funerals for Friday's victims, where large crowds of mourners were chanting anti-government slogans.

A witness in Izraa told the Observer that five people from nearby Dael and Nawa were shot dead at the entrance to the town . "They were attempting to come to the funerals of 10 people killed on Friday," he said. He insisted the security forces and army were responsible. News agencies reported that at least two mourners had been shot dead by snipers in Douma, a suburb of Damascus, and three in the district of Barzeh.

Human rights organisations and activists said at least 76 people and possibly more than 100 were killed during the largest and bloodiest protests yet on Friday, as the unrest continued into its eighth week. Many were shot in the head and chest, and mosques were used as hospitals. Al-Jazeera reported accounts of Syrian security officers entering hospitals and clinics to take the dead and injured to military hospitals in an apparent attempt to cover up casualty figures.

Local human rights organisations claimed some Syrian Christians were among the dead. Christians, who make up around 10% of Syria's population of 22 million, are largely supportive of the regime due to fears of a backlash by the Sunni Muslim majority. The claims could not be independently verified. Easter celebrations, in which parades of children and families usually flood the streets of Damascus's old city, have been cancelled. It is unclear whether this was a decision by Christian leaders or if the government had put pressure on them in a bid to prevent large gatherings.

With the death toll since 18 March now above 280, international condemnation of Syria has begun to grow. Barack Obama issued a strongly worded statement calling the violence "outrageous" and said that it should "end now". As in other protests that have swept the Arab world, social media have been one of the powerful tools of protest, subverting official channels. Amateur video footage of bloody scenes continued to emerge from the protests.

In one video, posted on YouTube, a man tells how security forces killed his son and left him to die.

As the situation escalates, Syrian observers said the government had made it clear that it intended to cling to power with the use of violence, despite attempts at reform. "They want to push demonstrators to the limits," said Ayman Abdel Nour, a Syrian dissident based in Dubai. He still believed that President Bashar al-Assad had time to show that he was serious about reform.

But after Assad recently lifted the country's state of emergency, abolished the security court and appointed new governors in Latakia, Homs and Deraa, other commentators said he was running out of options.

Protesters have responded with a new round of chants. "We want the toppling of the regime," said a resident of Ezraa, a small southern town that saw one of the highest death tolls on Friday. "The blood of our martyrs makes this our responsibility now."

Activists acknowledged some concerns that protesters, who have been overwhelmingly peaceful so far, will be tempted to take up arms in self-defence. Syrians say weapons licences are hard to come by for non-Baath party members, but many people in the tribal southern region own guns.

The regime still retains the loyalty of the military and leading businessmen as well as many among the country's minority communities. In the streets of central Damascus, many say they would rather stick with stability than take a risk on what would come if Assad's regime was to fall.

Syria's government, which has continued to blame the deaths on armed gangs, expressed "regret" at Obama's sharp condemnation of Friday's violence. "It isn't based on a comprehensive and objective view of that is happening," it said in a statement posted on the official Sana website.

It added that Syria viewed Obama's comments as "irresponsible".

The statement came as al-Jazeera correspondent Cal Perry was ordered to leave the country, adding to an almost total blackout on independent and foreign media.

Katherine Marsh is the pseudonym of a journalist living in Damascus

More than 1,000 people have died in Misrata since protests began in February, but its volunteer fighters remain defiant

The slight, smooth-cheeked young man sat patiently in the hospital reception as trolleys rushed by carrying the dead and wounded from the frontline. He had two crutches at his side. He had one leg.

His name was Hassan Ibrahim and he was born in 1992 in Misrata, Libya's third biggest city, home to more than 300,000 people. He was a first-year engineering student. He flipped open a laptop, and called up a picture taken on 18 March, a month after the uprising began, and the day when Muammar Gaddafi sent in five brigades to crush it once and for all.

Ibrahim had been on a street near the city centre with friends when a column of tanks suddenly advanced, firing. A shell exploded close to them. The photograph showed his torso, his right leg, and mangled flesh where his left thigh used to be. Bleeding heavily, he was brought to the private clinic that now serves as a trauma hospital. Doctors who a few weeks earlier had rarely seen a bullet wound had to make a quick decision. They amputated his left leg just below the hip to save his life. Ibrahim grimaced slightly as he stood up, and then said: "What happened to me is nothing compared to others who have given their lives."

This is the spirit of Misrata, a besieged city that has resisted everything that Gaddafi has thrown at it for more than two months, thanks to the solidarity and fierce determination of its people.

That spirit was epitomised on Saturday during fierce battles that saw some of the last of the government's troops in the city centre killed or captured. Having being forced out of their base in the city's vegetable market, a contingent of Gaddafi's forces is now surrounded in a hospital they have used as a base for more than a month.

The rest of the troops are gathered on the southern outskirts of the city. The rebels even claimed that the tables had been turned on Gaddafi's forces. Misrata is not free, but it may not be that far away. But the ground gained came at a heavy cost. While dozens of Gaddafi's fighters were killed, at least 24 rebel fighters and civilians died. More than 70 injured people arrived at the hospital.

On Friday night the Libyan government admitted that its military solution in Misrata was not working, with the deputy foreign minister, Khaled Kaim, saying local pro-Gaddafi tribes might be sent into the city to end the rebellion.

Each day of anguish only appears to strengthen the people's resolve. Many thousands of men who had never held a gun before have taken up arms and fight street by street against an enemy with far superior firepower.

Other volunteers drive bulldozers or trucks, piling sand from the beach to stop Gaddafi's tanks rolling down the streets. Families forced to flee from the city centre, where the fighting has been heaviest, have been welcomed into strangers' homes in safer areas. "People who never knew each other are now living together in the same home," said Ibrahim Amer, 21. "In a big house, you can find 50 or 60 people living together."

Committees have been set up to help the poor and the displaced, who collect free food from warehouses and $10 in cash daily. Women prepare meals, which are sent to hundreds of checkpoints manned by young volunteers.

The cost of the resistance has been huge. At least 1,000 people have died, picked off by Gaddafi's snipers, who set up base in the city's tallest buildings, or by indiscriminate shelling. Thousands more have been injured.

"We have done too many amputations here, arms, legs, both legs," said Dr Khalid Abu Falgha, a member of Misrata's medical committee. "When this is over we are going to need so many prosthetic limbs."

No one knows when that will be. But this much is certain: nobody in Misrata can contemplate life under Gaddafi again. They will win, or they will die.

"If people put their guns down, Gaddafi is going to kill us all," said Haythem Ibrahim, who runs a large company importing goods from China. He has a US passport, but has never contemplated leaving the city by boat, as he could have. Instead, he spends most days at the hospital with his brother, Suleiman, archiving footage of the war.

The brothers' younger twin siblings, a dentist and trainee doctor, are also at the hospital, working 18-hour days, sleeping on the premises.

"The people of Misrata are all in this together – this revolution has brought us together," said Haythem, 31. "I have lost so much of my business because of this. But it's only money. People are sacrificing much more."

The uprising began on 19 February, a small demonstration called in support of the people of Benghazi in the east, whose own protests had been crushed by the government. For 14 days the people of Misrata controlled the city. Some say it was the greatest time of their lives. People flooded the streets, crying with joy. But they knew Gaddafi's forces would come back. And they were prepared. When a large convoy of Gaddafi tanks and armoured vehicles reached the city on 6 March, they met no resistance and were drawn into the city centre.

Hundreds of young men were waiting on the roofs of buildings, armed with petrol bombs and "gelatinas", tiny bombs made with TNT.

The mobile phone network was still working then, and once the order was given the homemade bombs rained down on the convoy. Gaddafi's forces were humbled. Many died, others retreated. Inside some of the destroyed tanks rebels found cakes and juice; the troops had been so convinced that they would retake the city they had prepared for a party.

On 18 March, a day after Nato imposed the no-fly zone, Gaddafi's forces launched a furious attack on Misrata. For two days they pounded it, but again the rebels rode out the attack. Gaddafi's troops were unable to take control of the city, and remain on its southern side. Last week many of the snipers in the tallest buildings were killed, captured or chased away by the rebels. But the shelling by Gaddafi's forces continued. On Wednesday night, Ibrahim was in the hospital again. He had an inch-long wound on his neck.

"I was sleeping at home with my family when I heard shells falling nearby," he said. "I went to wake up my brother and tell him to move. Then the shell came through the roof." A piece of shrapnel nicked his neck. When he looked at the wall behind him, he saw a big piece of metal. If it had landed a few inches closer, he would have been dead.

He shrugged, and half-smiled. Then he excused himself, took hold of his crutches and hopped away towards his car, which he has already learned to drive with one leg. On the back of his jersey was sewn a small flag, black, red, and green, with a star and crescent in the middle – the Libyan flag before Gaddafi took over.

■ The British government will face pressure to explain its strategy in Libya this week amid growing concerns that a "stalemate" has been reached.

Writing for the Observer, shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander said that the government needed a "clearer and better articulated strategy" and that "strategic, tactical and operational matters" had become "worryingly confused".

Sex abuse controversy refuses to go away as Catholics prepare for ceremony in Rome

A growing lobby of churchmen and religious experts are challenging the speed with which the Vatican is propelling Pope John Paul II towards sainthood, just six years after his death.

Hailed as the pope who helped bring down communism, who prayed alongside Jews and Muslims, and shrugged off an assassination attempt, John Paul will be beatified in St Peter's Square next Sunday, a first step towards sainthood.

The Vatican is erecting tent cities and stocking up with millions of bottles of water. More than 300,000 people are expected to descend on Rome to honour the Polish pontiff whose charisma gave Catholicism a new lease of life.

But as the crowds begin to arrive, doubts are being expressed over the decision to begin beatification proceedings for John Paul immediately after his death in 2005, instead of observing the usual five-year waiting period.

Some experts are questioning whether John Paul is fit for sainthood at all, pointing to his poor record in handling the sex abuse allegations against priests that came to the fore during his 26-year papacy. "I oppose this beatification and predict history will look unkindly on John Paul, who was in denial as the worst crisis since the Reformation happened in the church," said Father Richard McBrien, a theology professor at Notre Dame University in the US.

"My doubts are about John Paul being beatified by his successor, Pope Benedict," said the Catholic historian Michael Walsh. "It appears incestuous and akin to the habit of deifying one's ancestors."

Even as Benedict faced the fallout from accusations that scores of priests abused children around the world, he has pulled out the stops to beatify John Paul. Sorting through hundreds of miraculous cures attributed to the pontiff, Vatican officials have selected the overnight recovery from Parkinson's disease of a French nun as the miracle required for beatification. Experts believe canonisation could follow in two to three years.

"Years from now people may be saying, why the rush?" said Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author. "It takes a little bit away for future generations." Tom Reese, a theologian and author, added: "What we need are fewer popes and priests beatified, and more real lives."

The ramifications of the sex abuse scandal will continue as an internal Vatican report on predator priests in Ireland reportedly lands on Benedict's desk, ahead of the publication next month of an Irish government report on the scandal. It is expected that the report will shed light on whether the abuse was ignored by Bishop John Magee of Cloyne, a former private secretary to John Paul.

John Paul's unwavering support for Marcial Maciel Degollado, the Mexican priest and morphine addict who ran the powerful Legion of Christ movement, has also sparked concerns. Maciel has been accused of abusing seminarians, fathering up to six children and allegedly pacifying the Vatican through large donations, despite complaints about his behaviour dating back to the 1970s.

Supporters of the pope have argued that John Paul was wary of sex abuse accusations after seeing communist officials use fake charges to discredit priests in his native Poland. But Walsh said there was no excuse with the Legion. "John Paul clearly safeguarded Maciel," he said. Benedict was quick to banish Maciel to a life of penitence in 2006 after his election as pope.

Those voicing reservations over John Paul's beatification are very much in a minority. Martin said: "Among church insiders there is a sense of the perceived haste over the beatification, but it's a small concern among ordinary believers. The Vatican is often criticised for not responding to the will of the people, but here you can argue it is doing just that."

Visitors to his simple marble tomb are convinced John Paul is worthy of beatification. "He had courage, look at how he forgave the man who shot and wounded him in St Peter's Square in 1981," said Olivier de Pommery, a banker from Paris. "Through his own illness at the end of his life he taught us to live and suffer with love," said Marie Louise Murebwayire, from Rwanda. "He made suffering become love and gave dignity to all people who suffer."

Following his beatification, John Paul's remains will be moved to a large, ornate chapel near the entrance to St Peter's Basilica. The tomb of a 17th-century pope, Innocent XI, will be moved to make space.

Stokes Croft group who were raided by riot police say 'we have nothing to do with the anti-Tesco protest'

The squatters whose treatment by police sparked an anti-Tesco riot near the centre of Bristol have denied any connection with activists campaigning against the supermarket giant.

Speaking in the aftermath of one of the most serious outbreaks of disorder in Bristol since the St Pauls riots in 1980, the four occupants of "Telepathic Heights", which was raided by police on Thursday night, also denied they had been manufacturing Molotov cocktails in the squat.

"We had no intention of attacking Tesco whatsoever," said Gavin Houghton, 28. "It was never on the cards – we have nothing to do with the anti-Tesco protest. They're a separate group.

"This is a nice building and it would be suicide if we started throwing petrol bombs off the roof. We would never do that. It's not what we're about."

Avon and Somerset police maintain that the operation was justified and said its officers had found petrol bombs on the roof of the building which had been taken away for tests.

A spokesman said its forensic experts were trying to establish who made the bombs. He added: "We need to try and link it to the actual people involved because there are a number of people at the address."

Around 160 police officers in riot gear raided the squat in the Stokes Croft area to arrest a number of people they said posed "a real threat to the local community".

But the operation sparked violent protests amid allegations of heavy-handed tactics. Eight police officers were injured and recently opened Tesco store was badly damaged. Nine protesters were arrested, four of whom appeared before Bristol magistrateson Saturday. None of the four squatters remaining in the building were arrested.

Houghton and Salim Noormohammad, also 28, told the Observer that the police raid had been violent and unwarranted.

According to the squatters, the night the police arrived most of those living in the house had already moved out. The group had been in contact with Bristol city council's empty homes agency and were removing the last of their stuff.

"We were working on tidying the place up, as you do – it's a house, so it's got to be tidy," says Houghton.

"Then Salim said the police were trying to get in the front door, so I stopped painting. My first instincts were that there were going to be a few police to tell us that we were going to be evicted. But when I looked out the window it was a completely different story.

"There were 30 to 40 police officers all dressed up in riot gear and they stormed the building."

Noormohammad said that after the officers broke through the door they tipped over the sofas and ripped them open, before emptying the squatters' recycling box over the floor.

"Then," claimed Houghton, "one of the officers barged me in the face with his shield and pushed me across the room and told me to sit down on the floor. Whilst he was pushing me I said, 'Leave me alone, I'm not doing anything to you.' Then he started shouting, 'Sit there, don't move.'

"I think once they realised there were only four of us in the building, they calmed down."

Houghton said the police officers told him that they were looking for petrol bombs.

According to witnesses the operation to clear the squat attracted a large crowd of people which blocked Cheltenham Road, one of the main routes into the city centre. By 1am on Friday there was serious trouble outside the Tesco store. Barricades were erected, bottle banks were emptied and their contents hurled at police, rubbish bins were set alight and a concrete slab was thrown at an officer who was knocked to the ground.

Lewis Clapham, 22, a customer services worker, got caught up in the violence which lasted for several hours. He said: "I wasn't involved in the protest or the squat. I just happened to be down there and I went up to the police and said I was just passing through, but one of them came and hit me really hard with a baton. I've got bruising all down my side now with massive swelling on my elbow."

Squatters Noormohammed and Philip Pezard have degrees in English and photography respectively. Noormohammad and Houghton are unemployed and Pezard works as a chef, but said he still didn't have enough money to rent a home. They said that none of them imagined squatting after university and all claimed to be busy trying to find jobs rather than mounting a campaign against the supermarket chain. "This thing against Tesco," said Pezard, "it's the last thing on my mind."

The general mood in Stokes Croft is somewhat different. Hostility towards Tesco is apparent almost everywhere you look. For more than a year the residents have run a noisy campaign to stop the chain from opening one of its Express stores on the busy road.

"No Tesco" graffiti dots walls up and down the road for a mile. Most prominent is a giant mural which gives a clear message to those entering the area: "Think Local, Boycott Tesco."

People have also held sit-down protests outside the store every day since its opening less than a fortnight ago. But, amid fears that violence could continue in Bristol over the bank wholiday weekend, the last residents of Telepathic Heights remained adamant that the police were looking in the wrong place for anti-supermarket activists.

Documents submitted to Office for Fair Access are blow to government expectations on increased access

Cambridge University fears it will attract fewer students from the state sector next year, despite government expectations that universities charging £9,000 in tuition fees would "dramatically" increase their intake from disadvantaged communities.

Documents submitted to the Office for Fair Access (Offa), and seen by the Observer, reveal that Cambridge's initial target, following the rise in fees, will be merely to maintain the status quo.

A university source told the Observer there were even concerns that the proportion of students enrolled from the state sector could drop next year, as it did in 1999 when fees were first introduced, and in 2004 when they were increased.

Offa can only reject Cambridge's plans to charge the maximum in tuition fees if it believes the university has been "seriously negligent" in its interpretation of the office's published guidance.

The university said that it believed its access statement – submitted to Offa in justification of its fees – was challenging and fair but "realistic".

Cambridge's submission confirms that its "principal milestone is to increase the proportion of our UK undergraduate intake from schools in the UK state sector". But it adds: "Given the uncertainty regarding application trends in light of the new financial circumstances, our minimum objective for 2012 will be to maintain our intake profile." Of the 15,700 students accepted by Cambridge last year, 59% were from state schools. It hopes to increase that figure to between 61% and 63% by 2015.

The plans appear to contradict assurances by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg. In response to Cambridge's plans to charge £9,000, he said: "They're only going to be given permission to do so if they can prove that they can dramatically increase the number of people from poorer and disadvantaged backgrounds who presently aren't going."

The president of the National Union of Students, Aaron Porter, said: "After months of warnings to the government that huge debts would put students from less well-off backgrounds off going to university … we now see that one of those universities with the worst participation records has secretly acknowledged the negative impacts of rushing to the £9,000 cap."

The government's access watchdog revealed last week that all universities intend to charge at least £6,000 a year.

David Willetts, the universities minister, had initially predicted that universities would charge different levels and that the average would be £7,500. He later revised that to £7,500-£8,000.

The shadow universities minister, Gareth Thomas, said: "The government got wrong the number of universities that would charge the full £9,000; ministers were wrong that Offa could control fee levels; and now they've been found out on claims of more access."

A spokesman for Cambridge University said: "The access agreement we have submitted clearly shows that there will be a concerted drive to increase state school participation, but we must be realistic and realise that in the first year this will be a challenge."

A spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovations and Skills said: "In order to charge more for tuition, Offa will expect universities to set themselves stretching targets on access, achieving a more representative student body and improving student retention."

Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa is standing by his government's crackdown – and is due at Friday's royal wedding

There will be at least one royal presence at Friday's wedding that is likely to raise eyebrows. Among the 46 foreign royals seated in the south lantern, just behind the British monarchy, will be Bahrain's crown prince, Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, an invitation that could prove awkward in light of his government's brutal treatment of mainly Shia pro-democracy protesters.

At least 30 people have died in Bahrain since protests began in mid-February, including four who died in official custody, and many activists and lawyers have been imprisoned.

Human rights campaigners are already petitioning the foreign secretary, William Hague, to revoke the invitation, saying the prince should not be allowed to attend given the bloodshed in his country. Earlier this week, the crown prince praised the "relentless efforts of Bahrain's security forces to maintain security and stability".

"The reform and modernisation process, initiated by His Majesty King Hamad, is continuing to serve every citizen," he added.

Mehdi Hasan, senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman, tweeted: "Crown Prince of Bahrain to attend Royal Wedding. Royals & their apologists should be ashamed."

The crown prince, seen as a moderate reformer, has been a guest of the royal family before – in December 2004, Prince Charles invited him to St James's Palace and the pair have had regular discussions on relations between their two countries, according to recent reports in the Saudi press.

The crown prince said earlier this month that the ruling family was committed to reform, but unrest had escalated to the point that security forces had to step in. "I will continue … to be firm on the principle that there can be no leniency with anyone who seeks to split our society into two halves," he told Bahraini TV.

In March, Bahrain's Sunni rulers announced martial law, deployed security forces and called in troops from neighbouring Sunni-led Gulf Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia.

"Bahrain has created a state of fear, not a state of safety," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director of Human Rights Watch.

'Big society' under pressure with philanthropy biased towards the capital, says leading thinktank

David Cameron's "big society" emphasis on charities and philanthropy to compensate for public sector cuts will exacerbate the north-south divide, according to one of the UK's leading thinktanks.

A report from the Institute for Public Policy Research North suggests the government's hopes that the voluntary, business and philanthropic sectors will help transform society at a time of budget cuts across the public sector are misplaced.

Depending on philanthropic donations to help achieve this goal will backfire because donations are unevenly distributed in favour of London, the IPPR warns. It found that 40 donations of more than £1m were made in London in 2009, compared with six in the north-east of England, eight in the Midlands and nine in Scotland. "Clearly, the gap between London and the rest of the UK is enormous," the IPPR says.

The rise of the modern philanthropist has been exemplified by Dame Vivien Duffield, who has given more than £200m to good causes, notably an £8.3m donation last month to a number of British arts organisations including Tate Britain, the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The IPPR also claims that relying on the private sector to provide the resources to bring about the "big society" will put areas such as London – where many of the largest businesses have their headquarters – at a huge advantage. The south also benefits because it is home to the largest charities and voluntary organisations, which are better equipped to compete for public sector contracts. Conversely, the north suffers because it is home to more voluntary and community organisations that are reliant on public funding.

As a result, the IPPR warns public spending cuts could "doubly disadvantage" the north and claims 62% of voluntary and charitable organisations in the north-east have already seen a decrease in funding.

"Our research shows that the big society is not currently a fair society and goodwill is beginning to wear thin as the voluntary and community sector try to deal with budget cuts," said Ed Cox, director of IPPR North. "We need to target what little money there is to organisations that struggle to find it elsewhere. Less attractive organisations that lack donor appeal or those operating in areas where business or corporate gifts are hard to come by should be the priority."

Earlier this year a senior figure in the voluntary sector said the cuts were "destroying" volunteering and undermining the big society vision. Dame Elisabeth Hoodless said before she stepped down as head of Community Service Volunteers that there was no strategic plan.

The government has responded by insisting it wants fairness to be at the heart of policymaking and has introduced a series of grants and policies to get the big society up and running. Community organisers are being trained and a Big Society Bank will invest cash from dormant accounts in social ventures. There will also be a £100m fund for charities affected by local government cuts.

But the report questions whether the initiatives will benefit all regions equally and warns that "stark inequalities exist in how the time, capacity and skills required to engage with the big society are currently distributed. A key component of fairness is that there is a level playing field, so that individuals and groups have an equal opportunity to engage."

The IPPR points out that only 10% of the 5,000 new community organisers in England will receive a bursary, and then only for a year. It also questions whether by focusing on geographically defined neighbourhoods minority interests would be marginalised.

To address these concerns the thinktank suggests that the Big Society Bank should make funds accessible to small as well as large organisations.

It also calls for "seed-corn" grants to help voluntary and community organisations become more enterprising and for a "strongly branded local community fund" to be established in priority areas, backed by government pledges to match a proportion of business donations.

Millionaire facing imminent extradition hearing was asked to collect murdered wife's belongings

South African prosecutors attempted to "trick" the British man accused of ordering his wife's murder on their honeymoon into returning to South Africa, so that they could detain him without the need for an extradition agreement.

Documents marked "confidential", which have been seen by the Observer, reveal how South African authorities reached a secret plea bargain with the principal witness against Shrien Dewani and then attempted to lure the Briton to Cape Town on false pretences, while intending that he would face trial.

The Bristol-based businessman is accused by South African police of arranging the killing of his Swedish wife, Anni, on 13 November last year. She was shot after the apparent hijacking of their taxi in a township in Cape Town. Her body was later found in the abandoned car. Dewani, 31, had been released unharmed.

His extradition hearing on 3 May will continue on a later date, to allow time for a psychiatric report on Dewani's condition to be compiled. The millionaire care home owner was detained in a secure mental health hospital after magistrates in London heard he was suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Dewani was admitted to Fromeside, in Bristol, after he was removed from the Priory.

According to the documents, taken from the Western Cape's directorate for priority crime investigations, the couple's driver, Zola Tongo, claimed in a plea bargain read out in the Cape high court on 7 December that Dewani had paid him 1,000 rand (£90) to organise the killing of his 28-year-old wife.

The documents show that Tongo, 31, had agreed the plea bargain two weeks earlier, on 21 November. The same day, prosecutors asked Dewani to visit Cape Town to identify his wife's jewellery.

The documents also indicate that Tongo's plea bargain, including a jail sentence of 25 years, with seven suspended, was agreed in little more than a day. The documents state: "By late Sunday evening it had been agreed that Zola Tongo would plead guilty to … kidnapping, conspiracy to commit murder and robbery with aggravating circumstances.In return he would make a full disclosure of his participation in the crime and agree to testify against Shrien Dewani at later trial proceedings."

Officials asked Dewani, who was oblivious of the allegations against him, to return to the country as soon as possible to inspect his late wife's belongings. The paperwork states: "He was requested to return to Cape Town this week to identify the recovered jewellery."

A source close to the investigation said: "It appears this was a plan to usurp the extradition process and a bid to trick Dewani back to South Africa. Dewani felt it was too soon to return to the place where his wife was murdered." Since then, however, the South African authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Dewani. South African police claim they have evidence, including CCTV video, mobile phone records and witness statements, that, they say, implicates him in the murder.

A friend of the Dewani family said: "He is determined to clear his name and has told doctors that he wants to get better and find out the truth of what happened." He also praised the Foreign Office and urged officials to ensure that Dewani's rights continue to be protected. High court documents reveal that Dewani has co-operated fully with the investigation, including giving police the password to his BlackBerry, which was stolen but is thought to have been recovered. However, South African police have so far declined to question him over the allegations.

Mziwamadoda Qwabe, 25, and Xolile Mngeni, 23, have also been charged with murder, kidnapping and robbery. Both deny involvement.

Tributes are paid to the screenwriter described as 'the Dickens of his generation' who has died after a short illness

Tributes paid to John Sullivan, the scriptwriter famous for creating Only Fools and Horses, who has been described as "the Dickens of his generation".

Sullivan, 64, who was awarded an OBE in 2005 for services to drama, died after a short illness, the BBC announced. In addition to creating one of Britain's most popular television series, he also wrote Citizen Smith, Roger Roger, Dear John and Just Good Friends. The third and final episode of his latest work, Rock & Chips, a comedy drama prequel to Only Fools and Horses, will be shown on BBC1 on Thursday.

Sir David Jason, who played Del Boy in the hit comedy, said he was "devastated" at the loss of his friend. He added: "We have lost our country's greatest comedy writer but he leaves us a great legacy, the gift of laughter. My thoughts at this time are with his lovely family."

Nicholas Lyndhurst, who played Del's brother Rodney, said he was deeply saddened and described his friend as "without doubt" Britain's finest TV writer. "He was a shy and self-effacing man, but had a huge passion for his work and was looking forward to writing more Rock & Chips. I hope the last episode makes him proud."

Sullivan is credited with penning some of the most memorable catchphrases from Only Fools and Horses, including "lovely jubbly" which made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2003. He also wrote the theme tune.

Mark Thompson, BBC director general, said Sullivan had created some of the UK's most-loved comedies. "He had a unique gift for turning everyday life and characters we all know into unforgettable comedy. His work will live on for years to come. We will miss him and we send our condolences to his family."

Sullivan, born in 1946 in south London, always said the secret to his success was that he wrote about what he knew, and revealed Del Boy was an amalgam of many characters he came across.

He landed his first job at BBC Television Centre as a scene hand aged 16. During his spare time he wrote sketches and his break came when he submitted one of his scripts to Dennis Main Wilson, the renowned BBC comedy producer, who commissioned him to work on the series that became Citizen Smith.

But it is for Only Fools and Horses, which followed the ups and downs of Derek "Del Boy" Trotter and his family as they tried to make a quick fortune, that Sullivan will be best remembered. It ran for 10 years between 1981 and 1991, with several Christmas specials in the years that followed, and was regularly voted the best British comedy of all time.

A 1996 episode called Time On Our Hands, in which the Trotter brothers become wealthy following the discovery and sale of a valuable watch, attracted 24.3 million viewers and gained the record for the highest UK audience for a sitcom episode.

"The sudden death of John Sullivan has deprived the world of television comedy of its greatest exponent," said Gareth Gwenlan, the show's producer.

Mark Freeland, BBC head of comedy, said: "No one understood what made us laugh and cry better than John Sullivan. He was the Dickens of our generation."

Sullivan died at a hospital in Surrey following a battle with viral pneumonia. He had two sons and a daughter, with his wife Sharon, and two grandchildren.

Martin Amis hails the peerless intelligence and rhetorical ingenuity of his exceptional friend, Christopher Hitchens

Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle," confessed Vladimir Nabokov in 1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions (1973): "I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand … My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French.

"At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts … nobody should ask me to submit to an interview … It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance."

We sympathise. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion somewhere or other on Nabokov's sliding scale: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

Mr Hitchens isn't like that. Christopher and His Kind runs the title of one of Isherwood's famous memoirs. And yet this Christopher doesn't have a kind. Everyone is unique – but Christopher is preternatural. And it may even be that he exactly inverts the Nabokovian paradigm. He thinks like a child (that is to say, his judgments are far more instinctive and moral-visceral than they seem, and are animated by a child's eager apprehension of what feels just and true); he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a genius.

As a result, Christopher is one of the most terrifying rhetoricians that the world has yet seen. Lenin used to boast that his objective, in debate, was not rebuttal and then refutation: it was the "destruction" of his interlocutor. This isn't Christopher's policy – but it is his practice. Towards the very end of the last century, all the greatest chessplayers, including Garry Kasparov, began to succumb to a computer (named Deep Blue); I had the opportunity to ask two grandmasters to describe the Deep Blue experience, and they both said: "It's like a wall coming at you." In argument, Christopher is that wall. The prototype of Deep Blue was known as Deep Thought. And there's a case for calling Christopher Deep Speech. With his vast array of geohistorical references and precedents, he is almost Google-like; but Google (with, say, its 10 million "results" in 0.7 seconds) is something of an idiot savant, and Christopher's search engine is much more finely tuned. In debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes.

Whereas mere Earthlings get by with a mess of expletives, subordinate clauses, and finely turned tautologies, Christopher talks not only in complete sentences but also in complete paragraphs. Similarly, he is an utter stranger to what Diderot called l'esprit de l'escalier: the spirit of the staircase. This phrase is sometimes translated as "staircase wit" – far too limitingly, in my view, because l'esprit de l'escalier describes an entire stratum of one's intellectual and emotional being. The door to the debating hall, or to the contentious drinks party, or indeed to the little flat containing the focus of amatory desire, has just been firmly closed; and now the belated eureka shapes itself on your lips. These lost chances, these unexercised potencies of persuasion, can haunt you for a lifetime – particularly, of course, when the staircase was the one that might have led to the bedroom.

As a young man, Christopher was conspicuously unpredatory in the sexual sphere (while also being conspicuously pan-affectionate: "I'll just make a brief pass at everyone," he would typically and truthfully promise a mixed gathering of 14 or 15 people, "and then I'll be on my way"). I can't say how it went, earlier on, with the boys; with the girls, though, Christopher was the one who needed to be persuaded. And I do know that in this area, if in absolutely no other, he was sometimes inveigled into submission.

The habit of saying the right thing at the right time tends to get relegated to the category of the pert riposte. But the put-down, the swift comeback, when quoted, gives a false sense of finality. So-and-so, as quick as a flash, said so-and-so – and that seems to be the end of it. Christopher's most memorable rejoinders, I have found, linger, and reverberate, and eventually combine, as chess moves combine. One evening, close to 40 years ago, I said: "I know you despise all sports – but how about a game of chess?" Looking mildly puzzled and amused, he joined me over the 64 squares. Two things soon emerged. First, he showed no combative will, he offered no resistance (because this was play, you see, and earnest is all that really matters). Second, he showed an endearing disregard for common sense. This prompts a paradoxical thought.

There are many excellent commentators, in the US and the UK, who deploy far more rudimentary gumption than Christopher ever bothers with (we have a deservedly knighted columnist in London whom I always think of, with admiration, as Sir Common Sense). But it is hard to love common sense. And the salient fact about Christopher is that he is loved. What we love is fertile instability; what we love is the agitation of the unexpected. And Christopher always comes, as they say, from left field. He is not a plain speaker. He is not, I repeat, a plain man.

Over the years Christopher has spontaneously delivered many dozens of unforgettable lines. Here are four of them:

1. He was on TV for the second or third time in his life (if we exclude University Challenge), which takes us back to the mid-1970s and to Christopher's mid-twenties. He and I were already close friends (and colleagues at the New Statesman); but I remember thinking that nobody so matinee-telegenic had the right to be so exceptionally quick-tongued on the screen. At a certain point in the exchange, Christopher came out with one of his political poeticisms, an ornate but intelligible definition of (I think) national sovereignty. His host – a fair old bruiser in his own right – paused, frowned, and said with scepticism and with helpless sincerity, "I can't understand a word you're saying."

"I'm not in the least surprised," said Christopher, and moved on.

The talk ran its course. But if this had been a frontier western, and not a chat show, the wounded man would have spent the rest of the segment leerily snapping the arrow in half and pushing its pointed end through his chest and out the other side.

2. Every novelist of his acquaintance is riveted by Christopher, not just qua friend but also qua novelist. I considered the retort I am about to quote (all four words of it) so epiphanically devastating that I put it in a novel – indeed, I put Christopher in a novel. Mutatis mutandis (and it is the novel itself that dictates the changes), Christopher "is" Nicholas Shackleton in The Pregnant Widow – though it really does matter, in this case, what the meaning of "is" is… The year was 1981. We were in a tiny Italian restaurant in west London, where we would soon be joined by our future first wives. Two elegant young men in waisted suits were unignorably and interminably fussing with the staff about rearranging the tables, to accommodate the large party they expected. It was an intensely class-conscious era (because the class system was dying); Christopher and I were candidly lower-middle bohemian, and the two young men were raffishly minor-gentry (they had the air of those who await, with epic stoicism, the deaths of elderly relatives). At length, one of them approached our table, and sank smoothly to his haunches, seeming to pout out through the fine strands of his fringe. The crouch, the fringe, the pout: these had clearly enjoyed many successes in the matter of bending others to his will. After a flirtatious pause he said, "You're going to hate us for this."

And Christopher said, "We hate you already."

3. In the summer of 1986, in Cape Cod, and during subsequent summers, I used to play a set of tennis every other day with the historian Robert Jay Lifton. I was reading, and then re-reading, his latest and most celebrated book, The Nazi Doctors; so, on Monday, during changeovers, we would talk about the chapter "Sterilisation and the Nazi Biomedical Vision"; on Wednesday, "'Wild Euthanasia': The Doctors Take Over"; on Friday, "The Auschwitz Institution"; on Sunday, "Killing with Syringes: Phenol Injections"; and so on. One afternoon, Christopher, whose family was staying with mine on Horseleech Pond, was due to show up at the court, after a heavy lunch in nearby Wellfleet, to be introduced to Bob (and to be driven back to the pond-front house). He arrived, much gratified by having come so far on foot: three or four miles – one of the greatest physical feats of his adult life. It was set point. Bob served, approached the net, and wrongfootingly dispatched my attempted pass. Now Bob was, and is, 23 years my senior; and the score was 6-0. I could, I suppose, plead preoccupation: that summer I was wondering (with eerie detachment) whether I had it in me to write a novel that dealt with the Holocaust. Christopher knew about this, and he knew about my qualms.

Elatedly towelling himself down, Bob said, "You know, there are so few areas of transcendence left to us. Sports. Sex. Art … "

"Don't forget the miseries of others," said Christopher. "Don't forget the languid contemplation of the miseries of others."

I did write that novel. And I still wonder whether Christopher's black, three-ply irony somehow emboldened me to attempt it. What remains true, to this day, to this hour, is that of all subjects (including sex and art), the one we most obsessively return to is the Shoa, and its victims – those whom the wind of death has scattered.

4. In conclusion we move on to 1999, and by now Christopher and I have acquired new wives, and gained three additional children (making eight in all). It was mid-afternoon, in Long Island, and he and I hoped to indulge a dependable pleasure: we were in search of the most violent available film. In the end we approached a multiplex in Southampton (having been pitiably reduced to Wesley Snipes). I said, "No one's recognised the Hitch for at least 10 minutes."

Ten? Twenty minutes. Twenty-five. And the longer it goes on, the more pissed off I get. I keep thinking: What's the matter with them? What can they feel, what can they care, what can they know, if they fail to recognise the Hitch?

An elderly American was sitting opposite the doors to the cinema, dressed in candy colours and awkwardly perched on a hydrant. With his trembling hands raised in an Italianate gesture, he said weakly, "Do you love us? Or do you hate us?"

This old party was not referring to humanity, or to the West. He meant America and Americans. Christopher said, "I beg your pardon?"

"Do you love us, or do you hate us?"

As Christopher pushed on through to the foyer, he said, not warmly, not coldly, but with perfect evenness, "It depends on how you behave."

Does it depend on how others behave? Or does it depend, at least in part, on the loves and hates of the Hitch?

Christopher is bored by the epithet contrarian, which has been trailing him around for a quarter of a century. What he is, in any case, is an autocontrarian: he seeks, not only the most difficult position, but the most difficult position for Christopher Hitchens. Hardly anyone agrees with him on Iraq (yet hardly anyone is keen to debate him on it). We think also of his support for Ralph Nader, his collusion with the impeachment process of the loathed Bill Clinton (who, in Christopher's new book, The Quotable Hitchens, occupies more space than any other subject), and his support for Bush-Cheney in 2004. Christopher often suffers for his isolations; this is widely sensed, and strongly contributes to his magnetism. He is in his own person the drama, as we watch the lithe contortions of a self-shackling Houdini. Could this be the crux of his charisma – that Christopher, ultimately, is locked in argument with the Hitch? Still, "contrarian" is looking shopworn. And if there must be an epithet, or what the press likes to call a (single-word) "narrative", then I can suggest a refinement: Christopher is one of nature's rebels. By which I mean that he has no automatic respect for anybody or anything.

The rebel is in fact a very rare type. In my whole life I have known only two others, both of them novelists (my father, up until the age of about 45; and my friend Will Self). This is the way to spot a rebel: they give no deference or even civility to their supposed superiors (that goes without saying); they also give no deference or even civility to their demonstrable inferiors. Thus Christopher, if need be, will be merciless to the prince, the president, and the pontiff; and, if need be, he will be merciless to the cabdriver ("Oh, you're not going our way. Well turn your light off, all right? Because it's fucking sickening the way you guys ply for trade"), to the publican ("You don't give change for the phone? OK, I'm going to report you to the Camden Consumer Council"), and to the waiter ("Service is included, I see. But you're saying it's optional. Which? … What? Listen. If you're so smart, why are you dealing them off the arm in a dump like this?"). Christopher's everyday manners are beautiful (and wholly democratic); of course they are – because he knows that in manners begins morality. But each case is dealt with exclusively on its merits. This is the rebel's way.

It is for the most part an invigorating and even a beguiling disposition, and makes Mr Average, or even Mr Above Average (whom we had better start calling Joe Laptop), seem underevolved. Most of us shakily preside over a chaos of vestigial prejudices and pieties, of semi-subliminal inhibitions, taboos and herd instincts, some of them ancient, some of them spryly contemporary (like moral relativism and the ardent xenophilia which, in Europe at least, always excludes Israelis). To speak and write without fear or favour (to hear no internal drumbeat): such voices are invaluable. On the other hand, as the rebel is well aware, compulsive insubordination risks the punishment of self-inflicted wounds.

Let us take an example from Christopher's essays on literature . In the last decade Christopher has written three raucously hostile reviews – of Saul Bellow's Ravelstein (2000), John Updike's Terrorist (2006), and Philip Roth's Exit Ghost (2007). When I read them, I found myself muttering the piece of schoolmarm advice I have given Christopher in person, more than once: Don't cheek your elders. The point being that, in these cases, respect is mandatory, because it has been earned, over many books and many years. Does anyone think that Saul Bellow, then aged 85, needed Christopher's repeated reminders that the Bellovian powers were on the wane (and in fact, read with respect, Ravelstein is an exquisite swansong, full of integrity, beauty and dignity)? If you are a writer, then all the writers who have given you joy – as Christopher was given joy by Augie March and Humboldt's Gift, for example, and by Updike's The Coup, and by Roth's Portnoy's Complaint – are among your honorary parents; and Christopher's attacks were coldly unfilial. Here, disrespect becomes the vice that so insistently exercised Shakespeare: that of ingratitude. And all novelists know, with King Lear (who was thinking of his daughters), how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless reader.

Art is freedom; and in art, as in life, there is no freedom without law. The foundational literary principle is decorum, which means something like the opposite of its dictionary definition: "behaviour in keeping with good taste and propriety" (i.e., submission to an ovine consensus). In literature, decorum means the concurrence of style and content – together with a third element, which I can only vaguely express as earning the right weight. It doesn't matter what the style is, and it doesn't matter what the content is; but the two must concur. If the essay is something of a literary art, which it clearly is, then the same law obtains.

Here are some indecorous quotes from the The Quotable Hitchens. "Ronald Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife." On the Chaucerian summoner-pardoner Jerry Falwell: "If you gave Falwell an enema, he'd be buried in a matchbox." On the political entrepreneur George Galloway: "Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs." The critic DW Harding wrote a famous essay called "Regulated Hatred". It was a study of Jane Austen. We grant that hatred is a stimulant; but it should not become an intoxicant.

The difficulty is seen at its starkest in Christopher's baffling weakness for puns. This doesn't much matter when the context is less than consequential (it merely grinds the reader to a temporary halt). But a pun can have no business in a serious proposition. Consider the following, from 2007: "In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in Latin form, 'no child's behind left'." Thus the ending of the sentence visits a riotous indecorum on its beginning. The great grammarian and usage-watcher Henry Fowler attacked the "assumption that puns are per se contemptible … Puns are good, bad, or indifferent … " Actually, Fowler was wrong. "Puns are the lowest form of verbal facility," Christopher elsewhere concedes. But puns are the result of an anti-facility: they offer disrespect to language, and all they manage to do is make words look stupid.

Now compare the above to the below – to the truly quotable Christopher. In his speech, it is the terse witticism that we remember; in his prose, what we thrill to is his magisterial expansiveness (the ideal anthology would run for several thousand pages, and would include whole chapters of his recent memoir, Hitch-22). The extracts that follow aren't jokes or jibes. They are more like crystallisations – insights that lead the reader to a recurring question: If this is so obviously true, and it is, why did we have to wait for Christopher to point it out to us?

"There is, especially in the American media, a deep belief that insincerity is better than no sincerity at all."

"One reason to be a decided antiracist is the plain fact that 'race' is a construct with no scientific validity. DNA can tell you who you are, but not what you are."

"A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends."

On gay marriage: "This is an argument about the socialisation of homosexuality, not the homosexualisation of society. It demonstrates the spread of conservatism, not radicalism, among gays."

On Philip Larkin: "The stubborn persistence of chauvinism in our life and letters is or ought to be the proper subject for critical study, not the occasion for displays of shock."

"[I]n America, your internationalism can and should be your patriotism."

"It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment."

"This has always been the central absurdity of 'moral', as opposed to 'political' censorship: If the stuff does indeed have a tendency to deprave and corrupt, why then the most depraved and corrupt person must be the censor who keeps a vigilant eye on it."

And one could go on. Christopher's dictum – "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" – has already entered the language. And so, I predict, will this: "A Holocaust denier is a Holocaust affirmer." What justice, what finality. Like all Christopher's best things, it has the simultaneous force of a proof and a law.

"Is nothing sacred?" he asks. "Of course not." And no westerner, as Ronald Dworkin pointed out, "has the right not to be offended". We accept Christopher's errancies, his recklessnesses, because they are inseparable from his courage; and true valour, axiomatically, fails to recognise discretion. As the world knows, Christopher has recently made the passage from the land of the well to the land of the ill. One can say that he has done so without a visible flinch; and he has written about the process with unparalleled honesty and eloquence, and with the highest decorum. His many friends, and his innumerable admirers, have come to dread the tone of the "living obituary". But if the story has to end too early, then its coda will contain a triumph.

Christopher's personal devil is God, or rather organised religion, or rather the human "desire to worship and obey". He comprehensively understands that the desire to worship, and all the rest of it, is a direct reaction to the unmanageability of the idea of death. "Religion," wrote Larkin: "That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/ Created to pretend we never die …"

And there are other, unaffiliated intimations that the secular mind has now outgrown. "Life is a great surprise," observed Nabokov (b. 1899). "I don't see why death should not be an even greater one." Or Bellow (b. 1915), in the words of Artur Sammler: "Is God only the gossip of the living? Then we watch these living speed like birds over the surface of a water, and one will dive or plunge but not come up again and never be seen any more … But then we have no proof that there is no depth under the surface. We cannot even say that our knowledge of death is shallow. There is no knowledge."

Such thoughts still haunt us; but they no longer have the power to dilute the black ink of oblivion.

My dear Hitch: there has been much wild talk, among the believers, about your impending embrace of the sacred and the supernatural. This is of course insane. But I still hope to convert you, by sheer force of zealotry, to my own persuasion: agnosticism. In your seminal book, God Is Not Great, you put very little distance between the agnostic and the atheist; and what divides you and me (to quote Nabokov yet again) is a rut that any frog could straddle. "The measure of an education," you write elsewhere, "is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance." And that's all that "agnosticism" really means: it is an acknowledgment of ignorance. Such a fractional shift (and I know you won't make it) would seem to me consonant with your character – with your acceptance of inconsistencies and contradictions, with your intellectual romanticism, and with your love of life, which I have come to regard as superior to my own.

The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation – to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the multiverse. The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself to be an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a "higher intelligence" – because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it.

Anyway, we do know what is going to happen to you, and to everyone else who will ever live on this planet. Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars. Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly. The parent star, that steady-state H-bomb we call the sun, will eventually turn from yellow dwarf to red giant, and will swell out to consume what is left of us, about six billion years from now.

Polly Harvey opens up to Dorian Lynskey about 20 years in music and the emotions behind her latest dark masterpiece

Polly Jean Harvey chooses her words carefully. Her lyrical perfectionism is the chief reason why her new album, Let England Shake, has been widely hailed as her masterpiece – quite an achievement for someone 20 years and eight albums into her career, at a stage when most songwriters are leaning on their back catalogue. But she is almost as exacting when it comes to interviews. She talks in eloquent, formal sentences, with nary an um or er, as if even one careless utterance might betray her.

At 41, Harvey is revered for what she does not give away. We don't tend to draw distinctions between artist and celebrity. Usually the life promotes the work, and interviewers comb the lyrics for gateways into autobiography, but Harvey likes to keep certain doors closed. Apart from her short, inevitably public relationship with Nick Cave (they fell in love while filming the video to their 1996 duet "Henry Lee"), her private life is terra incognita. Last time I met her, in a pub in Abbotsbury, Dorset for 2007's White Chalk, it struck me that she answered questions the same way she poured our tea: elegantly, precisely, without spilling a drop. The only personal detail I can remember extracting is her unexpected love of Wife Swap.

This time she is warmer – literally so, because the fire in Kensington's Gore hotel is on full-blast despite the sunshine outside. "I can't work out how to turn it off," she says apologetically. She is dressed so chicly, all in black, nothing out of place, that I assume she's doing a photo shoot later, but no, it is just how she likes to present herself. Even the room feels carefully chosen. Wood-panelled, lined with stern oil paintings and ranks of unread books, it's so remote from the 21st century that even the mineral water bottles on the table between us seem anachronistic, and my Dictaphone looks like something that fell off a spaceship. It speaks to Harvey's fondness for old things. When I mention that I often go on holiday in Dorset, where she was born and still lives, she excitedly rattles off some Harveyesque sightseeing recommendations: graveyards and ruins.

Like White Chalk, Let England Shake has an ancient quality – in the words of one song, "the grey, damp filthiness of ages and battered books/ Fog rolling down behind the mountains/ And on the graveyards and dead sea captains." It's about national identity and conflict, initially inspired by Iraq and Afghanistan but roaming across centuries and continents, following the ribbons of blood that tie all wars together. She thought it a strange, dark record when she finished it, and the intensely positive reception has surprised her. "It's been overwhelming," she says. "People from all walks of life tell me how much it's touched them. It's a wonderful feeling, and not one I'm used to – the feeling that people were hungry for this kind of work."

A few weeks ago she played the Troxy in east London. Even as she paraphrased Eddie Cochran on "The Words That Maketh Murder" and sang "What if I take my problem to the United Nations?" – a goofy joke in Cochran's Summertime Blues half a century ago and a bitter one now — an ocean away in New York the UN Security Council was debating what to do about the rebellion in Libya.

"It strikes me every time we play that song," she says. "Or indeed any of the songs on the record – how you can apply them to different situations. Certainly that night at the Troxy it had a different meaning because of what was happening at the time, and I'm sure it did for many people in the room as well."

Whatever Harvey thinks about the Libyan intervention, or about any specific political controversy, she keeps to herself but the richness and ambiguity of Let England Shake allows listeners to make their own connections. It's about war, and the damage it does to countries and to human bodies, but it doesn't yield anything as simplistic as a message. The album is a collage of so many different voices – sampled, quoted or alluded to – that Harvey's own point of view is lost in the fog, and deliberately so.

"I didn't want to tell people what to think or feel," she says. "I wanted to remain a narrator." In October 2008, around the time she was starting the album, she heard Stephen Wyatt's Memorials to the Missing, a Radio 4 afternoon play about Fabian Ware, founder of the Imperial War Graves Commission. "What touched me the most is that [Ware] heard the voices of the dead talking to him and he couldn't rest. I'd always be following the news and there'd be so many firsthand accounts from soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. That's what I wanted to be heard – people who had been eyewitnesses through all different periods in history."

Even though Harvey has never written about such issues before, she says she has always been politically engaged, and music was crucial to her education. Her parents, a quarryman and a stonemason, were friends with Rolling Stone Ian Stewart and their remote Dorset farmhouse (she has said that even a day trip into town would make her dizzy) was often home to visiting musicians. The songs they played were windows on the world beyond. "Certain Neil Young songs like 'Southern Man' or 'Ohio', I'd go looking for the meaning behind them. A lot of Dylan's work, especially the early 60s. Beefheart's 'Dachau Blues'. I remember hearing that when I was very young and wondering, what's he singing about? 'Burning in the ovens in world war two.' Pink Floyd, 'Money'. I remember thinking about money a lot, and how this thing that meant so much was just a piece of paper." She laughs, and her laugh is wonderfully giddy and uncontrolled – it leaps out of her. "There was so much going on."

In sixth form she had an activist phase. "I think I went on a few different marches. I was involved in different action groups at the school."

What were the causes? "I can't recall," she says, unconvincingly. I suspect she just doesn't want to give away any information that might enable people to slap a label on her. Still, it's a surprising image: Polly Harvey on a demo, holding a placard. "I literally left school and went straight into music via art college for a year, and I've been so involved in my job of writing songs that the more actively involved part became channelled into standing on the stage and saying things that way. It's only now that it's come full circle and I'm using my voice again in a way that's tying everything together."

Like a more elegant Forrest Gump, she has a habit of wandering into pivotal moments in history. She flew in to visit some friends in Berlin the day the wall came down in 1989. On 9/11 (or "September 11, 2001" as she puts it with typical formality) she was on tour in Washington DC. This also happened to be the day that she won the Mercury prize, for Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, and had to phone in her acceptance speech. "I can remember looking out of the hotel window and seeing armoured vehicles driving up the street and the Pentagon on fire, so of course everything took on an entirely different perspective. It felt very strange to not even be in the place where the prize was being given and then to be on the telephone and to look out of my window and see that scene."

The Mercury-winning Stories is her most commercially successful album to date and also her least favourite: an exercise in pop songcraft that left her unmoved. At that point, she could have gone either way. Her first two albums (Dry, Rid of Me) were raw and visceral. Her next two (To Bring You My Love, Is This Desire?) were spooky and sensual. Stories was predominately about New York (where she lived for a while) and being in love. On the cover, she stood looking chic and purposeful amid the bright lights of a Manhattan street. Entering her 30s, she seemed to have sanded down her edges and become comfortable, which, for all the album's charms, was a disappointment.

But no. Her next album, 2004's Uh Huh Her was a raggedy scrapbook of disparate ideas, less a coherent statement than an exercise in creative house-clearing, and with White Chalk she opened a whole new chapter. Perennially disgruntled by critics who took her songs for glorified diary entries, she embraced a more obviously literary approach, setting aside her guitar to pick out sparse, beautiful melodies on unfamiliar instruments such as the piano and autoharp. She sits down to write every single day instead of waiting for the muse to strike. Lyrics tend to start out as poetry, and some then evolve into songs. "You have to be more disciplined, and you ultimately end up with a much stronger piece of work."

Listening to her talk about Let England Shake, it sounds less like a record than a novel or an art exhibition. "She comes from an art school ethos," says Paul McGuinness, who has been managing Harvey since she supported his other clients, U2, in 1993. "Had she not got a record deal she would have gone on to do fine art at St Martins. She did get a record deal, but in a way she's been at art school ever since. She's extremely independent. She makes a plan and then very methodically carries it out."

Harvey still likes to draw and paint, recently contributing illustrations to Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story magazine, and owns paintings by Christopher T Wood and Alasdair Wallace. All the photographs and videos accompanying the new album are the work of the war photographer Seamus Murphy.

"I'm probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets," she says. "With songs I almost see the images, see the action, and then all I have to do is describe it. It's almost like watching a scene from a film, and that's what I go about trying to catch in a song."

Songwriters tend to be notoriously bad at describing the creative process, and loth to mention the perspiration behind the inspiration, but Harvey is visibly energised by talking about it. "I certainly feel like I'm getting somewhere that I wanted to get to as a writer of words. I wanted to get better, I wanted to be more coherent, I wanted there to be a greater strength and depth emotionally, and all these things require work – to hone something, to get rid of any superfluous language. I'm inspired by the other great writers I go back to and read again and again, and think how did they do that?"

Such as? She indicates a volume of Harold Pinter's poetry that she has brought with her. "Pinter leaves me speechless. Just unbelievable. A poem like 'American Football' or 'The Disappeared'. TS Eliot of course. Ted Hughes. WB Yeats. James Joyce." She leans forward, freshly excited. "Just that feeling of reading something profound and having your breath quite literally taken away by the end of a piece. I'm reading John Burnside's poems at the moment. Do you know his work? I'm getting that feeling – just reaching the end of every poem, going 'Oh my God!'" She clutches her chest and laughs. "And all of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people. It made me want to try and get close to this strange, mysterious thing that people can do with words."

Even so, I wonder if she ever misses the jolting release of strapping on an electric guitar, turning it up loud, and bashing out a song in a couple of hours. "I think probably that desire is met in other areas – that immediate buzz you get from something taking off. It might be driving really fast somewhere. It might be screaming like a lunatic, running fast down a hill. Or playing music extremely loud and shouting."

This is the thing about Harvey. She has done such a good job recently of presenting herself as a patient craftswoman, chipping away at words the way her mother chips away at stone, that you could be mistaken for thinking she had become emotionally cool, but it's just that she doesn't advertise that side of her personality anymore, and for good reason. When, in 1992, she was promoting Dry, whose torrid, abstract expressions of female sexuality were new to indie-rock, she found herself fielding questions about when she lost her virginity. Along with the other sudden pressures of entering the music business, it precipitated a nervous breakdown. Circa To Bring You My Love three years later, when she adopted a lurid, glam-grotesque look she described as "Joan Crawford on acid," she was asked about eating disorders. Who could blame her for pulling up the drawbridge in later years? She is not cool so much as contained, with a hint of underground streams foaming away beneath the surface.

"I'm not a removed person, no matter what I'm doing," she says. "I've always been very visceral in that I feel things very deeply. I certainly can get very angry about things I hear day to day, and shout at the radio, shout at the television, or actually feel sick or feel like weeping. Equally I laugh out loud quite a lot and I love comedy. I like to roll around laughing with tears streaming down my face. I do react to things."

I wonder how she was affected by researching Let England Shake. She hoovered up information about myriad conflicts from books and museums. When I last met her, she didn't even own a computer but she has relented for research purposes. Unsurprisingly, she has not been seduced by such fripperies as Twitter. "I'm the type of person that if there's something I have access to I want to know everything it has to offer. I can't not finish a book. So if there's an open book like the internet, there's a temptation to sit there and learn everything. So I'm very disciplined. I just use it for very specific purposes when I know exactly what I'm looking for."

She knows so much about Gallipoli, the subject of at least three songs, that she could probably write a doctoral dissertation on the fiasco. She planned to go there, and to other first world war battlefields, but never got around to it. "I went within my mind but I'd still like to go there and see if the place I went in my mind is how it is."

Sometimes, she admits, it was overwhelming, all that death. "I think as a creative artist it's crucial to be open – to feel. You can't do it with a closed heart. You almost have to hand over your soul to that action. And so there can be times when you can feel too full of the piece that you're making. It's almost like being a sponge and you just have to absorb everything in order to have all of the goods to make something out of that.

"I've been writing songs for many years, and you become more accustomed to taking care of that – knowing how much to expose yourself, knowing how to pace yourself. Just simple things like learning that when I come to approach my work every day there's a certain opening that has to take place, and then when I finish my work for the day I give myself time to close that down again. You just close up all your edges and carry on about your day."

Having lived in New York or Los Angeles, she's thinking of leaving Dorset again for a while. "It would be a good time for me to remove myself from familiar surroundings. It really opens my eyes and forces me to think in an entirely different way."

She already has several competing ideas for her next album, but you probably shouldn't hold your breath waiting for it. Let England Shake was the product of "hundreds of pieces of writing: entirely finished poems and songs, entirely recorded songs". Getting a record right has become more important to her than being prolific. "If it takes 10 years then I would rather wait and know that I felt each piece was strong than feel that it was time to put something out but five pieces are a bit weak."

The industry standard cycle of album-tour-album-tour doesn't apply. "There wouldn't be any point in me trying to persuade her to take the steps that I thought were necessary to get her into football stadiums," says Paul McGuinness. "She's not, quite honestly, that interested in success. She's not driven in any way by commercial imperatives. Really she's working to satisfy herself."

However charming and polite Harvey is, you can still come away from talking to her feeling that so much goes unsaid. She maintains her sense of mystery, which serves her art but leaves anyone who loves that art wanting to know more about the person who creates it. While writing Let England Shake, she dug out the war memorabilia of her own family: her great grandad's naval hatband, her grandfather's drum from the Home Guard, dozens of old photographs. "I did find myself looking at them and wishing I'd asked a lot more of my grandparents when they were still alive," she says wistfully. "There's so much you want to know once they're gone."

I know the feeling.

PJ Harvey's Let England Shake and her latest single The Glorious Land are out now on Island

Can you learn to be funny? Can you study humour and unlock its scientific formula? Alex Horne swaps the comedy circuit for the lecture hall in search of the science of laughter. Plus, Greg Davies, Tim Minchin and Shazia Mirza tell us what really tickles them

In the middle of last year's football World Cup, 200 men and women from Asia, America, Australia and Europe sat in silence in the main hall of the City University of Hong Kong. I was in the middle of this disparate group, next to my reluctant assistant, Tim. 

At the podium the university's president clicked his PowerPoint remote control and revealed a photo of a young lady pretending to perform oral sex on a statue of Ronald McDonald. Tim and I exchanged glances then copied the rest of the delegates by bowing our heads and scribbling in our branded pads while Professor Way Kuo announced: "There is no area of life that can't be improved by an injection of humour." This was the opening ceremony of the 22nd International Society for Humour Studies conference.

I had taken the first step on my journey to Hong Kong 10 years earlier while supposedly studying in my own university's library. Easily distracted, I'd picked up a bright pink hardback entitled It's a Funny Thing, Humour, which contained the minutes of the first International Conference on Humour and Laughter, held in Cardiff in 1976. This was the start of my obsession with the laughter-watchers.

It was an extraordinary book, fascinating and intensely boring at the same time. It claimed to hold the secrets of laughter – why people laughed, what made them laugh and how that laughter could be increased – but it was full of graphs and bar charts and the driest of observations. I was both intrigued and amused by the combination of light-hearted subject matter and serious scholarship and spent the rest of the week poring over every page, giggling at the ludicrous research, but absorbed by the results.

Compared to my own studies, experiments like those designed to discern the effects of age and alcohol on laughter were captivating (both concluded that the more you drink/age, the less you understand, but the more you laugh). I made lengthy notes on every chapter, from "The Uses and Abuses of Canned Laughter" to "Female Responses to Chauvinist Humour" and "Humour Among the Au Pairs". This was my sort of academic research.

A few years after leaving university I had somehow become a comedian, a profession traditionally suspicious of this sort of thing. Eric Morecambe warned, "If you try to find out what makes us tick, the watch stops." Ken Dodd, the guest speaker at that first conference, implored the scientists and psychologists not to discover or disclose the "key" to humour. Most memorably, the American humorist EB White once remarked: "Analysing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." But I was interested; I wanted to gawp at the insides of this funny frog, and I wasn't alone.

Since the International Society for Humour Studies (ISHS) took charge of the original laughter conferences in 1989, humour experts have met every year in locations as exotic as Israel, Osaka, New York, Sydney and Sheffield. Its membership has mushroomed as psychologists, health professionals, writers and more scientists from across the world have been drawn to the cult of laughter studies and as I worked my way around the UK's comedy clubs I continued to read the papers they produced, itching to get involved.

Then, a year and a half ago, my wife and I had a baby; a son but also my very own guinea pig. This, I thought, was my chance to get in on the laughter action. In the foreword to those 1976 conference notes, the author mentioned CW Valentine's Psychology of Early Childhood, in which the psychologist explored the behaviour of his own five children. This was the passage that had first tickled my fancy.

In a brief digression on laughter, Valentine explained how he'd identified 12 stimuli that made his kids chuckle, ranging from tickling, mild shock and mere repetition, to teasing, incongruity and the sight of a bright or pleasing object. The idea of researching the most fundamental jokes appealed to me and I decided to see if these triggers worked for my progeny, too. I wanted to discover if a sense of humour, in babies at least, is universal and timeless.

Apart from Valentine's work I could find almost no other research on laughter in babies. Plenty of parenting books advise you when you can expect your baby to start laughing, but not why they do it. In Robert Provine's authoritative Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, he does point out that "pre-school babies provide an opportunity to study laughter independent of speech, the criteria of most adult laughter", but for some reason he didn't seize that opportunity. This was my gap in the laughter market.

So, while struggling with nappies, babygros and the fundamental principles of fatherhood, I carried out countless potentially amusing experiments on our tiny son. I held bright and pleasing objects in front of his face, mildly surprised him with games of peep-bo and tickled him incessantly, all the while ensuring that I could justify my behaviour should social services come calling. I filmed his reactions, made copious notes and at last, on his 102nd day alive, he cracked (up). I was whistling to him, he looked at me. I continued to whistle, he smiled, then gurgled. I whistled some more. He carried on making that noise and eventually I realised it wasn't gurgling, he was chuckling. That was his laugh. Looking into his eyes I saw delight, but more than that, I saw amusement. He found whistling funny.

After that there was no stopping him. On Day 114 he had his first proper laughing fit when his uncle pretended to be a duck. A week later I heard him sniggering to himself when alone in his cot. Other observations in my notebook included: "Day 130, T found tickling funny"; "Day 142, T laughed when I babbled"; "Day 150, I asked T the question, 'Do you?' 10 times in a row, he found it increasingly funny"; "Day 169, T laughed when I mildly frightened him just before bath." 

When he reached six months, I stopped our experiments. By then my son was aware enough to know when I was acting differently, particularly if I had a video camera in my hands, and would adjust his own behaviour accordingly. But I had enough evidence. It may have taken my son three months to learn to laugh, but when he did so the prompts were almost identical to those of Valentine's offspring. My conclusion was simple: we are all born with a similar sense of humour.

I wrote up my findings and sent them to the organisers of the next two major laughter events with a note asking if I could present a paper myself. To my surprise and delight, they agreed. They were keen to have a comedian on board, I was desperate to join their ranks, so in the spring of 2010 I packed a bag, kissed my wife and son goodbye and headed for Lodz University in Poland and LAFAL – the first ever International Symposium on Linguistic Approaches to Funniness, Amusement and Laughter. 

Before this trip I had never attended any sort of academic event so spent most of the preceding weeks and all of the two-hour journey southwest from Warsaw frantically trying to polish my material (no pun intended). I wanted to be both funny and interesting. That, surely, was what any decent laughter student was aiming for. But as my taxi pulled up at the university, the reality of the situation hit me for the first time. This was not necessarily going to be a fun-filled few days. The compact building where I would be both staying and working was clean but drab. The people bustling in and out of the door were decidedly studious. This was miles from any comedy club, both literally and metaphorically, and I couldn't hear anyone laughing.

I felt like a fresher all over again. The only flights I'd been able to find meant I'd arrived half a day late, so everyone else had already made friends and I shuffled about on the fringes of conversations. Thankfully a Scottish lecturer named Graeme Ritchie rescued me. He'd happened to see me perform in Aberdeen the month before, and after he'd introduced himself I clung to him for the rest of the weekend.

The seminars themselves didn't start promisingly. Most of the speakers projected huge swathes of data on to tiny whiteboards behind them and I struggled to keep up. Being a proud PowerPoint connoisseur I was particularly distressed by the presentations. The clip art was nearly all clichéd, the text far too small and, worst of all, the fonts weren't even uniform.

An even bigger problem was that I found much of the technical jargon bandied about was impenetrable. I was surprised and dismayed to find almost all the evidence used to demonstrate humour and laughter had been culled from the internet, a notoriously unamusing hunting ground in my experience. Here's a typical example: 

Why was Cinderella chucked off the baseball team? Because she always ran away from the ball.

After 20 minutes of rigorous analysis, this apparently "standard joke" was declared an example of "lexical humour". No one mentioned that it wasn't actually funny. Categorising jokes was all-important. Certain people, scientists in particular, seem anxious to classify everything they find, but jokes can't always be pinned down with a single label. You might be able to put a joke in a particular linguistic box but unless you take into account the personality of the joke teller, their delivery and the context, that box is a useless box. 

When it came to my own talk, I was apprehensive. These people, most of whom spoke English only as a second language, spent their lives dissecting jokes. Would mine be rendered impotent by the filters of translation and analysis?

In short: no. After two days of unwavering sobriety, a lecture filled with jokes they hadn't heard before was just what people wanted. Unfortunately, while they laughed at my material, they didn't take my research seriously. They saw me as nothing more than a comedian and I still felt like an outsider.

THE CONFERENCE IN Hong Kong, a few months later, was a far grander event. Tim and I were welcomed with hearty information packs and our very own conference T-shirts. But during a couple of the driest sessions I sat, open-mouthed, amazed at how uninspiring my fascinating subject could sound. Do we really need an "ironyness scale"? Are pie charts always the best way to represent amusement? And is any line from You Rang M'Lord? ever worth analysing for more than half an hour? 

Tim and I were very well looked after and, outside the classrooms, we were royally entertained. I met great and diverse people and a few of the talks were genuinely fascinating. But after struggling to stay awake for a dozen sessions Tim and I both agreed to sneak off and explore the island instead. After a 10-year build-up, I did feel guilty missing talks such as "Did Hitler Have a Sense of Humour?" but I'd had my fill.

My own presentation had the opposite problem; the delegates laughed as much at my theories as my jokes. When I asked for feedback I was told I needed to do far more research and provide far more data if I really wanted to make a point. Pre-empting this criticism I revealed the news I was expecting another baby at Christmas, a playmate for my son and a control to confirm my previous hypothesis. Again, they chuckled and told me I'd need to examine at least 50 babies before my theories would be properly considered. 

So the main thing I learnt in Hong Kong and Poland was that I am no academic. Despite the universal subject matter, they were specialist events, and despite my personal interest, I'm no expert. But I still have the itch. The laughter conferences and I have unfinished business; we are yet to do each other justice. 

The next big international gathering takes place in Boston this July and I'm hoping to go again, as a bona fide practitioner this time, rather than a curious performer. So right now I'm knuckling down. I have work to do. And if anyone has a baby between six weeks and six months old, please get in touch. I'm serious this time. It's the only way.

"If I saw a mouse as big as a horse I'd die", says Greg Davies

"Sadly there isn't a formula for making an audience laugh, but if a comedian really believes what they are saying is funny and sells it accordingly, there is a pretty good chance an audience will agree. My family and friends make me laugh, as do animals that are traditionally small made huge. If I saw a mouse as big as a horse I'd die." Greg Davies is currently on a nationwide UK stand-up tour Firing Cheeseballs at a Dog (gregdavies.co.uk)

"Couples arguing in public is hilarious," says Shazia Mirza

"The truth makes an audience laugh. If you tell the truth about life in a funny way everyone will be able to relate to it. Even if you tell the truth simply about your own life, people will still laugh out of being able to relate to what you are saying and from shared experience. Audiences also laugh at silly things, and absurd things that are so ridiculous they must be made up. I once went through a woman's handbag on stage and found a bra with a computer mouse hanging from it. The audience laughed hysterically. It was absurd.

I laugh at people's stories about their life. Their sex life, their marriage, their divorce, their husband/boyfriend. I also laugh at other people's misfortune – a woman running for a bus and missing it would make me laugh out loud, I'm afraid. Couples arguing in public I find hilarious. Things I'm not supposed to laugh at like war, death, famine, I find funny." shazia-mirza.com

"I like black comedy and anti stand-ups," says Tim Minchin

"Audiences laugh when someone delivers their own experiences back to them in a package that is familiar, but odd or shocking. The type of experiences you address changes what audience you get coming to your gigs. Someone like Michael McIntyre is brilliant at comically mirroring experiences that the majority of people can relate to, so his audience is massive. Someone like Stewart Lee (a very different genius) talks about ideas that many people might not have considered.

I'm somewhere in between, and I have a piano and rhymes on my side. I also like black comedy. I like anti stand-ups. I like the elegant, uncompromising expression of ideas that are not commonly seen as comic. I also like complete stupidity."timminchin.com

Twitter, Facebook, emails, and voicemail – we are overwhelmed by digital data, is it time to rebel against information overload?

We were brushing through wet grass in the early morning when we saw it – a flash of white drifting behind a small patch of trees, backlit by the sun. Crouching down next to my small son, we watched the unmistakable shape of a barn owl until he disappeared into the wood. The look on my son's face was part of a brief moment of magic, the kind of memory that we live for.

Ordinarily, my next thought would have been to pull out my phone and take a photo, send a tweet or record a video. Connecting is something I do unconsciously now. Tweeting is like breathing and photos and video have documented nearly every day of my 21-month-old son's life. The meaningful merged with the mundane, all dutifully and habitually recorded – my enjoyment split between that technological impulse and the more delicate human need to be in the moment. This is how we live.

That weekend, however, our whole family – my partner, my son and I – were offline. Swallowtail Hill Farm, in Rye, East Sussex, is a pretty soft option when it comes to a digital detox; a charming small farm with a diverting collection of animals and four vintage tractors. Camping was an easy option for an offline experiment, but there wasn't much choice outside that for a UK break. High-end hotels in the US are now promoting their offline credentials, from boutique luxury to remote donkey trekking, but the UK has some catching up to do. Anyway, blessed with two days of good weather and some delicious local food, I barely even noticed I wasn't online.

What I did notice was my partner, Will. If my worst digital habit is incessant tweeting, his is allowing his phone to be the single most disruptive thing in our relationship. Country walks, dinner, bathing our son – no moment is safe from the seemingly irresistible ringing, vibrating, nagging phone that demands – and wins – his attention when he should be enjoying the moment with us. Any objections of mine are swiftly defended by explaining the importance of dealing with that email/text/voicemail now, though it never seems anything that couldn't wait half an hour. I take equal responsibility for our connectopia – magnetically drawn, as I am, to any screen that can feed my addiction.

We handed our phones in at the gate. The only interruption during lunch was from two woodpeckers and the entertainment during dinner by the fire was our own conversation. There was a moment when Will was distracted by a buzzing sensation and reached for his phone, before realising it was a bee. Without our phones, we had no idea what the time was. I reached for my phone when I wondered about local property prices and whether it is normal to see a barn owl during the day. And those moments when Artley, my son, was leaning out of the steam train window, having his bath outdoors under a woodburner-powered shower and being read his bedtime story in front of an open fire, I've had to try and commit to my own fallible memory.

Breaking away from my connected life, I could feel how the compulsion, the divided attention, the multitasking has permeated my way of being. Early adopters, the heavy technology users who throw themselves at every new device and service, will admit to an uncontrollable impulse to check email, tweets or Facebook. Researchers have called this "variable interval reinforcement schedule"; we have in effect been trained into digital message addiction because the most exciting rewards are unpredictable. We're no better than slot-machine addicts.

The hustle we develop as we struggle to keep up with the pace of digital information has produced a restless, anxious way of engaging with the world. Desperate for efficiency, this seeps into our physical lives; I feel compelled to tidy while on the phone, to fold the washing while brushing my teeth. No single task has my undivided attention. A study by the University of California, San Francisco, last week concluded that constant multi-tasking gradually erodes short-term memory. And interruptions are a massive problem, taking anything up to 20 times the length of the interruption to recover. For those of us compelled to check email every few minutes, that revelation explains where the day goes.

As consumer web technologies mature, so too does our desire to understand the impact they are having on our lives. Few books on digital dystopia are more resonant than Hamlet's BlackBerry, an imaginative and thoughtful book that explores philosophical reaction to new technologies throughout time and the lessons we should have learnt from those. The author, former Washington Post journalist William Powers, is, like me, a true believer in the power and potential of digital technologies, but concludes that we need a little discipline to restore control over our unsettling, hyper-connected lives.

"The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward," he writes. "There's a preoccupation with what's going on 'out there' in the bustling otherworld, rather than 'in here' with yourself and those right around you. What was once exterior and faraway is now easily accessible and this carries a sense of obligation or duty." That feeling that we should be reaching out, or be available to be reached out to, is tied to the self-affirmation the internet provides. "In less-connected times, human beings were forced to shape their own interior sense of identity and worth."

Powers offers practical solutions, including advocating the use of paper as a more efficient way of organising our thoughts. The theory of "embodied interaction" asserts that physical objects free our minds to think because our hands and fingers can do much of the work, unlike screens where our brains are constantly in demand. The eponymous technology he describes in his book is an intriguing Elizabethan version of a PDA, pocket-sized notebooks with pages coated in an erasable, plaster-like material. "Writing tables", as they were known, were used for note-taking and checklists. While we can't be sure Shakespeare used one, we're shown that Hamlet was a keen user of the latest screen technology.

"Yea, from the table of my memory," Hamlet reflects, after meeting the ghost of his dead father.

I'll wipe away all trivial fond

records

All saws of books, all forms, all

pressures past,

That youth and observation

copied there

Hamlet wants to clear his life of all the superficial detritus so that he can focus exclusively on avenging the death of his father. The development of print culture was adding to the tumult of life in Elizabethan England, just as we are overwhelmed with the explosion of always-on digital information today. Exploring Seneca's "spa of the mind" as a way of escaping the commotion of a busy city, Powers explains that the constant demands of being overwhelmingly connected need to be balanced out by reintroducing a little disconnectedness. That's exactly what Powers did at home, banning the internet at weekends. It took six months for the family to adjust. "Because we were now away from our connectedness on a regular basis, we grasped its utility and value more fully … There was an atmospheric change in our minds, a shift to a slower, less restless, more relaxed way of thinking. We could just be in one place, doing one particular thing, and enjoy it."

At home, my concern about our digital addiction is most acute when I catch my son looking at me while I'm checking a screen. It's reinforcing how much more important the screen is than him, as if I'm teaching him that obeying these machines is what he needs to do.

Our fireside conversation that night, against a backdrop of a moonlit wood, was about Hamlet's BlackBerry and what Powers calls the "vanishing family trick", when a seemingly sociable family would gradually dissolve away to screens in different corners of the house. It's a familiar story.

"What's lost in the process is so valuable, it can't be quantified," Powers despairs. "Isn't this what we live for – time spent with other people, those moments that can't be translated into ones and zeros and replicated on a screen? I sometimes felt as if love itself, or the acts of the heart and mind that constitute love, were being leached out of the house by our screens."

As we left the farm, the real work began, trying to resolve our new promise of balancing work and home life by introducing phone-free zones and offline days. Best of all, when the farmer handed back our phones, we didn't have a missed call or message between us.

Jemima, Will & Artley stayed at Swallowtail Hill Farm, 01275 395447; canopyandstars.co.uk

The Labour thinker puts a restored faith in working-class values at the heart of a project for the party's renewal

The Labour tradition is far richer than its recent form of economic utilitarianism and political liberalism would suggest. Labour is a unique and paradoxical tradition that strengthens liberty and democracy, that combines faith and citizenship, patriotism and internationalism and is, at its best, radical and conservative.

That is the paradox that Blue Labour is trying to capture in order to renew the party and the movement as a powerful force for good. In order to do that Labour needs to recall its vocation as the democratic driver of the politics of the common good, a Labour politics that brings together immigrants and locals, Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and atheists, middle and working classes.

The resources for Labour's renewal lie within the practices and history of the Labour movement. Blue Labour reminds the party that only democratic association can resist the power of capital and that the distinctive practices of the Labour movement are built upon reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity.

This is not a politics of nostalgia, as has been claimed over the past few weeks by some critics inside and outside Labour. It is a claim that practices and values crucial to what Labour is and stands for have either been forgotten, lost or wrongly downgraded in the party's list of priorities. Nor is it a defence of a vanished working class; it is a claim that the ethical vision of a humane society which led working men and women to found the party in 1900 is still relevant and vital today. It's good that the media is increasingly talking about Blue Labour, but "blue" should not be understood to denote insularity, fear of change and a rearguard action in defence of the white working class. By re-engaging with its history, Labour can revitalise Britain.

The Labour tradition understands something important about capitalism, which is that finance capital wishes to pursue the maximum returns on its investment. To that end it exerts great pressure to turn human beings and nature into commodities. Labour politics is rooted in the democratic resistance to the commodification of human beings. The organised workers who resisted their dispossession and exploitation called their party Labour to remind us of that. Democratic politics, according to this view, is the way citizens come together to protect the people and places that they love from danger. Britain's forests, for instance, are more than an opportunity for the timber industry, as recent protests against privatisation amply demonstrated.

This always generates a rich and complex politics that is as much about cherishing what you know and love as about the pursuit of progressive ends. That is why Labour politics has always been radical and conservative, wishing to democratise ancient institutions such as parliament and the city councils.

Democratic resistance to the domination of capital through the pursuit of the common good is not really the way that liberals view politics or, more important, markets. They see the benefits but not the distress, the efficiencies but not the disruption, the choice but not the coercion. Labour has always understood both. This understanding is essential in defeating the liberal-led coalition – there is nothing conservative about this government – by developing a strong agenda for both regulating finance and generating regional private sector growth.

At London Citizens I worked on the Living Wage Campaign so that contracted-out cleaners, cooks and security guards could earn enough to feed their children without having to do two jobs.

I learned many things in those years and one of them was that, unless there were effective organisations, immigration led to a double exploitation, of the immigrants and of the locals. We ran a campaign called Strangers into Citizens so that illegal immigrants could build alliances and a common life with their new neighbours and colleagues. We ran the Living Wage Campaign to assert a common human status for all who worked in an enterprise or institution.

It was driven primarily by faith communities who asserted the dignity of labour and the importance of association. It was a resistance to the commodification of labour. The Catholics, Methodists, Pentecostals and Muslims I worked with did not talk to me about changing divorce laws or prohibiting civil partnerships, about abortion or the hijab. We spoke about a living wage, about establishing an interest rate ceiling of 20%, about affordable family housing and community land trusts and about achieving a common status as a citizen of the country. We spoke about matters of common concern where we had common interests. A common life between the old and the new required the establishment of relationships between what was divided. It required new work agreements so that all was not relentlessly up for grabs in an exclusively contractual churn.

The very simple idea of people's relationships with others is what is at stake here. The centrality of one-to-one conversations, of relationship building, of establishing trust between what were seen as incompatible communities and interests transformed my understanding of what a politics of the common good could be, and of what Labour should be about. A political party that is a democratically organised force for the common good. In order to do this, Labour must establish those conversations that broker a common good within which party organisations such as Progress, the Fabians, Compass and the Christian Socialist Movement and Blue Labour talk and build a common programme.

Blue Labour has no nostalgia for old Labour and no illusions about the shortcomings of the new. Both Blair and Brown were recklessly naïve about finance capital and the City of London and relentlessly managerial in their methods. Blair developed a political alchemy that Brown failed to recreate, and it was between tradition and modernity. The problem was that his conception of tradition was superficial and his concept of modernisation verging on the demented: a conception of globalisation understood entirely on the terms set by finance capital.

The German economy with its worker representation on the management board, works councils, pension co-determination, regional banks and vocational regulation, in other words with high levels of democratic interference in the economy, emerged with a more efficient workforce, greater growth and with a genuinely modern industrial sector.

The paradox here is that vocational institutions decried as "pre-modern" and "Jurassic" preserved a knowledge culture that facilitated a more efficient response to globalisation than managerialism. The democratic representation of different economic interests turned out to be more efficient than leaving decision-making to the money managers. So Labour needs to engage with diverse interests in corporate governance and place greater stress on vocational rather than transferrable skills.

The control of the City of London in regional investment must be broken and local banks established that could enable people to have meaningful jobs and live closer to their parents. Modern economies require trust, institutions that uphold non-pecuniary values and strong constraints on capital. Again, this is not nostalgia but it does defy a view of modernisation defined by the unimpeded flow of money and people.

The withdrawal by New Labour from the economy led to a manic embrace of the state. New Labour's public sector reforms were almost Maoist in their conception of year zero managerial restructuring. As an academic at London Metropolitan University I lost count of the number of line managers that were assigned to supervise and assess me, but I do know that departmental meetings were abolished and academics had no decision-making power. "Human resources" and "teaching and learning" laid down the law and there was no departmental mediation. This was typical of New Labour public sector reforms. Managerial, arrogant and ultimately doomed. Labour should know that, unless the workforce is engaged and committed, change remains, in the worst sense of the word, aspirational.

Old Labour was worse. Entirely disengaged from democracy in the economy, its renewal in our cities or in the party and held in thrall by an administrative and rational conception of the state and the use of scientific method to achieve its ends, by the 1970s it could barely generate the energy to win an election, let alone redistribute power to ordinary people. So there is plenty to talk about.

The starting point for Blue Labour is that the banking crisis of 2008 marked the end of New Labour economics and opens up the possibility for renewal. The tradition is strong and the party should honour it. In its explanation of the crash it must point to the volatility and vice of finance capital and the necessity of a balance of power within the firm and stronger institutions to constrain capital and domesticate its destructive energy.

The lessons of New Labour are not to have a contemptuous attitude to the lived experiences of people but work within them to craft a common story of what went wrong and how things can be better. To bring together previously separated political matter in the pursuit of the common good.

In his Fabian speech in January, Ed Miliband set out the direction of travel. He stated his opposition to the domination of capital and an exclusive reliance on the state for redress. He expressed a desire to "change the common sense of the age" through renewing democracy in politics and the economy and opening the space for people to build a better life together. The price of victory is a constructive alternative and it will be crafted by all elements of the tradition.

There are great times ahead for the Labour party.

Drink-related deaths among men in hard-pressed rural areas exacerbate the decline in the nation's population

Down a winding lane, through fields still covered in snow, stands a cluster of wooden cottages an hour's drive east of Moscow. Twenty years ago, the village of Rybaki was a lively community of more than 1,000 people. Today the population is a quarter of that. Almost no one has a job inside the village; the only thing thriving is a cemetery, which is black with fresh graves.

The fate of Rybaki is echoed across Russia. Late last month the government published the initial results of a census taken last year. Since 2002, Russia's population has fallen by 2.2 million to just under 143 million.

The proportion of men has fallen from 46.6% to 46.3%, which means the country now has 10.5 million more females than males. That speaks of an ugly truth: while outward migration to towns plays its part, a punishing mortality rate among men has devastated places such as Rybaki.

"Most of my contemporaries are already dead," says Oleg Zlotnikov, 50, who sells sand and crushed stone at the end of a track in the village. He is one of only a few dozen men, and among the tiny handful who still work.

While it is only 25 miles from the skyscrapers and Bentley showrooms of central Moscow, much of Rybaki looks like a scene from Tolstoy. Shabby cottages made from split logs stretch along streets of mud and slush. A few smart brick buildings fringe the community, but these are dachas built by rich Muscovites who are there for only a few weeks in the summer.

Russia's demographic crisis sets it apart from most of Europe, where numbers have been more or less stable for two decades. Its population reached about 148m in 1990, but has declined since. While many countries have low fertility rates, here the problem is compounded by a high early death rate. Smoking, heart disease and accidents all contribute. One of the greatest killers, however, is the old Russian demon: vodka.

"We are only women left," says Nina Burenina, a 75-year-old former milkmaid in a coloured headscarf, sitting in her kitchen in Moskvaretskaya Street. "Two of my sons died from drink – and my husband, too. Why hide it?"

The first to die was Alexei, 23, who got into a drunken brawl with some men on a barge by the river, not long after coming back from his army service. "They beat him to a pulp and tossed him overboard, then pretended he fell in and got caught up in the propeller," says Burenina. "His body was found downstream three days later."

Her husband, Ivan, a digger driver, succumbed to booze at the comparatively ripe age of 77. Then last May, her son, Konstantin, a 42-year-old engineer, died after contracting lung cancer, an ulcer and paralysis caused by drinking. Such stories are rife in Rybaki.

On the other side of the village is a crumbling two-storey apartment block, behind the ruins of a social club where dances were held in the Soviet days. On the second floor, Klavdiya Turbanova, 78, peeps out of her window from behind a geranium plant. She moved to the village three years ago, but is shocked by the spectacle she sees in the yard below.

"All the time there are people crawling around drunk," she says. "Once I found a man lying in the snow and wrapped him in a coat. Another time I dragged one out of a puddle. One of my neighbours said, 'You'll soon get used to ignoring them.' But I can't get used to it, it's not right."

An alcoholic woman from the floor below recently burst into the flat and demanded the tiny bottle of nastoyka – a mix of vodka and herbs – that Turbanova sips to help with her high blood pressure. "After I retired I mopped floors and made pies and knitted socks to make a little money," she says. "Even now I have a little allotment out the back where I grow potatoes and cucumbers. These drunkards have lost all hope. They don't want to look for a job."

Turbanova's granddaughter, Nastya, who is visiting from Zhukovsky, a town closer to Moscow, would like her to move away. Rybaki has a small medical station with a nurse, but two years ago Turbanova began to suffer fainting attacks. She had to go to a hospital in a larger village nearby. "It was ghastly," says Nastya. "There were cockroaches all over the place, the toilets were falling apart. We had to buy grandma's medicines ourselves because they didn't have any."

Oleg Zlotnikov says people are driven to alcohol by lack of opportunity and the harsh living conditions. A long-promised gas supply has not been connected, so all the households are heated with wood or coal burners, or small electric heaters. In December and January, when temperatures fell well below zero, Rybaki went without electricity for almost two weeks after an ice storm brought down the power lines, said Zlotnikov.

"Life is tough and people need jobs," he adds. "There's a farm, but they pay practically nothing, so only a few Tajik and Kyrgyz migrants are prepared to work there."

Land is sold for dacha construction at such high prices that buying it for agricultural use is unprofitable. Meanwhile, Zlotnikov and his wife, Marina, have struggled to keep their business alive. The desperate conditions can lead to hatred and envy. One winter someone plugged up the holes Oleg had drilled in the ice of his pond to keep his fish alive. "Just out of spite," said a neighbour.

In 2006, Zlotnikov was jailed for four years for planning to murder a business rival. He claims that the accusation was fabricated because he refused to cede to a local mafia kingpin.

"They didn't reckon on my wife," he says, smiling. Marina fended off the raiders while Oleg was in jail, and saved his life when he contracted tuberculosis.

Marina says: "Corruption also kills. It's psychological; in the end people just lower their hands. We didn't give up."

Now the couple have branched out into breeding geese and turkeys. They even have two shaggy Bactrian camels from Astrakhan which they hope to hire to a local holiday camp for rides.

Despite the hardships, some residents refuse to blame Russia's ruling tandem – President Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, who is still thought to be the dominant force – for Rybaki's decline.

"Please say thank you to Putin," says Burenina. "It's not his fault my sons turned to drink. It was the local shop, for staying open too late. Putin speaks well. He said he would raise pensions and he did."

Turbanova said there were worse things than watching the drunks outside her window. "I lived through the war: I lost my father and brother at the front," she says. "At least there's no war now."

What did she think of the country's leadership? "I like Putin, he's good. And that other one, his assistant."

President Medvedev? "That's it. I like him, too."

Our great national roadshow will be out in force as Prince William and Kate Middleton get married on Friday. Don't be too cool to enjoy it – there's no shame in celebrating (or grieving) en masse

The agreed national line on the royal wedding is: "Good luck to the youngsters, I hope they're happy, but I'm not very interested."

That is what everybody says. The engagement was announced to a roar of benevolent apathy. I have encountered neither republican fervour nor royalist excitement since this whole thing began, only a vague and indifferent goodwill.

I expect there'll be a large audience on Friday, just because it's on TV and most people are off work. There may even be an outbreak of cheerful, faintly ironic street parties. Still, nobody admits really to caring one way or the other.

That is not how I feel. I am extremely excited. I shall be up at dawn (an eventuality rarely achieved without a neighbour's drill) so as not to miss a second of the coverage.

I won't be one of those lightweights tuning in for the service alone. I'll be in the front of the television in my pyjamas hours before the start, demanding to hear canapés and fascinators debated as if they were troop movements in Libya. I want to see diagrams of the route and colour charts anticipating the Queen's hat. I want to be reminded that Kate is travelling from the royal suite of the Goring Hotel with its original 19th-century lavatory by Thomas Crapper. (It was puzzling that the Sun reported this without even attempting a throne joke).

Having said that, I struggle to feel a massive excitement about Kate Middleton herself. It's the main royal family I want to see, gathered in all its bizarre, comical glory. My hunger for them will never be sated.

I want the Queen, tiny and beaming in peach, escorted by the 200-year-old Duke of Edinburgh.

I want Princess Anne, grudgingly buttoned into a skirt suit she's been wearing since 1973.

I want Prince Charles, arriving a careful two minutes after his lesser siblings but five minutes before Her Majesty, in a vintage Bentley tweaked to run on apple juice.

I want Prince Andrew, fivers tumbling out of his back pocket, tricked into attending on the promise that Westminster Abbey has a golf course.

I want Prince Edward, just because it's always hilarious to remember he exists.

How could anyone not be gripped by this roadshow? It's the gift that keeps on giving. I've tried to be a republican but, like trying to drink coffee, I can't make it stick. I was born preferring tea – and biscuits from a tin with the Queen Mother's face on it.

When I hear Colin Firth, a chap whose general sympathies are not unlike mine, revealing that he doesn't support the monarchy, I think: "Come on, Coren! That's where you should stand! Equality for all! Citizenship not subjection!"

But I just can't. Colour and sparkle are too attractive to my magpie gaze, and history is too romantic. I can't blind myself to their appeal. I'd be bored and cross if they were gone.

True, I grew up in a golden age for the royal soap: leaked affairs, tapped phones, endless scandal and shock divorce. This family will loom large for schoolchildren of the future, fat with memorability like Henry VIII. Their private scandals were conducted in parallel with an undeniable sense of public duty: that tension is fascinating, it's operatic. They are just never boring. They're so… not Dutch.

The royal wedding is a rare chance to see them clustered together in one delicious, historical, televised hit. The Windsor safari park in your very own home! How can anyone claim indifference?

My theory was that the bride in the centre just doesn't inspire strong feeling. Kate Middleton is neither a fairytale countess nor a fairytale commoner. She is a bit like us (no title, clothes from Jigsaw) and not at all like us (stunning, super-wealthy, no job), therefore we can neither root for our home girl nor be intrigued by her mysterious aristocracy.

Besides, a nine-year courtship is undramatic, unthrilling. People weren't hooked by the story, I theorised, so they just put it down after a few chapters, much as I did with We Need To Talk About Kevin.

"You're quite wrong," a friend of mine said the other day. "The reason nobody is showing any interest is because we're all so embarrassed by the Diana business."

The Diana business?

"All that sobbing in the street and leaving flowers," she went on. "The mass hysteria. The wall-to-wall coverage. Britain went mad for weeks. It was like we'd been drugged. Then we all came to our senses and now everyone looks back with terrible embarrassment and never wants to show interest again. It's like getting drunk and phoning someone you've just met to shriek that you love him. Forever after, you have to act as if you don't care whether he lives or dies – just to make it look like a blip, rather than full-on lunacy."

I was amazed. Royalists or otherwise, I thought two camps remained on the Diana mourning: those who still feel nostalgia and a lump in the throat, and those who considered the reaction vulgar and overblown. Can it be that everyone is embarrassed by hindsight?

Well, I'm bloody not. I am a bit embarrassed to admit my unshakeable fondness for the royal family (and I'm well aware that any further opinions from me may now be obsolete to some readers), but not remotely discomfited to say that I grieved for Princess Diana. I went to Kensington Palace the night she died, was moved to tears by the funeral and joined the silent crowd who watched her cortege drive slowly up the Hendon Way towards the M1 and Northamptonshire.

I am not embarrassed for myself nor anyone else who was there. The memory of a nation crying for someone they didn't know, and leaving flowers, doesn't make me feel ashamed of Britain; it makes me proud.

What kind of people would we be if we hadn't mourned her? We met her (many of us as small children) when she was 19. We watched her subsequent excitement and misery reflected in her changing body shape. We knew (whether we wanted to or not) about her awful parents, her difficult marriage and her struggle to fit in. We watched her fall in love with heart surgeons and rugby players, cads and bounders, on a doomed quest for completion and contentment that was deeply familiar to us – from novels, if not our own bumpy, imperfect lives.

She was the most famous woman in the world, and she was one of ours. She died suddenly, violently and young. A country which hadn't stopped in shock, which hadn't expressed collective sadness, which had shrugged and said "Meh, I didn't know her", is not a country I would want to live in.

If we were looking back now on a fascination with her life, followed by disinterest in her death, that is what would be shameful.

The British are sentimental people. We respond to narrative. Show us a short film of starving African children, tell us their names and we'll donate £74m in the middle of a gruelling recession. There's nothing wrong with sentimentality. Would we want to have a smaller heart?

Those Comic Relief kids are at the bottom of the luck ladder when it comes to money and luxury living, Diana was at the top. We can't imagine what it would be like to live at either of those extremes, but we can respond emotionally to the trials of both; that is a very true form of egalitarianism. Hurray for us.

Those snobs who spoke out in the first days after her death, already (and quite incorrectly) slamming the tearful displays as "unBritish", are quite happy to be moved by art. They'd be over the moon if their children cried at the death of King Lear or Boris Godunov. Those who grieved for the stranger Diana were also responding to a storyline. It may be more elegant to cry for people who lived centuries ago – or never – but it isn't "better".

Let the record show: Britain's reaction to Diana's death reflected well on us, not badly. It should be a source of pride.

And what the hell, let's enjoy the wedding. Don't be too cool, you might freeze. This is a sunny development to the story. This is the fun bit.

Tripe, faggots, hogget… the menu at Manchester's exceptional Mark Addy is studded with sumptuous meaty treats

Stanley Street, Salford, Manchester (0161 832 4080). Meal for two, including wine and service, £75

There is about Robert Owen Brown a touch of the Dickens character; one of those sturdy, reliable ones who turn up a few chapters in when everything is looking bleak for the hero, and hangs about the page looking like a place of safety. He has ginger curls, wears unbuttoned waistcoats, calls men sir and women madam in a way that is entirely unforced, and has a robust response to anything he judges to be total bollocks. Whenever I write about his food I am compelled to mention his refusal to put the words petit pois on the menu. "They're little peas," he once told me. "We're not in France." Indeed not. We are by a canal in Manchester.

I have been directing people to the pub where he now cooks for a while now, but have held off writing about it because of what might be called Owen Brown's "stamina" issues. He has had a habit of setting up somewhere, getting good reviews, then disappearing. It happened last at the Angel, an old boozer that smelt sweetly of damp dog. But, with good people backing him, he has been dug in now at the Mark Addy pub for a year or two.

It is a mixture of wonderful bare-brick arches, and 70s additions – smoked glass, modern window frames – which will be equally wonderful when someone gets round to destroying them. The current team cannot, by the terms of their lease, do anything about these interiors issues. But with Owen Brown in the kitchen, they have created the kind of gutsy gastro pub Manchester deserves.

To say the chef is a follower of Fergus Henderson of St John does not do justice to their friendship. The two are famous for disappearing off to drink beer and swallow oysters in the small hours, and the menu reflects that. In some ways this sort of food works even better here. St John in London is a great restaurant, but it is also a self-conscious statement. It is dinner for the design crowd. At the Mark Addy it is just dinner. Henderson's roast bone marrow with parsley salad is often on the menu here. Much of the rest, however, is less homage than Owen Brown paying his respects to the under-celebrated inner and outer bits of the beast. Alongside the laminated standard menu there is a changing list of specials which tonight has two ways with tripe: both pickled in the local style, and long braised in Madeira on toast. It is dark and sticky and slippery.

A bunch of his starters come on toast like this, lending to this first course the feeling of an old English high tea. There is a disc of creamy, day- old curd cheese, with a sour edge, on a toasted, buttered crumpet. It looks like too much cheese to too little crumpet, but it all disappears quickly enough. Another plate has buttered buckling on toast, the edges of the salty, oily fish crisped nicely. We despatch this swiftly as well. Starters are rarely above £6 and mains no more than double that.

We order a long-braised, chicken-stuffed pig's trotter and it comes with piped ribbons of perfect mash with wild garlic. A crown of pigeon is a little overcooked, but tastes of a bird that led a proper life, and is accompanied by a scoop of impeccable black pudding. The bird was shot in the hills outside the city and to celebrate the way it reached its end, a salad is presented in a shotgun canister, as if it were a vase. This is what passes for whimsy in Owen Brown's kitchen. The menu offers lots of other good things, like slow-braised faggots, roasted hogget and smoked haddock with poached duck egg. The wine list is short and gloriously priced; we order a fabulous Cahors which I have seen in London for north of £30 – here it costs £22.

What it doesn't have is much in the way of desserts. Oh, they are there, but Owen Brown isn't that interested in them. A treacle tart is OK, but rough and ready. A baked apple stuffed with sultanas is undercooked. Still, they stock very good ice creams by Mrs Dowsons. And now that Owen Brown is finally staying put, he can afford to hire himself a good pastry chef. Then the Mark Addy would be complete.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place