The Devil's Throat at the Iguazu Falls, from the Brazilian side of the river. Photograph: Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images

It's potentially one of the most powerfully destructive forces of nature, but we can't live without it. It's also well on the way towards being the most divisive political issue in the world today; a potent symbol of all that separates rich areas of the world from poor ones. On average you and I use between 135 and 140 litres of it a day. What is it? It's water, of course.

The actual presence of water is essential to the survival of life as we know it; it is one of a handful of items that can, without exaggeration, be described as essential. It is hardly surprising, then, that it has always been called on by poets as symbol, metaphor and actual presence in their works. For James Joyce, in his poem All Day I Hear the Noise of Waters, the sound of the stuff flowing, its constant monotone, is redolent of the melancholy isolation of the artist. Continue reading...

Ooh matron, the time for the Bad Sex in fiction award has come again. This year Alastair Campbell's brief return to saucy fiction is the most prominent contender alongside the likes of John Updike and James Buchan. Over 17 years, the prize has become a reliable fixture of the novelty calendar in Britain – it's very hard to imagine its mix of titters and embarrassment being staged anywhere other than the home of Benny Hill and Carry On. Continue reading...

Electrifying ... Michael Rosen. Photograph: Rex

Michael Rosen has been a tireless ambassador for children's literature during his stint as children's laureate – I saw him in action earlier this year, and he was a truly electrifying speaker, making the kids present practically incandescent with excitement – but his two-year tenure is coming to an end next year, so the organisers are asking for nominations for the new incumbent. Continue reading...

Any book was going to suffer in comparison after the sequence of books I read during the winter of 1997. Starting with Philip Roth's American Pastoral, continuing with Toni Morrison's Paradise and Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and concluding with DeLillo's Underworld, it was a four-book run of novels that reaffirmed, at least to me, that greatness was not something only attributable to the dead, obscure or soon-to-be-canonised. It was exhilarating and exciting, but also tiring. The next book needed to be different, something lighter to follow such a lush diet; something English, something funny, and something short. And what I chose was Charles Kennedy Scott's Low Alcohol. Continue reading...

Looking for inspiration ... Sarah Palin. Photograph: Lynne Sladky/AP

While many Americans are feeling a sense of post-election depression - personally, I really miss spending my nights phoning random strangers in Virginia and Colorado - two of the most vibrant characters from the campaign trail haven't let their team's loss get them down. Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber Wurzelbacher have hauled themselves up from the ignominy of defeat and decided to tackle the next best thing to the presidency: being published. Continue reading...

'Blackbird = poet'? Detail from Rory Jeffers' blackbird image

Int én bec
    ro léic feit
    do rind guip
    glanbuidi
    fo-ceird faíd
    os Loch Laíg
    lon do craíb
    charnbuidi

This weird little scrap of Irish syllabic verse, probably from the 9th century, consists of just 24 syllables, broken up into eight short lines, which have somehow continued to echo in modern Irish verse: the little lyric seems to have stuck; it has proved itself, in Seamus Heaney's words, to have "staying power". Continue reading...

Constance Briscoe. Photograph: Francesco Guidicini/Rex Features

Misery memoirs – that "painful lives" section of the book shelves that makes an awful lot of money for publishers but which the majority try not to talk about too much – are back under the spotlight this week, thanks to yet another controversy over accuracy. This time it's Constance Briscoe's bestselling Ugly that is up for discussion, with her mother suing Briscoe for libel, and accusing her of writing "a piece of fiction".

Cue an outraged article in the Mail this morning, deploring the "shameful appetite for misery porn". Continue reading...

The very first books that hit your brain... Photograph: Gary Calton

"There is always one moment in childhood", wrote that modern master of the soulful soundbite, Kahlil Gibran, "when the door opens and lets the future in." For me, that moment occurred around age four, when at dinner one night I discovered that our kitchen table had a drawer underneath it, and proceeded to use it to hide my crusts, just as the eponymous heroine had in my bedtime book, My Naughty Little Sister And Bad Harry by Dorothy Edwards and Shirley Hughes. I was promptly spotted, roundly rebuked, and refused pudding, which set the pattern for my lifetime: ineptly modelling my own behaviour on attractively intractable literary characters (My Naughty Little Sister remains a favourite muse), reaping dissatisfaction, disillusion and despair, but persisting nonetheless, despite the repeated lack of real, and metaphorical, cornflake tart. Continue reading...

These cash-strapped times mean getting something for free is always an unexpected bonus, which is why I love the idea behind Book View Cafe, our site of the week this week. Continue reading...

The Afghan-born Prix Goncourt winner Atiq Rahimi. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty

The motives that guide the gaze of the literary world can be both
unthinkingly loyal and randomly fickle. For while there are more
sacred cows grazing on the lush pastures of literature's vast
canonical steppe than there are dead ones hanging in Smithfield
market, it doesn't take long for last year's big thing to fall off the
shelves into the ignominy of remainderdom, replaced by a glut of more
brightly coloured, aggressively marketed, bright young things. Continue reading...

'One of our least parochial novelists': Costa shortlistee Louis de Bernières. Photograph: Guardian

If your first thought was that this year's Costa shortlist for best novel looks rather white, male and middle-aged, then your second should perhaps be that this is itself a novelty these days. Literary prize juries have given so much attention to the first novel in the last few years that one has to be grateful to the Costa for its quaint habit of separating them off into a category of their own, thus clearing a path to more experienced novelists. Continue reading...

The lovable 'poached egg': a Morris Minor

The last thing you expect to have on your tail these days is a Morris Minor. But that looks like being my lot for years to come. Earlier this year, I couldn't get enough of the little rounded cars, famously damned by their reluctant maker Viscount Nuffield as "poached eggs". Everyone I met was quizzed: did they have one? Had their parents? What about their grannies, sisters, cousins, aunts? Continue reading...

Wildlife beware: in the Poacher's Handbook, no creature is safe. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty

Like many city-dwellers, I sometimes experience a desire to pack up and light out for a place where life is governed according to different principles. A common, idle daydream perhaps, but one I've entertained frequently enough to lead to the creation of a small section of my library devoted to rural living, from self-sufficiency guides to out-and-out survival handbooks. Surely, I think, after another bus journey spent perilously contorted and savagely vibrated, if one is properly prepared then country life can't be all that hard to adapt to, can it? Continue reading...

Untroubled by irony: 1976 Booker winner David Storey. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

The long hiatus in my trawl through past Booker winners has not been caused by boredom. True, the last winner I read, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat And Dust, was dry and cold, but the project itself interests me as much as ever. Indeed, the book at which I broke off – David Storey's Saville – is particularly fascinating. It's certainly blown apart one of my own long-held cultural assumptions. Continue reading...

Andrew Marvell

The male poet strides through European literature, eloquently pleading with his mistress to seize the day, ie come to bed. We don't hear much from the mistress – unless of course we look into the subterranean streams of ballads and folk songs, which are perennially filled with the anonymous laments of those women who let themselves be seized (by jolly sailors and soldiers more often than poets, it must be said) and were left holding the baby. Continue reading...