Kultur & Literatur

To the untrained eye the damage is barely visible. Yet within the handbound pages of books charting how Europeans travelled to Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul empire from the 16th century onwards, the damage caused by one Iranian academic to a priceless British Library collection is irreversible.

Leading scholars at the library are at a loss to explain why Farhad Hakimzadeh, a Harvard-educated businessman, publisher and intellectual, took a scalpel to the leaves of 150 books that have been in the nation's collection for centuries. The monetary damage he caused over seven years is in the region of £400,000 but Dr Kristian Jensen, head of the British and early printed collections at the library, said no price could be placed upon the books and maps that he had defaced and stolen.

"These are historic objects which have been damaged forever," said Jensen. "You cannot undo what he has done and it has compromised a piece of historical evidence which charts the early engagement of Europeans with what we now know as the Middle East and China.

"It makes me extremely angry. This is someone who is extremely rich who has damaged and destroyed something that belongs to everybody."

Hakimzadeh, 60, faces a jail sentence today when he appears at Wood Green magistrates court in London. The Iranian-born academic fled his country after the fall of the Shah and holds a US passport. He has pleaded guilty to 14 specimen charges of stealing maps, pages and illustrations from 10 books at the British Library and four from the Bodleian Library in Oxford dating back to 1998.

When police searched his home in Knightsbridge, west London, last July they discovered some of the missing maps, pages and pictures inserted into less valuable editions of the same books he owned.

Academics at the library were forced to turn detective in June 2006 after a reader who had taken out a copy of Sir Thomas Herbert's book A Relation of Some Yeares Travaille, Begunne Anno 1626 suggested some of its pages had been removed.

Careful examination by experts at the library proved him to be correct and the staff mounted a delicate operation to find out who had been damaging the book and whether other items had suffered the same fate.

Using electronic records, they found all the British Library members who had taken out the book and then examined other works these people had had contact with. They discovered that other works detailing the same periods in history and covering European engagement to the area from modern-day Syria to Bangladesh were also damaged.

Pages had been sliced away close to the spine of the books and maps, one of them worth £32,000, had been removed from chapters, leaving barely noticeable indentations in the paper marking where they had been.

"It was only the books taken out by Hakimzadeh which showed a consistent pattern of damage," said Jensen.

They discovered that Hakimzadeh had taken out 842 books and of these at least 150 had been mutilated. Some of the stolen pages were discovered but many have been lost forever.

The library wrote to Hakimzadeh, who at the time was chief executive of the Iran Heritage Foundation, a charity he formed in 1995 to promote and perserve the history, languages and culture of Iran. He replied saying he had no idea that there was any damage to the books. It was at this point that the library went to the police with the details of the investigation.

Forensic scientists analysed the damaged books and police officers called at Hakimzadeh's Knightsbridge home, where he lived with his wife.

"Some pages were found loose and others had been inserted into books in his own collection," said Jensen, who acccompanied the officers. "Hakimzadeh is eminently characteristic of our traditional groups of readers: he has a profound knowledge of the field. From my point of view, that makes it worse because he actually knew the importance of what he was damaging. What he did was use the cover of serious scholarly purpose to steal historic pieces and abuse our trust."

The library has launched a civil action to sue Hakimzadeh for full compensation.

Defaced books

The rare books that were defaced by Hakimzadeh include:

Historia de la China From the writings of Father Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit who travelled to China in 1582 and became the first western traveller to settle there. First published in Latin in 1615. This copy was printed in Spain in 1621. Ricci learned to speak and write Chinese and his work was the first important and reliable European description of the country.

Novus Orbis An anthology of works by Simon Grynaeus, professor of Greek at Basle. Hakimzadeh removed an engraving of a world map drawn by Hans Holbein the Younger, court painter to Henry VIII.

Mithridates By the English dramatist Nathaniel Lee. Published in 1693.

Ost-indian-und Persianische Reisen By Johann Gottlieb Worm, the German philosopher who accompanied an envoy of the Dutch East India Company sent to the Safavid court in Persia in 1717. He travelled to Isfahan from India via Bandar. Published in 1745.

Mark Crick performs 'Hanging Wallpaper with Ernest Hemmingway' and 'Boarding an Attic with Edgar Allan Poe'

These are high times for Gordon Brown. He has been praised for saving the global financial system, and received a welcome respite from his electoral troubles at the Glenrothes byelection.

But not everything is rosy for the prime minister. His latest book, Wartime Courage: Stories of Extraordinary Courage by Ordinary People in World War Two, has sold just 193 copies in the fortnight it has been on sale.

In the same two weeks, Jordan - Pushed to the Limit, the latest instalment of the glamour model's autobiography, sold 4,446 copies, despite having been on sale for 10 months. Wartime Courage currently ranks at 10,646 in the Amazon UK sales chart.

To rub salt into his wounds, the reviews have been rotten. The Independent bemoaned Brown's "robotic neutrality", "engine-drone monotone" and "mealy-mouthed avoidance of 'controversial' issues". Writing in the Spectator, the author James Delingpole went further, describing Wartime Courage as a "leaden, clunken-fisted cuttings job". Brown has an "automaton-like inability either to empathise with his subject ... or to work out which details needed emphasising and which could be safely excluded".

Brown's subjects - which include the Chariots of Fire legend Eric Liddell and Violette Szabo, who worked undercover for the Special Operations Executive during the second world war - were intrinsically thrilling, said Delingpole. Which "makes it all the less excusable that Brown has made them seem so dull".

And that's not all. "His opening and closing essays are waffly, trite and, in so far as they attempt to make political capital from the achievements of people who have nothing whatsoever to do with him or his grisly ideology, offensive," complained Delingpole, who admitted that as a "starving author" he resented "the allocation by the publishing industry of time, money, space and attention to people who can barely write and anyway have well remunerated day jobs".

Not everyone hated it, however. The Jewish Chronicle's reviewer was a lone fan, saying all of the stories in the book were "well told" and made "compelling reading". "Finding time to write this book does the prime minister credit."

The book was due to be published in April, but did not hit the shops until November. A spokeswoman for Bloomsbury, the prime minister's publisher, denied it had been held back because of his low popularity ratings in the spring.

"The reason it was delayed was because he hadn't finished writing it - he didn't have a ghostwriter," said Bloomsbury's publicity director, Katie Bond.

Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of the publishing trade magazine the Bookseller, said that while he was surprised Brown's book had sold so badly, it was not the most tempting proposition.

Denny said: "It would be different if he had written his memoirs. That could be political dynamite. We've had half the story of the Blair years, but Brown's point of view could be fascinating."

But he added: "It is not disastrously bad. Hardback books do not sell in huge quantities any more. When the Booker longlist came out last year, of the 13 books, half had sold less than 1,000 copies."

Gordon Brown's first book on the subject of bravery, Courage: Eight Stories, which was published by Bloomsbury last year, has sold 4,469 copies in the UK, according to Nielsen BookScan.

The Conservatives may be falling back in the polls, but they are easily winning the book war: William Hague's biography of William Pitt the Younger has sold more than 78,000 copies since 2004.

PM's weighty tome

Tirpitz and Godfrey Place

On 11 September six X-craft set out for the thousand-mile journey. Each midget submarine had two crews: one for the passage out - on which they were towed by six larger submarines - and one operational crew to carry out the final attack. Two of the midget submarines broke adrift, one being eventually recovered, the other sinking with all hands. On 19 September the four remaining vessels approached the target area, still under tow. Towing problems delayed HM Submarine Stubborn and her charge X-7 when a floating mine - part of the outer defences of Altafjord - became caught on the tow-line and was then impaled on the bows of the midget submarine. Place, the commander of X-7, went out on its forward casing and cleared the mine away with his foot.

It has been likened to the quest to build ancient Alexandria's famous library, a formidable repository of knowledge held in one place. But this time, they hope it will be indestructible.

The EU yesterday launched the prototype of Europeana, its bold project to digitise millions of books, artworks, manuscripts, maps, objects and films from the most important libraries, museums and archives, and provide them free to download from one website. The EU commission's head, José Manuel Barroso, called it a Renaissance moment, as Europe plans to outdo commercial search engines in the staggering scope of its collection.

But demand for europeana.eu was so great that by 10.30am yesterday it had to be temporarily closed after crashing under 10m hits an hour. Last night, the site was still experiencing problems and was again taken offline.

The project was born of a fear among European leaders and culture bosses that Google was dominating the web, with its Book Search project scanning millions of books from dozens of world libraries to boost its traffic.

Europeana goes further by providing interactive content, audio and video, ranging from original texts of Dante's Divine Comedy and the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, to footage of the fall of the Berlin wall or 1970s documentaries on the pornographic film market in France. The site will feature pieces such as the 1215 Magna Carta and a painting by Domenico di Michelino - Dante illuminating Florence with his Poem - as well as 80,000 broadcasts from French national archives, including footage from the first world war.

But it will also offer audio pieces from the British Library, such as recordings of wildlife and every birdcall in Britain, as well as the complete range of dialects in the UK. Around 1,000 European national libraries, museums and institutions, including the Louvre and Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, have contributed.

"It is unique," said Jill Cousins, Europeana's executive director. "A search engine cannot do what we can. For example, a search for Mozart brings together letters he wrote to his father, musical scores, and film and sound recordings of his music."

She said she was grateful to Google for setting a precedent. "Part of the reason our site exists is because Google Book Search kicked off a debate about the presence of European cultural heritage on the web. That allowed us to mobilise."

One of the people most incensed by Google Book Search was the former French president Jacques Chirac, who started a race with the Anglo-Saxons to digitalise French content led by institutions such as the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. France accounts for around a half of the content of the Europeana site, followed by Britain and the Netherlands. Other countries will slowly add more content. Currently there are around 2m items available, and the site is expected to reach 10m items by 2010.

Stephen Bury, head of European and American collections at the British library, said: "The reason the French have such a presence is the French government gave money to digitalise, which we never had. While we funded our digitalisation by collaborating with private bodies or higher education organisations, the French have more things digitalised than they can use. It was a political drive by the French."

The site will reopen the question of whether governments should give more funding to ambitious plans to put books online. In 2009-2010 €69m (£59m) in EU funds will be available for research on digital libraries. With 14 staff and at an annual cost of around €2.5m, Europeana is still in its early stages.

Funding for online libraries can be daunting, even for private firms. Microsoft has abandoned its online library projects after digitalising around 750,000 works.

Santiago de la Mora from Google's European office welcomed the Europeana launch, saying Google hoped to collaborate with it "taking part in what could become the biggest technological leap in disseminating knowledge since Gutenberg invented the printing press".

Last month Google agreed to pay $125m in a legal settlement with authors and major publishers so that readers can browse millions of copyrighted books online. Europeana, trying to avoid similar problems, will initially offer access mainly to items in the public domain.

From Magna Carta to Mozart

Vermeer Dutch collections have provided a large number of Vermeers, including Girl with a Pearl Earring, from the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The site will enable users to view the painting in the same, if not greater, detail than they could in a museum Magna Carta of 1215 Provided by the British Library Beethoven's 9th Symphony Germany provided the score as well as images of the composer. Other original manuscripts include scores by Chopin and scores and letters by Mozart Footage of the fall of the Berlin wall Extensive newsreel film provided by the French national archives Historical maps A collection that ranges from British maritime maps to Europe's colonial past, such as a 1784 Portuguese map of the coast of Brazil, and an 11th century map of Ireland René Descartes A selection of original manuscripts, including his famous reasoning "Cogito, ergo sum" - "I think, therefore I am".

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".

First used in a metrical tract of the 11th century to illustrate a metre called snám súad, the lyric might be translated, literally, as: "The little bird which has whistled from the end of a bright-yellow bill: it utters a note above Belfast Lough – a blackbird from a yellow-heaped branch" (in a translation by Gerard Murphy). Or perhaps: "The little bird has whistled from the tip of his bright yellow beak; the blackbird from a bough laden with yellow blossom has tossed a cry over Belfast Lough" (translation by David Greene & Frank O'Connor).

Perhaps the poem's recent appeal has something to do with the character of the plucky little bird singing out over Belfast – the site of so much tragedy during the past three decades. Blackbird = poet? That, at least, is one way of looking at it.

Poetic versions, and rewrites, and reinterpretations of the poem abound, by John Montague, and John Hewitt, and Seamus Heaney, and Thomas Kinsella (in The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse), and Tomás Ó Floinn (in modern Irish), and by the current director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Ciaran Carson.

Carson tells the story of how, when appointed as the first director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, he saw a blackbird pecking around in the little garden outside the School of English and thought it might make an interesting symbol for the newly established centre for creative writing. And so "The Blackbird of Belfast Lough", in word and image, became the Centre's motto and emblem.

Some years later, as writer in residence at the Heaney Centre, I found myself in conversation with two artists, the brothers Oliver and Rory Jeffers. We'd occasionally meet, the three of us, on Saturday mornings to drink coffee and to talk about art and literature, and Oliver would sometimes bring along work-in-progress and Rory would try to explain to me the structure and meaning of the language of images (which I never understood). On a whim, and high on caffeine and big ideas, I thought I would invite a number of local and international artists to read "The Blackbird of Belfast Lough" in its original Irish and its English translations, and to make of it what they would. Which is how I found myself putting together an exhibition now on show at the Heaney Centre.

In his preface to the exhibition catalogue Seamus Heaney suggests that the images might be a way of keeping "the perpetual motion machine of art on the go". I couldn't – obviously – have put it better myself.

The mother of a lawyer who says her daughter's best-selling "misery memoir" is fiction broke down in court yesterday as she told a jury how she had struggled to raise her family. Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell is suing barrister Constance Briscoe for libel. Briscoe alleged she had suffered abuse and neglect during her south London childhood in Ugly, the first part of her autobiography published in 2006.

Briscoe-Mitchell began crying as she described her relationship with George Briscoe, father of seven of her 11 children, on the second day of the hearing at the high court in London at which she is also suing the book's publishers Hodder and Stoughton over her daughter's claims. Her counsel, William Panton, said Briscoe was "spinning a yarn". Her mother had worked as a dressmaker to keep her children, often without their father, and had provided for them equally to the best of her ability, an assertion supported by Briscoe's siblings, he said. Briscoe painted a picture of being regularly punched, kicked and beaten with a stick by her mother, said Panton, yet had not complained to police, social services or teachers.

Briscoe's lawyer, Andrew Caldecott QC, said the jury must remember when they heard witnesses that they were dealing with events between 1964 and 1975 when Briscoe-Mitchell, 74, was in her prime, not a vulnerable old lady, and Briscoe was a child. "Constance Briscoe says she was the victim of sustained cruelty and serious neglect when she was a child. She chose to say it. She has to prove it."

The trial was not of the accuracy of every word or paragraph in the book but of whether or not it was true that Briscoe was physically and emotionally abused by her mother over a lengthy period, said Caldecott. "We say this is a book that has its share of errors but it was properly put in the biography section of a bookshop, not in the fiction section."

Briscoe-Mitchell was asked about her relationship with George Briscoe. "My husband wasn't there to help me along with his children. I've had a very hard time with my husband. He wouldn't maintain them, he wasn't there. It was rough, it wasn't easy but I managed.

"He was in and out. He'd just come and make a baby and go back to his girlfriend and that was my life. It was too much. He'd come and kick the door off." Briscoe-Mitchell said she had four times taken him to court for maintenance. The only time she received any payment was when he was arrested and police gave her the £15 in his pocket. "He didn't want to know about his children, he got no interest there at all."

The case continues.

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.

The fact that they're experienced doesn't mean that they're no longer at the cutting edge. One of this year's big themes, for instance, has been psychotherapy, and Patrick McGrath, described by one critic as "our foremost exponent of the neurogothic", is in the forefront with Trauma, his novel of a New York shrink struggling to deal with his own and history's demons.

Likewise, Louis de Bernières's chamber novel, A Partisan's Daughter, may be confined to a London housing co-op in the late 70s, but it packs into it a moving account of the background to Yugoslavia's breakdown, as revealed through a series of conversations between a bored travelling salesman and a Serbian former prostitute. It's a reminder that, whatever form he chooses, De Bernières is one of the least parochial novelists writing in English today.

Sebastian Barry — best known as a playwright before this year — is now familiar as the man who, according to at least two judges, should have won the Booker for The Secret Scripture.

But perhaps the most exciting inclusion on this list is Chris Cleave, whose first novel, Incendiary, paid the price of being just too on-the-button (framed as a letter from a North London mother to Osama bin Laden after her husband and son have been killed in a suicide bombing at Arsenal football stadium, it was published on 7/7). What looked then like a tricksy coincidence appears, in the context of his second novel, as a refreshing willingness to confront big stories head on. The Other Hand sweeps from Nigeria to Kingston-upon-Thames, unpacking a load of liberal guilt as it goes. A second novel in line for one of the major prizes of the year — now there's a story!

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?

I met people who'd raced them, scraped fungus off them for primary school nature tables, turned one into a mechanical lobster and applied to be buried with theirs when they (the person, not the engine) died. It was lovely and I learned that the two words "Morris" and "Minor" were a sure way of getting almost anyone to go all soft and say: "Aahhhh."

It was necessary, too, because my task at the time was write the car's biography to celebrate its 60th birthday, a worthy occupation because the Minor is a case study in sociology as well as a classic piece of design. It was the first British car to sell a million and in the process achieved an exceptional lovability, or more precisely, a knack of making people extraordinarily fond of it. Anyone in need of this – a politician, a suitor, a parent or a child – should study Morris Minorism from A-Z and see how it can be done.

A is for Alec Issigonis, the car's inspirational Levantine creator (assisted by Reg Job and Vic Oak who were as village-blacksmithy Brit as their names). Z is for…, well, Z is difficult actually, unless you nerdishly include the Series Z Post Office van which the bright red Minor version replaced in 1953.

In between is everything else; but that's all in the book. My purpose here is to warn other nascent biographers, who don't already know, that a baby like this seems to be for life. Morris Minor, the Biography: 60 Years of Britain's Favourite Car has been out for just two weeks, but already I have 14 new anecdotes, two phone messages and three promises from relations to tell me about theirs when we meet at the extended family party on Boxing Day.

"My Dad only got rid of his when he was overtaken by a pedestrian when he was 85 and driving to the pub," starts one recollection. "Our neighbour kept hers even when it stopped going," begins another, "because unlike modern cars it was strong enough for her stand on without the metal dimpling when she was cutting her hedge."

Does this happen to mightier biographers? Was Morley beset with details he had omitted about Gladstone? Does Michael Holroyd ever escape from enthusiasts for Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw, or Claire Tomalin wriggle out from under the shadows of Hardy and Pepys?

The last two perhaps provide the answer: finish A and move on to B, which I am now about to do with a sequel on the Mini, which is 50 next year. That, and perhaps, in tune with modern interactive publishing, a couple of blank pages between the index and the back cover, for readers who aren't included to write their own experiences down.

A fantasy tale inspired by a stone dragon on a beach on Scotland's west coast has been chosen by young Scottish readers as their favourite book for pre-teens.

DarkIsle by DA Nelson triumphed in the 8-11 category of the Royal Mail awards for Scottish children's books, Scotland's largest children's book award. The fast-paced first novel describes the adventures of 10-year-old Morag who, aided by a talking rat and a resourceful dodo, must race against time to save their world from an evil warlock. The trio's guide is a dragon who has been turned to stone, based on a huge sculpture by artist Roy Fitzsimmons that overlooks Irvine beach. The book is the first in a trilogy.

The Royal Mail award-winners are selected by Scottish children themselves, who vote for their favourite books from shortlists chosen by children together with a panel of experts in Scottish children's literature and education. All of the shortlisted titles were published in 2007 by authors or illustrators born or resident in Scotland. This year, the third of the awards, 9,541 young Scottish readers took part in the competition and voted.

Most votes were cast in the early years category for a book in the 0-7 age group. It was won by Billy Monster's Daymare by Alan Durant and Ross Collins. Set in a topsy-turvy world where monsters are scared of children, the picture book describes how little Billy Monster can't sleep because he is suffering from horrible daymares about boys and girls.

The older readers prize (age 12-16) went to Bunker 10 by JA Henderson, a high-octane, action-packed adventure story set on a secret and remote military base peopled by super-smart teens.

Each author received £3,000 prize money at an award ceremony in Aberdeen hosted by the broadcaster Kirsty Wark and attended by hundreds of children from all over Scotland.

The high court is rarely the best place to settle a family feud - especially when one party is a barrister and part-time judge. But Constance Briscoe, whose autobiography of a traumatic childhood has sold nearly 600,000 copies, yesterday gained a few more readers as members of a jury began studying her memoir, which accuses her mother of violence and neglect.

Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, 73, is suing for libel and claiming damages from her daughter and publisher Hodder & Stoughton, which brought out Ugly: the True Story of a Loveless Childhood, in January 2006. She accuses her daughter of writing a "piece of fiction".

The jurors' verdict on the book's veracity will help determine the legal as well as authorial reputation of a woman who apparently defied the odds of a painful childhood and adolescence in south London to become one of Britain's few black judges.

Both Briscoe, 50, and Hodder & Stoughton deny libel and plead justification. As the case opened, Briscoe-Mitchell's lawyer, Milton Panton, said she was not alleging that Briscoe had exaggerated incidents alleged in the book, but that they did not happen at all. Briscoe and her publishers would have to satisfy the court that her claims were true.

"These are serious allegations of criminal acts - assault, abuse, neglect. You will expect cogent evidence from the defendants in establishing the truth of these matters."

He referred to alleged incidents when Briscoe was punched by her stepfather and when he stubbed a cigarette out on her hand, as well as a claim of needing surgery on her breasts because of trauma caused by her mother's assaults.

Panton asked jurors to consider whether they could trust Briscoe's memory. "When I read that book, I kept looking back and saying, how old was the author when this happened? In 1962 she was five, in 1963 she was six and so on. You have to decide whether the quotation of direct dialogue between Ms Briscoe and the adults in the book are real, whether someone could remember that far back."

The trial is expected to last 10 days. Ugly, the first of a planned autobiographical trilogy, has sold 200,000 copies in hardback and 380,000 in paperback in Britain alone, according to Hodder. Her follow up, Beyond Ugly, which takes her from university to plastic surgery and pupillage as a barrister, has sold another 43,000 hardback copies and 83,000 in paperback. The third instalment is already completed and Briscoe plans to turn to crime fiction,

In Ugly, Briscoe claims her mother systematically abused her, physically and emotionally, according to the publisher's blurb. Regularly beaten and starved, she tried to get herself taken into care by social services. Failing that, she swallowed bleach "because it kills all known germs and my mother always told me I was a germ".

The publicity material adds: "When Constance was 13, her mother simply moved out, leaving her daughter to fend for herself: there was no gas, no electricity and no food. But somehow Constance found the courage to survive her terrible start to life." It is, claims Hodder, a "heart-rending - and ultimately triumphant - story".

An extract published in the Guardian told how Briscoe was locked in the cellar for the first time after her mother had asked her to go down and get some potatoes. "When I was in the middle of the cellar I saw my mother's legs at the top of the stairs. She suddenly flicked the light switch off then moved backwards and the door to the cellar swung shut as I ran up the stairs.

"I heard the bolt slide home. I asked her to let me out, but she just walked away. I hadn't done anything wrong that I knew of. I started crying. In a panic I banged on the door and she shouted: 'If you know what's good for you, you will shut the fuck up.'"

The book may have been popular with readers but critics were divided. Julie Myerson in the Daily Telegraph complained about Briscoe's "plain lacklustre prose". But Marcel Berlins in the Guardian said Briscoe's book was an inspiring antidote to a catalogue of tedious career milestones and spoke "in a language untainted by convoluted legal-speak".

Out-li-er, noun

1: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from others in the sample.

2: yet another attempt to cash in by presenting a whole load of seemingly counterintuitive facts to tell you something you basically already knew.

One spring day in 2007 the two finest teams in the Canadian Hockey League met in the final of the Memorial Cup. These were the future stars of the sport, the 18-year-olds who had risen to the top of the sporting meritocracy on sheer talent and determination. Or had they?

This is a book about outliers, the people who do things above the ordinary. By looking at them I will get you to rethink your ideas of success. The question we always ask about the successful is, what are they like? But the real question is, where did they come from? Men such as Bill Gates didn't rise from nothing. They were once children with mothers and fathers. Amazing, but true.

Take the Canadian hockey players. Look through this team list and see if you can spot the anomaly. David Kveton, born Jan 1, 1988; Jiri Suchy, born Jan 1, 1988; Leonard Cohen, born Jan 1 1988.

You probably missed it. So let me help you. They were all born on January 1. This is because January 1 is the start date for each year's registration, so those born on that day have a huge developmental advantage. Only myself and pushy Canadian hockey parents who shag like rabbits in late March have noticed this. Perhaps one day someone might bother to research the educational effects of being a late baby in the academic school year. Oh. They already have.

Bill Joy co-founded Sun Microsystems and has become one of the richest men in the world. Most people have attributed his success to his being a complete neek. But this is only half the story. Joy also worked very hard. Research shows that those people who have worked for 10,000 hours are the ones who become successful - though I'm obviously hoping to be an exception to the rule. Timing is also critical; if Joy had been born in 1531, he probably wouldn't have had his own bedroom as a teenager to write code undisturbed.

So geniuses aren't created out of nothing. Let me pad this out a bit further with another lazy, rambling anecdote. Joe Flom is an extremely fat, ugly man who also happens to be one of New York's most successful lawyers. So how did a fat, ugly man become successful? Flom is also Jewish and was ostracised from traditional law firms in the 1950s and left to do the unpopular legal work, such as hostile takeovers, that no one else wanted to do. When these became standard business practice in the 1970s and 80s, he became very rich. Who would have thought it? Flom was from the right background at the right time and cashed in. If he had been born in 2020 he wouldn't have been born yet and things would have been very different.

In the 1980s and 90s, the Koreans crashed a lot of aeroplanes and no one really knew why until I looked up the crash investigation reports and copied them out here1. Koreans come from a society where people are taught to respect their superiors, so first officers never challenged the pilot if they thought they were making an error, preferring to let the plane crash. They have now all learned English, call each other motherfucker in the cockpit and their safety record has improved.

People are reluctant to stereotype people by ethnic group, so I should score contrarian points for that. And this. The Chinese are good at maths because of something to do with paddy fields and because their numbering system is easier than ours. I'm not sure this adds much, but what the hell. I looked it up, so you can read it.

Finally, take me. If I had been born 60 years ago, I would have been an unknown. But luckily, society now rewards chancers having a bad hair day.

1. Putting footnotes in a pop psychology book can be a good way both of filling up space and boasting academic respectability. The outlier is that it also colludes with the reader's vanity by implying they are clever enough to read a book with footnotes.

The digested read, digested: Paul Daniels meets Noel Edmonds.

Hear the digested read podcast at guardian.co.uk/audio

The renowned Israeli author Amos Oz has joined 30 intellectuals and public figures to forge a leftwing party in an attempt to defeat the resurgent rightwing Likud party, which is leading the polls.

But Labour, not the hardline nationalists in Likud, may be the biggest losers if the party succeeds in Israel's elections which are due in February next year.

"I hope the expanded leftist movement will become a replacement for the Labour party. The Labour party has finished its historic role, it isn't putting forward a national agenda and it joins any coalition," Oz told the Haaretz newspaper.

In 2006 Labour's leading light and Nobel peace prize winner, Shimon Peres, defected to join the hawkish Ariel Sharon, who led a breakaway group from the hardline Likud party to form the more centrist Kadima, which heads the coalition government.

More recently Labour's chairman, Ehud Barak, refused to rule out joining a coalition led by a resurgent Binyamin Netanyahu, whose Likud party is ahead in the polls.

Revelations last week that Barak, who is defence minister in the current coalition government led by Kadima's Ehud Olmert, had authorised the construction of 400 housing units and lots for Israeli settlers in the West Bank have further tarnished its left-of-centre credentials.

"The Labour party is a body that does not seek political life, and does not fight for its life," said Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel's domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, who resigned yesterday and is expected to join the more centrist party, Kadima.

The new left of centre party hopes to attract disgruntled Labour supporters, environmentalists, Reform Jews and Israeli-Arabs.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, arrived in Israel yesterday to begin a Middle East trip that will take in the Palestinian territories, Syria and Lebanon in the hope of promoting a regional peace plan.

But the trip has been overshadowed by Britain's decision to crack down on products sold in the UK that come from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal under international law.

Britain recently circulated a note within the EU expressing concern that goods may be entering the country improperly labelled as being produced in Israel when in fact they have been produced in the West Bank.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, opium

The Romantic poet composed one of his most famous works after taking laudanum in 1797. After waking from a stupor in which he'd dreamed of the stately pleasure-domes of a Chinese emperor, he scribbled 'Kubla Khan'. Coleridge's addiction finally killed him in 1834.

Thomas De Quincey, laudanum

His autobiographical account of his addiction to opium, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, published in 1821, brought him almost overnight fame. The book set the template for many writers who attempted to follow in De Quincey's druggy footsteps and found an even wider audience when Baudelaire published a French translation in 1860 called Les paradis artificiels.

Charles Baudelaire, hashish

Baudelaire was a member of the Club de Hachichins (Hashish Club), which met between 1844 and 1849 and counted Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Delacroix among its numbers. Baudelaire wrote widely on hash, saying: 'Among the drugs most efficient in creating what I call the artificial ideal... the most convenient and the most handy are hashish and opium.'

Robert Louis Stevenson, cocaine

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) was written during a six-day cocaine binge. His wife Fanny said: 'That an invalid in my husband's condition of health should have been able to perform the manual labour alone of putting 60,000 words on paper in six days, seems almost incredible.'

Aldous Huxley, mescaline

In The Doors of Perception, his famous 1954 book, which inspired Jim Morrison's choice of band name, Huxley recounts at length his experience on the drug mescaline. Found naturally in the Peyote cactus, mescaline induces hallucinations and it is these Huxley found opened his mind and inspired him to write his book.

Jack Kerouac, benzedrine

The Beat writer took less than three weeks to pen On the Road (1957). However, it took him a further five years to edit it for publication.

William Burroughs, heroin

The other famed Beat writer drew on his experience of addiction throughout his writing, most notably in Junkie (1953) and Naked Lunch (1959). The latter was written in Tangier, Morocco under the influence of marijuana and an opioid called Eukodol.

Philip K Dick, speed

The great sci-fi writer's intensive use of speed and hallucinogens inspired much of his work. One particular drug, Semoxydrine - similar to speed - fuelled him in the manic production of 11 sci-fi novels, some essays and short stories all in the space of one year between 1963 and 1964.

Hunter S Thompson, everything

Thompson, pictured right, wrote the infamous 1972 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, about a road-trip he had taken in 1971. His alter-ego narrator sets out with 'two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers'.

Stephen King, cocaine

The great horror writer was addicted to cocaine between 1979 and 1987 and used it to create a buzz to write. 'With cocaine, one snort, and it just owned me body and soul,' he told The Observer in 2000.

Craig Venter got an early hint of the trouble he would face as a key broker of the Human Genome Project when, in 1992, he was visited by a government official. Venter had just joined the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a senior researcher. 'Son, you are obviously doing extremely well,' the man announced. Venter was puzzled. How could this scientific illiterate assess my progress, he wondered? The man expanded: 'This is Washington and we judge people by the quality of their enemies. And son, you have some of the best.'

As backhanded compliments go, it was a cracker, though if it made Venter pause for a second, there is no hint in this robust and uncompromising autobiography. This is a man who, after quitting government science a year later, went on to pursue a privately funded path to decode the three billion 'letters' of DNA that form our genes. In the process, he delighted in slapping down officials, Nobel prize winners (including DNA pioneer Jim Watson) and billionaire businessmen seeking to invest in molecular genetics. Not surprisingly, in the end Venter fell out with just about everyone involved in the project. Yet without his dynamic input, it would never have been completed at its final remarkable rate.

Today a sprightly 62-year-old scientific entrepreneur and accomplished yachtsman, Venter remains one of the planet's most idiosyncratic scientists. A Californian surfer dropout who was drafted into the Vietnam war as a medical orderly, he witnessed the deaths of several hundred soldiers, usually while he was massaging their hearts or attempting to breathe life into them. 'I emerged with some serious medical skills, three military medals, an honourable discharge and, most important, my life,' he states.

Those skills - honed 'at the University of Death' - would see Venter through a brilliant scientific career, give him the urge to risk his life in some serious yachting adventures, and leave him with an unassailable confidence in his own judgment. Thus the lowly medical grunt from Da Nang became a world-ranking scientist and risk-taker. It's a remarkable story - and a thumping good read.