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A drifting mind turns to the classics as MPs discuss the wretched Common Fisheries Policy Environment questions, rarely the most fascinating events. As ever especially when they were discussing the wretched common fisheries policy my mind drifted, this time to consider how Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea might have turned out if he had written in the light of EU rules. All jargon is from today's session. The old man's forehead crinkled and above him the sun flamed in the pewter sky like the eyes of a Parisian putain. Madre de dios, he had had bad luck. His mind returned to his youth, when his face was smooth and the women thought him beautiful, the lost days before the CFP's broken regulations, based on a centralised, top-down system, had come into force under directive no 687 (B,i [d]). "Local and regional sea-based management!" he muttered with sour breath, spitting on the stones beneath his feet. "Get in the boat!" he said to the boy. '...

Witty writer, publisher and agent behind The Naked Civil Servant The writer and publisher Donald Carroll, who has died aged 70, will be best remembered for introducing the Liverpool poets Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri to the world; for persuading Quentin Crisp towrite The Naked Civil Servant (1968); and for being very funny. He was born in Dallas, Texas, to a family that could trace its descent to a signatory of the Declaration ofIndependence. Domestic life could be quite stormy. Donald used to tell astory about how his father, a wealthy stockbroker whose clients included Lyndon Johnson, became so annoyed with a swarm of bees around the swimming pool one day that he took out his shotgun and tried to blast them out of the air. Donald first demonstrated his love ofpoetry at the University of Texas, where he founded a quarterly magazine which published work by Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Wilbur and EE Cummings. He moved on to Trinity College Dublin, which...

David Shulman What Is a Palestinian State Worth? by Sari Nusseibeh Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldier Testimonies 20002010 by Breaking the Silence A few weeks ago I was in al-Nabi Salih, a Palestinian village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. It wasnt so easy to get there; the Israeli army had closed off the area on every side, and we literally had to crawl through the olive groves, just beneath one of the armys roadblocks, before we managed to reach the village. Al-Nabi Salih is a troubled place. The large Israeli settlement of Halamish nearby has taken over nearly half of the village lands, including a precious freshwater spring. Most Fridays there are dramatic confrontations between the soldiers and the villagers protesting this land grab and the other difficulties of life under occupation. Yet the first thing I saw in al-Nabi Salih was a huge sign in Arabic and English: We Believe in Non-Violence. Do You?

Audio slideshow: From Futurists to Constructivists, from Dada to Fluxus, we look back at 100 years of making manifestos Andy Duckworth Chris Moran Jim Powell Richard Lea

Sam Riley is Pinkie in a bold Mods'n'Rockers update of Graham Greene's classic Keith Waterhouse once wrote that Brighton looked like a town that was helping the police with its inquiries; no less memorably, Brighton resident Julie Burchill wrote that the simple word "esplanade" gave her a secret, sensual thrill. There's something of both these feelings in writer-director Rowan Joffe's bold, intelligent but flawed new version of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, his noir tale of fear and sin amid the interwar racecourse gangs in Brighton. Here, it's updated to the 1960s world of running seaside battles between Mods and Rockers. It's an intelligent and creative movie, not a masterpiece, but much better than some rather disobliging reviews have suggested, drawing less on the book than on the 1947 John Boulting film whose screenplay Greene co-wrote with Terence Rattigan. Fans of both, however, may be discontented with the way Joffe handles the ending,...

Audio slideshow: From Futurists to Constructivists, from Dada to Fluxus, we look back at 100 years of making manifestos Andy Duckworth Chris Moran Jim Powell Richard Lea

Publishers these days want their novelists looking young and shiny, but the books themselves are less attractive as a result At a certain point in your career as a novelist, you have to come to terms with no longer being "young". For novelists, youth seems to last, officially at least and according to Granta, until you are 40 but eventually, time catches up with us all. Personally, I've always been conscious of death, and on the whole rather cheered by the thought that one day my troubles large or small will be over. What I'm not so happy about is not having done enough with my life. Next to those I revere, composers especially, none of us will ever do much or indeed, suffer as much. But there are times when I feel that I've been serving out a sentence of some 20 years in order to look after my children and work and write, and that none of these has been done quite as single-mindedly or as satisfactorily as I'd wish. Not that I'm complaining: I count my...