Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

We were gathered at a spot in front of the open hanger, led off one by one, and brought to a tent. There they cut off our beards and shaved our heads. At least they would no longer be able to drag me around by the hair, I thought.

This is essential reading.
Five Years of My Life. An Innocent Man in Guantanamo by Murat Kurnaz. Published by Palgrave Macmillan. Murat Kurnaz will be speaking at an event for Amnesty International on April 28 in London and May 8 in Belfast. Please visit www.amnesty.org for further details.

But being constantly reminded of the threat and the pressure to be aware, generally worrying about the chance of a terror attack may well be taking a toll on the hearts of millions of Americans. According to the study the most fearful people were three to five times more likely than the rest to receive diagnoses of new cardiovascular ailments.

The opening story, Lasiren by Mandy Sutter introduces us to a small child who needs the help of a mermaid to conquer her fear of water. There were moments when the story lost me because I ceased to believe that the child was so young. And again, two consecutive paragraphs, both beginning with something seen “by the base of one of the trees”, called my attention to the inexperience of the writer, particularly in the editing department. Super story, though, and from someone with more than her fair share of talent.

Sidura Ludwig’s story, Ten Ways to Better Customer Relations, introduces us to Cathy, who runs a small card shop, handmade jewellery, scented candles, some body products, things to make people feel good. Only by the end of the story did I realise she had been showing us a mirror filled with loneliness. This is a theme recollected again in Ludwig’s second story, Interlake Evergreens, where a man caught between a wife with Alzheimer’s and a new lover, tries to maintain his own sense of self.

Polly Wright can write:

I catch her staring at me while I’m unwrapping the mini chocolate swiss rolls.
I say ‘What?’ and she says, ‘That’s a nice top, dear.’ But I know that’s not what she’s thinking. She’s thinking I look a mess. Mum keeps up standards in the clothes department. She’s wearing her pleated skirt and Aran cardigan and paisley green and cream scarf tied in a knot. Her shoes are very good. Rounded court design with a blocky sort of heel in rich tan. She’s had them for years, but they’ve kept their shape. Mum’s a great advert for the shoetree.

Wright’s Shropshire Gold looks at the long aftermath of an abortion and teeters, unfortunately, because her writing is strong, on the wrong side of that thin line which separates inhibition from sentimentality.

This is the voice of Myra Connell, the fourth contributor to this collection:

There are family photographs all over the house, but they are gathered, as if on a shrine, on these two walls facing each other across the stairs. Several show Heidi at her wedding: she wears a short salmon-pink shift dress in a heavy brocade. It has a high neck and long sleeves, and it doesn’t suit her. She looks ungainly, and the dress seems an odd choice; but in another picture it is clear, from the way he has his hand on her belly and she looks up at him so proudly, that she was pregnant at her wedding. In all of these photos she looks outrageously happy, she smiles and smiles and smiles.

I love that: outrageously happy. If you’re going to use an adjective, save it for something like that.

Myra Connell also provides the key story in this volume with the last narrative in the collection, a brave story set around the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre, entitled, Hero.

People are still out, walking and jogging and skating. But everything has sobered up. The things that seemed fun before, the things that people chased hoping they would make them happy, the gadgets and the pretty clothes and the brand-name trainers, and the shows and the bars and the balls games, all that no longer seems to matter.

Diego Garcia, a tropical island located in the middle of the Indian Ocean, has long since given up its once-cherished status as a paradise destination. The last remaining coconut plantations were uprooted in the 1970s to make way for a US military base which is now home to nearly 2,000 American personnel.

At the height of the Cold War, the island’s key role was to provide a home for US Air Force bombers and Awacs surveillance planes, as well as serve as a satellite-tracking station and communications facility. But independent military experts believe that, since 9/11, this horseshoe-shaped atoll has become the sinister destination for terror suspects who have undergone “extraordinary rendition”.

Waking in the night, the coroner went outside to the garden and taking his easement, heard shouts and uproar nearby. Finishing his business, he took his sword and went out to the way in front, where he found Adam and the tippler roused from their beds by the agitation. It was the dark time of the moon and shapes and shadows slipped by like phantoms while men with torches ran here and there, shouting oaths and threats. A shadow loomed over him and Brigge levelled his sword against the belly of a man who brought himself up to a sharp halt.

Bennett’s dystopian novel, preceded by a quotation from Goethe -

Mistrust all in whom the desire to punish is imperative

- opens in Northern England at the beginning of the 1630s. The Puritans are in control of the town and the initial idealism which accompanied their cause has degenerated into factionalism and fanaticism. No one is safe.

I generally avoid novels set in this period because I find it difficult to deal with so much brutality, gore and cruelty. And those elements are, of course, present in Bennett’s novel, although alleviated frequently by a masterful use of language.

Brigge is the town coroner and one of its governors. He is sitting in judgement on an apparently obvious case of infantilism concerning a certain Katherine Shay. But feels he has to interview a witness who the constable seems reluctant to produce. Eventually Brigge sets out to discover the missing witness himself.

At the same time the other governors of the town are involved in a power battle with secret arrests, false and hear-say evidence, and an increasing strangle-hold on the citizens of the town. Catholics and their priests are linked to heretics and fornicators, adulterers and beggars, and all of them are hurried through the inquisitors and towards the scaffold and the hangman.

Meanwhile the general populace, fearful of the unseen terrors which would take them in their beds, are whipped into a lust for revenge.

Bennett draws no easy or clichéd conclusions about our own time or the war on terror. He tells a story.

What advice would you give to new writers?

Have the strength to (metaphorically) kill your babies: just because you spent a long time on something, that doesn’t make it any good.

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The Independent has interviews with American troops in Iraq:

“I just remember thinking, ‘I just brought terror to someone under the American flag’.”

Sergeant Timothy John Westphal, 31, of Denver, 18th Infantry Brigade, 1st Infantry Division. In Tikrit on year-long tour beginning February 2004

“A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that if they don’t speak English and they have darker skin, they’re not as human as us, so we can do what we want.”

Specialist Josh Middleton, 23, of New York City, 2nd Battalion, 82nd Airborne Division. Four-month tour in Baghdad and Mosul beginning December 2004

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Weaving Words is a delightfully interactive site about books and literature through the ages.

In the Times Online site, Peter Stothard assesses the man’s legacy in as fair a way as possible.

We all know enough about his disastrous foreign policies, slavishly following the lead of the Bush gang in the USA, committing us to violence and needless bloodshed abroad and attracting increasing terrorist activities at home, but his domestic policies and their results are less widely publicised:

His final marks at home?

Anyone with a liberal social agenda, the money to keep their children out of state schools, a modest preparedness for home rule in Scotland and Wales, the need for cheap immigrant labor and the liking to live in a famous country under a famous leader has felt five-ways blessed.

Anyone who hoped for a transformation in schools, a sensibility to the countryside, civil liberty, tradition and a better sense of urban safety feels five-ways robbed.