Should writers burn their private notes and diaries in order to avoid the prurient eyes of future researchers? Jeanette Winterson's admission to an audience at the Shakespeare & Company literary festival in Paris, that she regularly destroys her documentary legacy with methodical zeal, got the head of a publishing house and me swapping horrified glances.

The theme of the festival, where Winterson and I were speakers, was biography and memoir, [...]

Friday 14 September, 13.32: "Is there a rush on the bank?" I asked, half joking. "It's not really a rush," said the man in the black flat cap as he pointed to the well-formed, 90-strong queue in front. At 6ft 6in he had the best view of the line that had been forming outside Northern Rock's branch in Golders Green, London since morning. Stretching 45ft from the cashier windows and [...]

The foiled terrorist attacks in London on 29 June, and the subsequent attack at Glasgow Airport, differ from previous British Islamic terrorist plots in two important ways.

First, in terms of their tactics. These were car bombs. The Iraqi insurgency, it seemed, had for the first time been outsourced to British soil.

Second, according to police, those involved in the plot or plots were not British-born or bred. With the [...]

The jury in the trial of seven Muslims suspected of a conspiracy to blow up shopping centres and nightclubs with home-made "fertiliser" bombs - the so-called Crevice trial - has delivered its verdict. Five of those in the dock were found guilty of involvement in what could have been Britain's most devastating terrorist attack; two others, including the brother of the plot leader, were found not guilty.

With the verdict, [...]

A little over two years ago, when I was in Pakistan reporting for the New Statesman, I stopped off in Jacobabad, a large town in the province of Sindh, where the ramshackle buildings and corrugated-iron huts are forever caked in the light-brown dust of the surrounding desert.

It was there, sitting in a crowd beside a night-time campfire that I met San Dino, a local man of 35 or maybe [...]

"Scorpio", a Pakistani 15-year-old from the Sparkhill area of Birmingham, is talking to his friend Ali about recent events. "It's bad," he says. "Now I can't go to people of other nationalities and say, 'I'm Pakistani, I'm the best of nations'." His friend interrupts. "No. But you can't go and join the British army though. Then you'll be fighting on the gora's [white man's] side against Pakistan." The two friends [...]

I have many interests and would like to keep my options open regarding my future career. I know that I am still curious about human behaviour and the scientific study of the human mind. I also have a keen interest in the way we grow physically as well as cognitively. I believe the 3 A levels that I am studying at present will enable me to continue my studies and [...]

"Look!" says the young man, holding up his wrists to show the red marks. "They cuffed me for trying to get to my house." He tells me he is called Abdullah, but like a lot of people in the area he will not give his full name. Like a lot of people in the area, too, he is angry. "Yeah, 20 officers arrested me and the other brother there" - [...]

"The last six months, for sure he was attending my circuits but he wasn't at all asking about jihad issues. He was debating issues, theological issues," says Omar Bakri Muhammad, former leader of the now-disbanded radical Islamic group al-Muhajiroun. We are sitting in the Beirut flat of one of Bakri's relatives and he is talking about Omar Sharif. Bakri was one of the last people to talk to Sharif before [...]

Dozens of people, most of them Muslims, are thought to have died in the violence that followed the publication of those infamous Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad. Someone I know could be the next.

I met Mohammed al-Asadi, the editor-in-chief of the Yemen Observer, at a course for investigative journalists in London in July 2004. A generous man, on his return home he wrote inviting all who had been on the [...]