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The Italian writer Paolo Giordano has drawn a mesmerizing portrait of a young man and woman whose injured natures draw them together and inevitably pull them apart.

What is it about Yeats that is so attractive to rock stars, and why does Auden have the crowd moshing at the Forum? Graeme Thomson meets the musicians turning poetry into pop

One day in 2005, Mike Scott decamped to his music room armed only with a long-cherished dream and a copy of WB Yeats's greatest hits, a brick-like anthology of the late poet's collected works. For a fortnight, the leader of the Waterboys sat at his piano and ploughed methodically through the book, pushing and prodding at the words on each page until some began to offer a glimmer of a song.

"If the first line of any poem suggested a tune in my head, I'd persevere with it, and if it didn't I'd pass on to something else," says Scott. "I started at page one and worked through to page 600-and-something, and then I started again in case I missed any. I must have done that nine or 10 times, to give the opportunity for each line to sing to me. At the end of the first two weeks I had about 10 songs." He has since doubled that number, and the result is An Appointment With Mr Yeats, a series of concerts (and, all going to plan, a studio album) in which the Waterboys recontextualise the words of Ireland's most venerated poet by setting them to rock music.

Scott has form when it comes to Yeats: as early as 1986 he was dropping The Four Ages of Man into the Waterboys' live sets, and he later recorded The Stolen Child for Fisherman's Blues and Love and Death for Dream Harder, both of which will be revisited in the new show. However, he's far from the only rock-seer in thrall to the Irishman. Yeats's words have inspired numerous musicians, including Van Morrison (Crazy Jane on God), Joni Mitchell (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, adapted from The Second Coming) and Bono (Mad as the Mist and Snow). A patchy compilation album of Yeats songs, Now and in Time to Be, was released in 1997, featuring Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore, the Cranberries and, yes, the Waterboys, alongside several lesser-known acts. Even Carla Bruni tackled Before the World Was Made and Those Dancing Days Are Gone on No Promises, her 2007 album, which tended to treat the words of great poets as though they had been torn from the Yellow Pages.

Just what is it about Yeats that is so attractive to musicians? His vision is both mystical and unflinching, and he adopted shifting stances – nationalist, liberal, nihilist, radical, establishment pillar – in a manner that would be familiar to any pop star, but there's more to it than that. "There's a depth and a weightiness to his work that combines with his wonderful ear for the sound and colour of words," Scott says. "Fortunately, he put a lot of his poems into meter and rhyme, and that's what suggests the music to me. Most of the ones I've done are the ones that scan, and most of the tunes came quickly."

Scott, who declares himself an "archivist" of Yeats adaptations, is a hard man to impress. Now and in Time to Be was, he feels, "a missed opportunity – there were too many slapdash interpretations," and he's similarly dismissive of most of the hundreds of other songs set to the poet's words. "I think, 'Oh my God, what I'm doing is so much better!'" he says. "I'm a competitive bastard." He cites the several dozen different existing versions of Song of Wandering Aengus as an example. "Most of them are very pretty and dainty, what some people think fairy music should be, but it shouldn't," he says. "With very few exceptions, they all fail at the most basic hurdle: they don't sound as if the singer has 'a fire in their head', which is the first line of the lyric."

Featuring a 13-piece lineup performing over five nights at Dublin's Abbey theatre, the Irish institution Yeats co-founded in 1904, Scott describes the Waterboys show as "a radical statement". In his hands News for the Delphic Oracle becomes a twisted, sinister waltz, somewhere between Tom Waits and Kurt Weill. Set to music during last summer's Iranian protests, Let the Earth Bear Witness – an amalgam of words taken from Cathleen Ni Houlihan and The Blood Bond – is a protest song with palpable modern resonance. Even The Lake Isle of Innisfree – "the chocolate-box poem, the one they all got in school" – becomes a blues. "Now, that's blasphemous," he laughs. "I love that. I think putting Yeats to rock'n'roll and doing it for 20 songs is radical. It's changing his context absolutely."

The Blue Aeroplanes, the Bristolian art-rock collective who have influenced like-minded bands from REM to Art Brut – and who have a new album imminent – have also made something of a speciality out of adapting poetry to music. On albums such as Spitting Out Miracles and Swagger, the words of WH Auden, Louis MacNeice and Sylvia Plath were spun over a riot of tangled folk-rock. Singer Gerard Langley has often pondered which poems fit with music and which do not.

"There's something innate in the poem that suggests it will work," he says. "I can go through an entire book of poems that I like and only a couple will fit. It's the rhythms. The reason that you could do the Beat poets with jazz is that they were already incorporating those rhythms into the poems. With older stuff it's slightly more difficult, but some of them – MacNeice and Yeats – were using rhythms from traditional songs anyway. Auden's Miss Gee was written as a cabaret tune." He sighs wistfully. "I did always like the sight of a couple of thousand people at the Forum moshing to Auden."

Poking fun at poetry slams and "stuff that's too redolent of arts centres", Langley is well aware of the stigma attached to the combination of music and poetry, a nightmare vision that tends to revolve around 60s explorers such as the Fugs earnestly declaiming the words of Matthew Arnold over bongos and freeform guitar. You end up either with a performance that's indulgent, pretentious and overrespectful, or else something à la Bruni that fails to connect with the words. Ideally, says Langley, the listener should barely be aware that they're hearing poetry at all.

"A lot of poems sung over music don't work because they're too poemy," he says. "Rather than words 'on top' of something, I'm trying to make it sound like songs. Our version of Sylvia Plath's The Applicant worked very well. The poem is structurally quite simple, but it seems more complex than it is because I fit the words into different parts of the tune for emphasis; then people start hearing it differently. We sent out advance copies to journalists and nobody spotted it was by Plath. In fact, I was criticised for my 'new man lyricism!'"

Idlewild's Roddy Woomble has worked with Scottish poet Edwin Morgan and curated Ballads of the Book, an entire album of collaborations between Scottish musicians and writers. He emphasises that, above all, the process should be fun. "There's a high seriousness associated with poetry, but it doesn't have to be that way," he says. "We didn't feel the weight of having to sing these sacred verses; the intention was to make a good album. Beyond the fact that there were poets involved, it had to be something you'd want to put on in the car."

For Scott, the trick is to tune into the intent of the poem but not to be intimidated by what it represents. Yeats died in 1939, meaning that under the 70-year rule his work has only just fallen out of copyright. This made life easier because, although the Yeats estate granted him permission for the project, Scott undertook some judicious shuffling – the bridge of White Birds, for instance, is taken from Yeats's play The Shadowy Waters – which may have tested their resolve to preserve the integrity of the poet's work.

"Part of the creative process is to change things in the poems to make them work as songs," he says. "There are 20 songs in the show and seven or eight are untouched, but the rest have got subtle changes. Sometimes I've used a verse from another poem, or I've changed a word that might be confusing, or perhaps the rhyme doesn't quite work. I worked with a very clear brief: I might change something for the sake of the form, but I'd never change something that affected the meaning or the intention of the poet."

Perhaps these nuances explain why poetry and music tend to remain wary bedfellows, despite Scott's grand plan and many other examples. Former PIL bassist Jah Wobble turned William Blake's The Tyger into a dub reggae song and has recorded two albums of poetry set to music, The Celtic Poets and The Inspiration of William Blake. Blake "chose me", says Wobble of a poet whose visionary status has made him susceptible to rock adoration (Mark E Smith and Patti Smith are both fans). "When you do something like this you feel you're part of a lineage, that something is being passed on that's bigger than you are," Wobble adds. More recently, Rufus Wainwright has set three Shakespeare sonnets (10, 20 and 43) to music on his new album, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu.

Aside from the creative riches on offer, there are expedient reasons for plundering poetry. With copyright control rarely an issue, it offers an entire world of words, often gratis; it's also a sure-fire means of defeating writer's block. "When I haven't got enough lyrics of my own, I'm always looking around for things I might want to do," says Langley. "That was originally one of the reasons for doing it." Scott agrees: "Lyrics are always the thing that takes most time with me, and here I had a bye to the next round!"

Wobble laments a rich seam of inspiration largely left untapped. "I want drama, and poetry is fantastic for that," he says. "It's a dramatic colour and I'm surprised musicians don't use it more, tying everything together, playing with connections and combinations. You could make an outstanding record using Shakespeare, because there's so many eternal truths there. Look what [film director] Akira Kurosawa did with him. You take the essence of what he wrote and use it."

Scott agrees that musicians shouldn't be afraid to bend poetry to meet their own purposes. Despite his affection for Yeats, he claims the Abbey shows aren't an exercise in reverence or nostalgia. They're about making the words sing in new and exhilarating ways. "I may be in awe of Yeats's skill, but I'm not in awe of his reputation," he says. "It's my job as a musical writer to treat the lyrics like I'd treat my own – to be ruthless with them, and unglamoured. My only responsibility is to make it as great as I can, and not to compromise. I can't be intimidated."

The Waterboys perform An Appointment With Mr Yeats at the Abbey theatre, Dublin, on 15, 16, 18, 19 and 20 March, and at the Grand Canal theatre, Dublin, on 7 November

Abdulrahman Zeitoun is the real-life hero of Dave Eggers's new book. In the aftermath of hurricane Katrina he paddled from house to house in a canoe, offering help to his neighbours. For his trouble, he was arrested as a suspected terrorist

Saturday afternoon and the Zeitoun household is bustling with activity, as you quickly get the impression it always is. Kathy Zeitoun, dressed in a blue silk shirt and matching hijab, is fluttering around making spiced pumpkin-flavoured coffee and answering the constantly ringing phone. Noises emanating from four of her five children bubble up like broth from the back room where they are watching Kung Fu Panda on a giant flat-screen TV. Kathy seats me in the neat and orderly living room, which is dominated by cream leather sofas and a watercolour of a street scene from her husband's native Syria. Beside it is a framed 3D model of the Qur'an.

Gradually, out of this domestic pleasure dome, telltale signs emerge of the calamity that struck the Zeitouns almost five years ago. An outside wall of the house is stained with a faint but still clearly discernible line at about shoulder height, a record etched in paint of where the flood waters settled.

"Most of the time I don't think about what happened at all," Kathy says, as she pours the coffee. "Until I step out on to the street – then it all comes back to me."

In recent days Kathy has been forced to think back a lot on the events leading up to and following 29 August 2005, when hurricane Katrina ripped through her city of New Orleans, breaching its levees and immersing much of it, including her home, in several feet of water. The reason for her current preoccupation is the publication of the new book by that one-man literary factory Dave Eggers, whose best-known previous work is the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

The book, entitled Zeitoun, is, as its name suggests, a very personal telling of a national tragedy. It explores what happens when the entire fabric of society collapses, plunging a city into a parallel universe where there is no justice, no government, no protection, no respect. It does so exclusively through the eyes of the Zeitouns. Eggers spent three years on and off interviewing the family, then translating their memories into his trademark vivid yet restrained prose.

At the centre of the book is Kathy's husband, Abdulrahman, or Zeitoun as he is universally known, a New Orleans building contractor who has attained almost mythical status. Not only is he the dominant character in the 339 pages of Eggers's book, but in the US press he has been dubbed an "all-American hero" for the phlegmatic way he conducted himself in the midst of catastrophe.

That said, when I arrive at his house he is nowhere to be seen. He turns up an hour and a half late, which Kathy insists is wholly true to form and actually not that bad: he kept her waiting for two hours on their wedding day. He could have turned up 10 hours late and still you'd forgive him, just as soon as you felt his firm handshake and the embrace of his warm smile. "Zeitoun," he says in self-introduction, as though there were any doubt.

He comes into the room straight from a building site with his trousers splattered in mud. "I really don't feel we deserve all this attention," he says in a thick Middle-Eastern accent. "I only did what I had been brought up to do."

What he did was to stay in New Orleans when the hurricane struck, driven by a conviction that that is where he belonged. While Kathy and the kids joined the mass evacuation from the city, he hunkered down at home; and when the levees broke and the flood water poured in, he put to use a battered old canoe he owned to navigate the streets of his neighbourhood, now turned into canals.

Zeitoun paddling through New Orleans in his canoe may well become one of the enduring images of Katrina. A line drawing of him in the boat is printed on the cover of Eggers's book, and the film director Jonathan Demme plans to make an animated movie of his story next year.

Zeitoun takes us on a guided tour of the route that he negotiated in his canoe in the days after the storm. He begins by pointing to a pillar at the front of his house. "That's where I kept the canoe tied, like you'd tie up your horse."

We set off by car along the maze of streets around his neighbourhood. On every street corner he has a tale to tell. The first stop we make is at a house of grey clapboard standing on stilts. In the hurricane, the flood waters reached almost up to its windows. As he paddled by, Zeitoun explains, he heard a voice faintly crying "Help!". He swam to the front door and inside found a woman in her 70s hovering above him. In one of the most memorable phrases of the book, Eggers writes: "Her patterned dress was spread out on the surface of the water like a great floating flower."

"She was inside the house holding on to the bookshelf with water up to her shoulder," Zeitoun recalls, as we stand outside the house. "She must have been in the water for about 24 hours by then."

Zeitoun helped the woman reach safety in a fishing boat, which was no small feat given that she weighed 90kg (14st). His construction skills and great strength proved invaluable as he levered her on a ladder out to the vessel.

Our tour continues and we pass the house of a local Baptist church pastor and his wife whom the Zeitouns had known for years and who similarly cried out for help. Further on, we come to the residence of a man who was stranded and to whom Zeitoun brought food and water every day while he still had his canoe and his liberty.

All in all, Zeitoun reckons he must have helped to save or rescue more than 10 neighbours. "The way I thought of it was, anything you can do to help. God left me here for a reason. I did what I was brought up to do – to help people."

At this point, our journey begins its descent to a much darker place. Zeitoun points out the spot where he saw a human body floating in the filthy water. Then we arrive at Claiborne Avenue where the weirdness truly began. It was 6 September, six days after the hurricane, and he was in the house – his own property, which he rents out – along with a Syrian friend, Nasser Dayoob, his tenant Todd Gambino and Ronnie, a white man Zeitoun didn't know but who had asked to stay in the house for shelter. Zeitoun was on the phone to his brother in Syria when six unidentified police officers and National Guardsmen burst through the front door dressed in military fatigues and bullet-proof vests and carrying M16s and pistols. Zeitoun explained he was the landlord, but the only response was a demand from one of the National Guardsmen for his identity card.

"All he did was look at my ID," Zeitoun says, "and that was enough. Nothing else. No other questions. The moment he saw my name he said, 'Get into the boat!'"

We get back into the car and retrace the route of that boat ride, stopping at the Greyhound bus station near the city centre. Today it's back to a semblance of normality, with its familiar canine logo and silver buses lined in rows. But when Zeitoun was carted off there, he and his three companions found themselves surrounded by 80 or so men with assault rifles and dogs, a mixture of National Guardsmen, prison wardens and soldiers, some of whom had recently been serving in Iraq and who seemed to approach the situation in New Orleans with a war-zone mentality. The closest thing it reminded him of was Guantánamo.

'You guys are al-Qaida,' said one soldier. 'Taliban,' said another

He takes us to see a concrete compound at the back of the bus station and describes the network of chain-fence pens that had been erected overnight to convert the area into a makeshift detention centre. Zeitoun and his companions were flung into one such cage, with armed soldiers standing guard over them on the roof.

"Why are we here?" they asked a passing soldier. "You guys are al-Qaida," came the reply. Another soldier said as he passed: "Taliban."

It was like a dagger blow for Zeitoun, for himself personally and for his vision of America, the country where he had come to live as a young merchant seaman from Syria and which he had always believed was a land of fairness and opportunity. He had come initially in search of work, never expecting to stay, but he then met Kathy, a local Louisiana woman who had converted to Islam four years previously. They had built a life together, grown their construction business and had children. And now here he was being called a terrorist. "I felt very bad. It was very hurtful. These guys wanted revenge on us, no matter what."

He was kept penned up at the bus station for three days and nights, and interviewed by officers from homeland security who seemed to think they had caught a big fish. He says now that whenever he drives by the Greyhound station – or Camp Greyhound as it was dubbed – dark thoughts enter his mind.

What dark thoughts? "Being called those terrible names. The memory of people refusing to help. Imagine you see a doctor and you shout at him, 'Can you help me?', because your foot is infected and hurting badly, and he's wearing a green medical gown and a stethoscope around his neck, and he says, 'I'm not a doctor,' and walks on. How would you feel?"

While Zeitoun was incarcerated, first at Camp Greyhound and then in a maximum-security prison, Kathy was, as she puts it, "battling her own demons". One of the gross injustices against them both was that Zeitoun was allowed no phone call, which left her in mounting despair. For two weeks she had no word from her husband, concluding in the end that he must be dead. Then, on 19 September, she learned of his detention from a missionary who called her after having seen Zeitoun in prison.

She dashed back to the city from Texas, where she had been staying with friends. The nadir came for her when she tried to find out the address of the courthouse where he was due to appear, charged with looting. Court officials told her they couldn't divulge such information as it was private.

"I cracked open at that point," she tells me. "How could the address of a courthouse be private? I cried harder then than I did at any other time. I felt like I was a little kid again – with no say-so, no rights, no voice. I felt lost."

Zeitoun was detained for almost a month before he was released on $75,000 (£50,000) bail for having looted his own house. The others fared worse: Dayoob, Gambino and Ronnie spent five, six and eight months in prison respectively, despite Zeitoun's efforts to prise them out. Eventually, the charges against all four of them were dropped.

Their experiences were just a blip in the civil rights catastrophe that was Katrina. Camp Greyhound held a total of 1,200 detainees in the aftermath of the hurricane, most of whom were African-Americans and all of whom suffered the indignity of having their right to habeas corpus removed.

As they approach the fifth anniversary of those events, the Zeitouns have managed with striking success to put their lives back together. The children are starting to sleep in their own beds again having for years insisted on cramming into their parents' for security.

Kathy has been diagnosed with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including memory loss and dizziness. "Katrina was a great reality slap. I was naive before – I felt I had things under control. But I've come to the conclusion that I don't control anything. I'm in control of nothing," she says.

Zeitoun still gets angry about the way he was treated, particularly as an American Muslim. "Muslim is a very simple word. Translated into English it means peace or believers. So why have these two nice, beautiful words been changed in people's minds to 'terrorist'?" he asks.

Despite that, he refuses to be bitter and vengeful. Instead, he dedicates his time to rebuilding the city, which is what he was doing when he was so late for our meeting. So far he has renovated a museum, some schools and about 250 houses damaged in the floods.

He says he is more disciplined now about his religious observance, making sure he at least is punctual for his five daily prayer sessions. He is also extra careful to follow all the civil rules – he doesn't speed or cut through red lights or park where he shouldn't. "I don't want to give these guys the chance to do the same thing to me again."

He has never even thought of abandoning the US. He refuses to bear a grudge, and says, for him, it remains a great country – you don't judge 300 million people on the behaviour of a few bad guys. Nor will he contemplate quitting New Orleans. "This is my home, my city. My life is here now," he says.

To prove the point to himself, perhaps, he plans to buy another boat; his canoe went missing following his arrest. This time, though, he wants a bigger model that would allow him to rescue people more easily.

But surely that suggests that he fears another Katrina, I ask him.

"It happened before," he says. "It can happen again."

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers is published by Hamish Hamilton in hardback on 15 March, £18.99.

Virginia Woolf's house, Gertrude Stein's flat – feminist pilgrimages are a great way to connect with history. So when Vera Groskop said girls were boring, her mother decided it was time for her first trip

Despite my best efforts, my three-year-old daughter Vera hasn't exactly been celebrating her girlhood of late. In fact, influenced by her six-year-old brother, she can frequently be heard muttering, "Girls are boring. I want to do boys' things." I can see her point. Her brother's life is full of Star Wars, pirates, football and other action-packed phenomena. Vera gets Hello Kitty. She clearly finds this unsatisfying, and the situation is coming to a head. "I am not a girl, Mummy, I am a boy," she told me recently. "My name is Peter."

But it's good to be a girl, I tell her. Being a girl is fun. There are women's successes to be celebrated. There is joy in the female condition. How can I prove this though? In our home city, London, there is just not that much physical evidence of women's greatness. The Alison Lapper statue in Trafalgar Square was taken down in 2007. There are nine male statues in Parliament Square – and no female ones. London's first public statue of a black woman, Bronze Woman by Aleix Barbat, in Stockwell Memorial Garden, did not appear until 2008. Germaine Greer has frequently complained that women are underrepresented in public monuments, noting that one of the only recent sculptures of a woman is of the actor Diana Dors at the Shaw Ridge leisure complex in Swindon. Now, I like Diana Dors. But this is pathetic.

I was not about to frogmarch Vera to Swindon, but I loved the idea of an adventure, exploring women's hidden imprint on our streets. So I decided it was time for her first feminist pilgrimage. My mother-in-law reeled: "That poor child." But I knew how to sell it to Vera. "Would you like to come and find out what lots of important ladies did, and then we'll have cake?" "Yes," she replied seriously. "I would like cake."

Rachel Kolsky, a London tourist guide, has run women's walking tours since 2005. "They open people's eyes to the hidden history of an area," she says. "There is a great women's story on every corner." Vera and I set off on a three-hour walk around the East End of London, starting at the Royal London Hospital, the focal point of the Wonderful Women of Whitechapel and Spitalfields Tour. Here, Kolsky tells a story about Eva Luckes, the famous hospital matron, whose successes included the containment of a typhoid epidemic. The hospital's inner courtyard has a magnificent statue of Queen Alexandra, who was instrumental in bringing a new treatment for tuberculosis to the hospital. "Look at that strong, proud lady, Vera!" I say. "You said I could have cake," she says. "I'm cold."

Then Vera starts to cry, bringing our adventure to a sudden end. This is the problem with Kolsky's brilliant London tours: in order to showcase women's buried history, they cover a lot of ground. Great for an adult, but slightly too ambitious for a three-year-old.

I am not deterred though. Quite the opposite. As we head home I am hatching plans for future feminist pilgrimages. In the UK, we can follow in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and the Brontës. Or, next time we are passing the Houses of Parliament, we could check out the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, one of London's few female landmarks, in Victoria Gardens. Then there's a trail of Pankhurst family blue plaques to be followed in London, from 50 Clarendon Road in Holland Park to 120 Cheyne Walk in Kensington.

Further afield there is Gertrude Stein's apartment in Paris at 27 Rue de Fleurus. Now a private home, this address was once host to weekly salons and packed with paintings by Renoir, Gauguin and Cézanne; Picasso was a regular dinner guest. You may only be able to walk past these days, but you can still reminisce fondly on key passages in Stein's classic work The Auto- biography of Alice B Toklas. Or, in the same city, you could visit Simone de Beauvoir's grave – next to Sartre's – at the Cimetière du Montparnasse.

In New York there is a lengthy Dorothy Parker trail leading from the Ansonia at 2108 Broadway (one of New York's most famous apartment blocks: Parker lived around the corner), to the 1925 birthplace of the New Yorker magazine at West 47th Street, where Parker worked, and on for cocktails at the Algonquin Hotel. Then there are all the great feminist museums: the Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art, for instance, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, which includes a gallery devoted to Judy Chicago's "vaginas on plates" sculpture, The Dinner Party.

Maybe I will even start a "Sylvia Plath does New York" fund for when Vera turns 16. We will stay at the Barbizon Hotel at 63rd and Lexington – which was once women-only – wearing dresses with matching bags, as Plath did. We'll lunch near the one-time offices of Mademoiselle at 575 Madison Avenue where Plath was an intern. Or we'll criss-cross Massachusetts in a turquoise 1966 Thunderbird Convertible à la Thelma and Louise in honour of Louisa May Alcott, tattered copies of my favourite childhood book, Little Women, in tow. More likely though, we might just go to Stockwell when the weather warms up and take a look at that Bronze Woman, holding her baby triumphantly aloft. As long as there's an ice-cream van nearby, I'm sure Vera will be up for it.

For anyone who wants to explore women's lives and history, here are some other great ideas for feminist pilgrimages.

Bath: Jane Austen

Austen lived in Bath from 1801 to 1806. The Jane Austen Centre at 40 Gay Street is gearing up for September's Austen Festival which features "the opportunity to dress throughout the week in 18th-century Regency costume". You can have "tea with Mr Darcy" (a £10.50 high tea with cucumber sandwiches, scones and cream) all year round. Those keen for an Elizabeth Bennett-style constitutional can download a free audio walking tour "In the footsteps of Jane Austen" at visitbath.co.uk. There is also a "Jane for the day" suggested timetable: "12.45pm: Visit the Assembly Rooms: in Jane's day, guests assembled for balls, to drink tea, play cards, listen to music or just to talk and flirt. 3pm: Stroll around the streets Jane would have known."

Sussex: Virginia Woolf

"It is not so much a house as a phenomenon." So wrote Quentin Bell of Charleston, the country home between Eastbourne and Lewes that was used by the writers, artists and thinkers known as the Bloomsbury group in the early 20th century. Virginia and Leonard Woolf originally spotted this late-17th-century Sussex farmhouse, situated at the foot of the South Downs, and coaxed Virginia's sister, Vanessa Bell, to move there in 1916. It reopens for the summer on 31 March, with special tours on Fridays.

The Woolfs' own country home was Monk's House near Lewes, East Sussex (nationaltrust.org.uk). This property is occupied by tenants so is open only for short visits on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons between April and October. But there is the ideal pilgrimage on Saturday 26 June: an eight-mile walk "In the Footsteps of Virginia Woolf", from Monk's House to Charleston, with lunch at local stately home Firle Place (£25). To book tickets, call Charleston on 01323 811626 (charleston.org.uk).

Washington: Michelle Obama

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (on the National Mall, 14th Street and Constitution Avenue) has hundreds of exhibits commemorating the women's reform movement. The museum's First Ladies' Collection celebrates the influence of presidents' wives and has been one of the most popular exhibitions for the last 100 years, including archive material, diaries, memorabilia and costumes. This week, the white chiffon Jason Wu gown Michelle Obama wore to the inaugural balls went on show for the first time.

For another tribute to Obama, head to her favourite takeout joint, Good Stuff Eatery at 303 Pennsylvania Avenue SE in Washington DC for a "Prez Obama" burger or to Ben's Chilli Bowl at 1213 U Street NW for the Obamas' favourite half-smoke chilli dog. Nearby Busboys and Poets (2021 14th Street), a cafe and bookshop, hosts feminist events and has a huge feminist book collection.

Amsterdam: Anne Frank

"Now our Secret Annexe has truly become secret . . . Mr Kugler thought it would be better to have a bookcase built in front of the entrance to our hiding place. It swings out on its hinges and opens like a door." The canal house at 163 Prinsengracht was the hiding place of the young Jewish girl Anne Frank and her family during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, and there are numerous tours of the city that include the house, where you can visit the annexe where Frank wrote her secret diary. The house opens at 9am, and it is best to visit early to avoid queues (annefrank.org).

Paris: Simone de Beauvoir

As the French travel bible Guide du Routard notes, "In the winter Simone de Beauvoir came always first thing in the morning to the [Café] Flore to have a seat near the stove. Sartre recreated the atmosphere of an English club. Everybody listened to jazz, read poems or played little acts." Pay homage to the great feminist philosopher over a café au lait at Café Flore, before downloading a walking tour from St Germain to the Louvre at girlsguidetoparis.com for $1.98 (£1.30). This takes in 60 Rue de Seine where de Beauvoir once lived, and while you are strolling, remember: one is not born a woman, one becomes one.

• Wonderful Women of Whitechapel and Spitalfields starts at 11am on 13 March. Tickets can be booked through the Women's Library on 020-7320 2222. Battling Belles of Bow, 11am on Saturday 5 June, follows in the footsteps of Sylvia Pankhurst. For more information on other tours, email rachel@smallcakes.co.uk or visit goeastlondon.co.uk

An exiled authority on Hispanic culture, he homed in on identity

David Vilaseca, who has died aged 46, after being run over by a skip lorry as he rode his bicycle near his home at London Bridge, was a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, who specialised in Hispanic studies and critical theory. He wrote two major books and a string of brilliant articles over the course of some 20 years.

As an authority on Spanish and Catalan culture, he produced original and innovative studies of a number of writers, mostly gay, and exiles from their native land or language. Himself a proud and openly gay man who had made his life in London rather than his native Barcelona, David clearly had a personal interest in such figures. But as a master in the demanding school of poststructuralist thought, especially psychoanalysis and queer theory, he was an impeccable scholar. His central theme was that identity was unstable and the limits between self and other difficult, if not impossible, to draw. It was a theme he would also explore in a prizewinning novel.

David took his first degree in philology in 1987 at Barcelona's Autonomous University before studying for an MA at Bloomington, Indiana, in 1989. I supervised his PhD, awarded at Queen Mary, University of London, in just three years (1992), in spite of the fact that he had a full teaching load as a language assistant. He then returned to teach at his home university. Finding the British system more receptive to his research, he came back to a lectureship at Southampton University in 1994 before moving to Royal Holloway as senior lecturer in 2000 with rapid promotion to professor of Hispanic studies and critical theory in 2003.

Salvador Dalí, whose autobiography was written in several, indecipherable hands and in a macaronic mix of languages, was clearly a perfect match for David's deconstructive approach. His first book, published in 1995, was The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí's Autobiographical Writings. Where previous scholars had attempted to discover the "true" Dalí behind the multiple masks, David took seriously the elusiveness of identity in a subject who wrote gnomically: "There are four Dalís and the best is the fifth." Crucially, this sense of self was built on Dalí's vehement rejection of homosexuality, and of Federico García Lorca, the gay poet who loved him. The painter could thus at one moment write jokingly to Lorca as a rent boy, offering his services for a few pesetas, and at another insist dogmatically: "Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. I am not a homosexual."

Bizarre episodes in Dalí's autobiography suddenly made sense in David's subtle and sensitive readings. In one tragicomic scene, Dalí struggles with a razor blade to cut out a tick that he believes has attached itself to his back, only to discover that it is a mole, part of his own body. Self and other, inside and outside, thus prove perilously difficult to separate.

While David's first book had on its cover a youthful Dalí, proudly posing in a turban, the second, Hindsight and the Real: Subjectivity in Gay Hispanic Autobiography (2003), boasted Johnny Depp in full drag from the film version of Before Night Falls, the autobiography of the Cuban exile Reinaldo Arenas.

Typically, David's accounts of Spanish, Catalan and Hispanic writers could prove unsettling to scholars and activists alike. Thus, he showed convincingly that Arenas actively constructed an image of himself as a person with HIV/Aids, even as that identity was imposed upon him; and that the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo came to identify himself as a homosexual only when told as much by his mentor, Jean Genet. This was a fine example of the "hindsight" of David's title, the way in which retrospectively we build narratives of ourselves, telling tales that are never simple or single.

It was perhaps a surprise that such a private person as David should publish a novel that was clearly autobiographical in origin. L'Aprenentatge de la Soledat (The Apprenticeship of Solitude), composed in diary format, is the story of a gay Catalan living in the London which David loved. While it would be naive to take the novel as a personal revelation (David worked for years on stylistic revisions of his text), it charts with disconcerting objectivity love and sex in the capital. Lengthy and controversial, it marked David's return to the Catalan language and won him the 2007 Octubre prize for Catalan fiction.

David wrote that, as in the continuing relationship between patient and psychoanalyst, Dalí's autobiography was "part of a love story which has clearly not come to an end". This is also true of his own writing. A third academic book, Negotiating the Event, will be published this autumn.

David is survived by his mother, Marina, his sister, Marta, and the many friends who loved him.

• David Vilaseca, Hispanic scholar, born 6 February 1964; died 9 February 2010