Because I Was A Young Man So,

When George Vi - Displaying A Flair For Timing That Was Utterly Absent In His Lifetime - Upped And Died, The Way Was Clear For Her To Inhabit Her Logical Position As The Eminence Cerise, The Bolster Behind The Throne.

What The British Seem To Like Are Television Historians And Naturalists, Not Public Intellectuals. You Can't Help Feeling That's Because One Supplies Narrative And The Other Supplies Facts, And The British Are Traditionally Empiricists So They/we Have A Resistance To Theory And To Theoreticians Playing Too Prominent A Role In Public Life.

In My View The Plangent Artificiality Of A Lot Of Creative Work Results From The Fact That The People Who Write Novels, Direct Films And Put On Plays Tend To Read Too Many Novels, Watch Too Many Films And Go To Too Many Plays.

The British And American Literary Worlds Operate In An Odd Kind Of Symbiosis: Our Critics Think Our Contemporary Novelists Are Not The Stuff Of Greatness Whereas Certain Contemporary Americans Indubitably Are. Their Critics Often Advance The Exact Opposite: British Fiction Is Cool, American Naff.

As A Writer, I'm Not Convinced That We Are The Best Equipped To Understand How We Go About The Business Of Literary Production.