Richard Curtis, the writer and director of Love Actually, is brilliant at many things, but his genius, I submit, is for thrusting characters into situations in which they feel driven to humiliate themselves. Which is why we love them, especially when it's all in the name of love. He is the Bard of Embarrassment.

I have a female colleague who gets annoyed that Tina Fey seems to go out of her way in her movies to deride her looks, as if she weren't such an attractive woman.

The economic and technological changes are real, but I just can't bring myself to wax apocalyptic about the future of books.

What can you say about a man who leaps from a helicopter over Manhattan without a parachute in the hope that by increasing his heart rate he'll transform into an iridescent lime-green behemoth so he can take on an even bigger behemoth? That he knows he's living in a computer-generated universe in which gravity is a feeble suggestion and nothing is remotely at stake, and that when he hits the ground he'll be replaced by a special effect. The Incredible Hulk is weightless-as disposable as an Xbox game.

My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.

Richard Curtis, the writer and director of Love Actually, is brilliant at many things, but his genius, I submit, is for thrusting characters into situations in which they feel driven to humiliate themselves. Which is why we love them, especially when it's all in the name of love. He is the Bard of Embarrassment.

Some reviewed 'The Master' on their knees, and while I respected its distinctive discordancy - can a movie be at once feverish and glacial? - I was unmoved.