As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim "You know exactly what I mean!" depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.

The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

I'm English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.

Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was the juvenescent who rushed with open arms to embrace the future.

For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.