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

Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.

Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.

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

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.

Political activists of all stripes are usually a wacky bunch, and never more so than in a system like Britain's, where power is effected via the quiescence of the electorate as much as its convictions.

The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.