Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.

It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.

As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.

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.

I am a regular if not exactly enthusiastic patron of my local bookshop. I try to buy at least some books there because I cling to the belief that it's important to maintain those businesses which put a human face on the exchange of money for goods and services.

Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.

If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.