I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.

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

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.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile.

There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers - some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn't always so, believe me.