Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

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.

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.

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

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

I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.

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.