That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.

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.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

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

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.

To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.