Because I was a young man so, of course, I did get into fights. The last time I actually was in a fight, in the sense of throwing punches myself, was probably when I was at college, not since 1980. But I remember being attacked quite a few times in the '80s.

What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!

As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.

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.

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.

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.

I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom.