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 write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.

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.

Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

You don't need to know this - but here goes: due to some acquired infantilism, I feel compelled to fall asleep listening to the radio. On a good night, I'll push the frail barque of my psyche off into the waters of Lethe accompanied by the midnight newsreader - on a bad one, it's the shipping forecast.

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

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.