I myself have not met a self-confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the 'typical liberal' - as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns.

Today's novelist is not only limited by the thin subject matter of personal experience, but by the pinched clinical conventions of the Health generation. Faced…

Unlike most wars, which make rotten fiction in themselves - all plot and no characters, or made-up characters - Vietnam seems to be the perfect mix: the charac…

Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless t…

Sometimes we get so caught up in language, and 'this' word and 'that' word, that we lose site of the bigger problems in the world. At one time, the word 'Bitch…

How did Memogate get a 'gate'? How did Nipplegate get a 'gate'? We invaded a country with the wrong information, and Janet Jackson's tit got a 'gate'. Who give…

'That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet b…