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‘It’s nothing bad. It’s good…Very early on this year I had a kind of…I wasn’t at my desk. I was reading on the sofa. I closed my eyes and imagined a visitor had come to the house. Entirely benign. A gentle ghost – a gentle reader, in fact. And guess who it was. My much younger self, come to me with…

It’s a matter of pressing interest, I find. What is the purpose of my average day?

If you’d asked me that five years ago, I would’ve equably cited John Dryden, who said that the purpose of literature is to give ‘instruction and delight’. That verdict goes back three centuries, and in my opinion …

Serious fiction could respond to the accelerated world; but serious poetry couldn’t. Naturally it couldn’t. A poem, a non-narrative poem, a lyric poem – the first thing it does is stop the clock. It stops the clock while whispering, Let us go then, you and I, let us go and examine an epiphany, a pr…

This is a language novel, written in a futurised farrago of Romani, rhyming slang, and Russian

What’s the difference between a story and a plot? you ask.

According to E. M. Forster (whom Jane used to refer to by his middle name, as did everyone who knew him), ‘the king died and then the queen died’ is a story, but ‘the king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. Not so, Edward…