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AAs a child and teenager, I had little to do with money. I was educated on scholarships and state hand-outs and the kindness of strange adults, and this money passed over my head. I started thinking seriously about money only in 1978, in the city of Jeddah on the Red Sea.

I had come to Jeddah to…

however fulsome the lip-service a society may pay to the professions which do not directly produce wealth

There was, then, a near-priestly kind of romance in the idea that a high-purposed literary career would be profitless, at least in terms of cash. Here was the Thorny Way, the way of deprivation. And for a period, I went along with this, nose in the air. At the same time, though, I knew I could hand…

Back in the early sixties, when I first started out, insolvency spelt glamour. It was OK to be broke – more than OK, since money was well-known to be the super-foe of books. It was Mammon v. the Muses: take your pick. In those days, if a writer owned up to caring about money, he was instantly brand…

In the Cambridge market square, there was an old brass fountain, tarnished with age and gummed up with drinking straws and cigarette butts and always smelling of urine. Drunks lolled on its steps, cradling tins of Carlsberg Special Brew or bottles of Anglia Sherry. The story was that one of them wa…