Activity

The average snake sticks to a diet of eggs, mice, insects and small birds; it does not recognise a small deer as a challenge. A python sees a small deer and thinks: Right. One minute there are two objects: a python and a small deer. Three hours later there is one object: a python with a deer-shaped…

You’d have liked to have made the movie of The Da Vinci Code, you gave it a lot of thought because it would be a challenge, writing a screenplay that would do justice to the intellectual complexity of the book. You weren’t sure you were ready to work with a studio again, so you walked away from it.…

1. Readers are, in fact, ostriches. They have problems of their own and they read to forget about them. Lovely glamorous Arabic would not only not make them forget their problems, it would remind them that there are all kinds of problems they can do nothing about. So there might be a small untapped…

She would like to leave home, but being a 12-year-old smart-ass she has of course read Lolita, Zazie dans le métro and Candide. White market labour is closed to 12-year-olds, which leaves drug dealing, theft, prostitution with paedophiles and a literary career. She does not feel up to inventing a l…

Or a reader might raise his head from the book. He sits on a bed in a tiny bedroom surrounded by paperbacks. He thinks: I sit here reading about adventure; why don’t I walk out the door? Sometimes he has spent too long in the land of the lotus-eaters; he takes a step to the door, picks up another b…