[...] The newspaper column is too finished, too regular; it is an easily digested piece. The essay of the kind that I have long enjoyed reading-as perfected by, say, Montaigne, Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Orwell or E.B. White-has all but disappeared from modern English. Anyone with an argument of more than 1,000 words is called an essayist-which is a shame given that, at its best, the essay strives for the literary permanence of a poem or novel and, I think, concerns the search for a personal voice. For Montaigne the essay was a philosophical form-amorphous, reflective, digressive and informed by self-revelation. Above all, it was personal and confidential. And he was writing not because he was commissioned but because he felt compelled to do so. His essays were ends in themselves. Hazlitt somewhere likens the idea of the essayist's role to that of a traveler embarking upon a long journey, the destination of which is uncertain. It is something like that for an essayist ... the idea of starting in one place and ending up somewhere completely unexpected. The word essai, in French, means an attempt, which captures the tentative nature of the form, a questing for knowledge. In this sense, the best essayists are those who have the gift of digression, those who can surprise the reader and themselves, who are able to luxuriate in language and to elaborate and inflate any chosen subject. One of the frustrations of being a writer in Britain, at the moment, is that there are very few places where you can publish essays which are not, in effect, extended book reviews. There is the monthly magazine Prospect, which in eclecticism, range and style recalls the defunct Encounter, and very little else. Few publications offer space for long, discursive essays.