Much of Blake Morrison's writing is an offshoot of what used to be called 'the new journalism', the journalism of involvement, which eschews any pretence of the reporter's detachment. When Hunter S Thompson wrote about Las Vegas and Nicholas Tomalin about war in Vietnam, they themselves were present in the picture they were describing.

Morrison's chosen terrain is closer – the personal and the intimate. The wars he reports are those between the sexes or the generations; his travel writing is about the landscape of childhood or neighbourhood. He looks at these through the prism of his own sensibilities, and registers his own emotional