Whether it is that the market has been ruined by academics who write for nothing just to get their names in print, few professional authors manage to make a decent living out of writing books. How do they supplement inadequate incomes? Some teach, of course. Some turn journalist, one or two get Arts Council grants and others simply bum off their friends. Stanley Bonnet, whose new novel Jump, Boy, Jump has just come out, has at least found an unusual alternative. A former Ford Foundation lecturer in journalism at Lagos University and erstwhile education correspondent of the Daily Mirror, he has just opened a cockle and whelk stall outside the Burgundian pub in the Finchley Road. 'It's marvellous,' he says. 'I sold 36 oysters yesterday.' With profit margins considerably higher than those on the printed word, he can almost afford to write another book.

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As Editor of Isis, Anthony Holden was obviously laying up trouble for himself when he ran a wicked series prophesying what would become in later life of his fellow undergraduates. His predictions proved only too accurate, and Holden's contemporaries are now sniping at him because he has had the nerve to become successful at a