As one of the many people who rushed to comment on What Ever Happened to Modernism? on the strength of an inflammatory article in The Guardian, I owe Gabriel Josipovici an apology. He has since written a piteous – but accurate – letter to the Times Literary Supplement regretting that the Guardian journalist ‘took a few sentences from one chapter of a fifteen chapter book … robbed those words of their nuance and context, and, on the basis of three telephone conversations in which I tried in vain to explain that I was not interested in personalities but in certain large and general literary and cultural issues, passed the whole thing off as an interview.’

In fact What Ever Happened to Modernism?, though trailed as a savage assault on such titans of the contemporary English bookshelf as Amis, McEwan and Barnes, turns out to be an exceptionally interesting piece of work. Like practically every academic study that approaches local culture from the angle