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“... off to drink himself stupid at Groucho’s in the company of (or at least in the same room as) Melvyn Bragg, Umberto Eco and Gore Vidal. Amnesia has gone away and names are being profusely dropped again. Bradbury has never had much luck with the Booker, and I would guess that he’s blown it for 1992. But what is intriguing about the description of ...”

“... but to his interviewers in Company (Helen Chislett), the Sunday Times and on The South Bank Show (Melvyn Bragg). To Helen Chislett he said: ‘I’m not anti-women. Everyone has a hard time in my books’ (cf Time Out, in one of numerous self-repetitions: ‘if you want to talk in those terms then my fiction isn’t anti-women, it’s ...”

“... if you can manage it. But in a way it comes back to your view of what you are up to. Somebody like Melvyn Bragg, as I’ve said, sees his role as bringing culture to the masses via television. Those who find this appalling would say it isn’t culture you’re bringing to the masses, it’s some cheapened version of culture. The real thing, they would ...”

“... an audience and tries to civilise that audience. The protector and the teacher. I would think of Melvyn Bragg, for instance, as a teacher. He takes what there is and makes it available. I think he feels the importance of that role quite strongly. There are those who are outward-turned and those who turn inward and in truth despise the audience. They ...”

“... metropolitan readership deserved each other? How this hawker of his own work would have loved a Bragg interview or a guest appearance at Hay-on-Wye. For the last eight or nine years of his life, from the fevered writing of Volumes I and II of Tristram Shandy in 1759 to his death on another London visit early in 1768, Sterne’s writing kept up with his ...”