If The Seventies Were Bulbous,

Sometimes It Occurs To Me That The Job Of A Serious Cultural Critic Mostly Consists In Telling The Generality Of People That Their Opinions - On Films, On Books, On All Manner Of Widgets, Gadgets And Even The Latest Electronic Fidgets - Simply Aren't Up To Scratch.

For Myself, I Haven't Been Content To Carry On Producing Books That Merely Strain Against The Conventions - As I've Grown Older, And Realised That There Aren't That Many Books Left For Me To Write, So I've Become Determined That They Should Be The Fictive Equivalent Of Ripping The Damn Corset Off Altogether And Chucking It On The Fire.

The Cynics Are Correct The Sense Of Freewill Is Only That Feeling Which We Have When We Take The Necessitated Option That Most Appeals To Us.

With Spectacular Events Taking Up So Much Of The Available Anxiety Quotient, We Need To Be Constantly Reminded Of The More Workaday Threats To Our Mortality - Threats That, While They May Also Be Functions Of Human Error, Have Become So Ubiquitous That We've Begun To Apprehend Them As Natural Phenomena.

As A Species, We're Addicted To The Facile Discrimination Involved In Saying That Something Or Phenomenon Is Either 'this' Or 'that' - How Much More Uncomfortable That It May Well Be 'the Other'.