Fascinating interview with A.S. Byatt about the struggle of modern man to define himself and to define reality. I couldn't resist a smile when she admitted how hard she found boarding school life, not because she was at a particularly nasty institution or was subjected to bullying, but because there was a hierarchy of girls, important ones and unimportant ones. She was an unimportant one but, she adds with a smile, she has yet to meet a writer who was one of the important ones.

Hmm. I certainly felt pretty close to the bottom of the heap in terms of my school year's hierarchy, but I put it down to being hopeless at netball in an English girls' school where you practically had to apply for naturalisation papers to the human race if you were not in the netball squad. Maybe I should hold a competition with a chocolate bar as the prize for any writer who can verify that they were a happy, well-adjusted teenager who loved nothing more that to be the life and soul of the school disco. I can just see the postcards flooding in...