“At an event organised by the Writers’ Centre in Norwich the other week, one of the volunteers – a woman perhaps a few years older than me – observed that when she was young writers were semi-mythical creatures, farouche, barely ever seen in the flesh, and their only spoor faded black-and-white photographs on the backs of their books. In some ways this was an exaggeration – there have always been writers (and by this I mean specifically fiction ones) – who’ve had a public profile. In the States this was, perhaps, carried off with a little more swagger, but we Brits always had our fair crop of novelists – and even poets – who were also public intellectuals. However, given the relative paucity of media forums – a mere brace of television channels, a triad of radio ones – these were inevitably only either the most personally egregious, or the most politically or socially plangent.

“What has changed in the past 30 years is that it has become impossible for the rump of the literary profession – those middling sorts (of sales, that is, not necessarily of brow) – to earn a reasonable living simply by writing books. The abolition of the net book agreement in the 1980s heralded two simultaneous developments: a vertiginous integration of book distribution and retailing, and a simultaneous collapse in the formerly steep-sided pyramid of critical authority. To put it bluntly: the punters would no longer buy what they were told to buy by literary types, and in any case, there were no longer cosy little bookshops in which they could order these recommendations. As for writers, whose earnings had been artificially maintained by a price cartel, there were only a few options available: the time-honoured promenade of Grub Street, some altogether non-literary job, or an ignominious – and often soul-destroying – retreat into silence.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s piece about reading his work in public at the Telegraph, here.

“Each year some 140,000 inmates pass through British prisons, of whom as many as 70,000 have some form of addictive illness. They move from one environment in which drugs are both sustenance and currency while crime is the means to pay for it, to another in which exactly the same is the case – only with greater intensity.

“Let’s assume that each of these inmates procures just a single gram of heroin while inside; this would imply that 70 kilos of heroin are smuggled into prisons during that year. In fact, as any reasonably dispassionate professional would tell you, the quantities are far larger.

“In the past, illegal drugs were brought into prison by visitors – and this continues to be the case. However, in the past decade or so, the use of sniffer dogs and searches has considerably constricted this flow, and the shortfall in supply has been made up by corrupt prison officers and other staff.

“How do I know this? After all, the numbers of prison officers being convicted for drug smuggling are paltry. The then under-secretary for state with responsibility for prisons and probation, Crispin Blunt, was asked about this in Parliament as recently as March, and he replied that a total of 18 officers had been convicted since 2008. Unless we are to assume that these individuals were not simply mules but actual packhorses, we can only surmise that they represent a fraction of the total.”

To read the rest of Will Self’s excerpt from his Longford lecture, to be delivered tonight at 6.30pm at Church House, Westminster, visit the Telegraph website here.