“What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can’t help feeling that’s because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.

“Intellectuals do exist in this country and have existed. If you think of the Foucaults and Derridas in France, we have our Terry Eagletons and Colin MacCabes. People such as Niall Ferguson and Simon Schama: think of them what you will, but they’re not lightweights – though they’re not necessarily high-order theoreticians.   More...

‘During the 1997 election I put up a handmade poster in the house where I lived that read: “A Vote for Labour is Not Necessarily a Vote for That Sanctimonious Git Blair.” I-told-you-so is never an attractive quality, but while my sign may have been factually incorrect, I was spot-on when it came to the man himself, which was why my tick was placed elsewhere in 2001, 2005, and will be again come May.   More...

This was published to celebrate Father’s Day, June 15 2008:

Will Self was born in 1961 and raised in an ‘effortlessly dull’ north London suburb. His father, Peter, held the chair in public administration at the London School of Economics. Self’s parents divorced when he was 18. He worked as a copywriter and a New Statesman cartoonist before his first collection of short stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, was published to critical and popular acclaim in 1991. Doris Lessing said of Quantity …, ‘absurdity unfurls logically from absurdity, but always as a mirror of what we are living in — and wish we didn’t.’
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