With Burgess we are in another part of the forest, he being the man who actually gets written the novels that other men only dream of writing - or, rather, that other regiments only dream of writing. Yet if Burgess's literary journalism was meant to be such an inherently inferior activity he might have done us the grace of being worse at it, so that we could have saved the money it cost to buy Urgent Copy and the time it took to enjoy it. I have that excellent collection of pieces in front of me now, almost falling to bits from being read in the bath. I turn it over and find on the back a dramatically lit photograph of Anthony Burgess. But where is the Government Health Warning? Where does it say: 'Listen sucker, the stuff inside was tossed off for the bread when by rights I should have been assembling another twenty-seven novels e il modo ancor m' offende'?...

Anthony Burgess is just one of the people who have encouraged the notion that only the longer article is worthy of preservation - this despite the fact that his own book is full of exemplary 1,000-word pieces. Economics and the temper of the times allowing, the best literary journalists should collect and publish all their pieces every couple of years. The short literary essay is one of the key forms in modern critical writing - think of Conrad Aiken, let alone the towering example of Edmund Wilson. As it is, to assemble a representative collection of the best twentieth-century literary journalism you must haunt second-hand bookshops until your sinuses clog up with dust, and be prepared to bear away hulking great anthologies for the sake of a single article. A necessary lesson in the variety of culture, although often enough you will stumble on a real prize - Urgent Copy, for example, which I got for ten bob in a Charing Cross Road basement.