Editorial

IN ONE OF Malcolm Bradbury's early novels, Stepping westward, an American university lecturer ruminates on the arrival of a seedy English man as visiting writer in residence. For the American, ‘the English had seemed…a settled race, a race that had taken the things of the mind for granted and lived easily with them, a race that had acquired forms for living and had assumed that concert halls and bookshops and libraries and writers were permanent and eternal—a race, in short, that hadn't faced the future.’