I spent my first three years after graduating sitting in the dim backroom of an antiquarian bookshop writing catalogue entries for unsaleable 18th-century novels (“3 vols, duodecimo, missing frontispiece; spine bumped, slightly foxed…” — the jargon lurks forever in my brain). With what now strikes me as massive naivety my cunning master plan for getting into the media constituted writing book reviews in small magazines and hoping somebody would see one of them.
It was all going very badly until I got an email from the books editor of The Times. He actually had seen one of my reviews. Did I fancy writing the odd thing for him? To put it mildly, I did. One book review led to another and then miraculously into
