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Angie was confident that Mark would provide for them but she was worried about leaving some sort of inheritance for Alex. She found she could not easily take on new work once she knew she was going to die, so she concentrated on the material that was already published or about to be published. Carmen Callil was a great help and this collection of previously published literary journalism was one way in which Carmen was able to do something positive for her.

She had an eager curiosity about the world and a deep knowledge and understanding of the traditional English literary canon. She was, in my view, profoundly well-educated, like my other great friend, her acquaintance Andrea Dworkin, who also died far too soon, in her fifties. She and Angie had much in common, though the two were sometimes at odds, frequently interpreting feminism very differently, especially where the Marquis de Sade was concerned. As Andrea and other American radicals had done, Angie adopted the German spelling of America to describe the imperialist, bullying, unjust aspects of a nation which she felt had let her down.

The USA, as she happily admitted, had an enormous cultural influence on her. She admired the vigour and willingness to engage with important subjects which characterised American novelists.
She had, in the main, enjoyed her time teaching in Austin, which remains one of the centres of US radicalism, but she could not condone the cynicism of the country's foreign policy, its gunboat politics, its willingness to support dictatorships and to interfere, sometimes violently, with the governance of other sovereign states. Equally, she was highly critical of the policies of the Thatcher government. Some of that criticism can be found here.

She loved novels, as she says, especially unusual novels like those of William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Iain Sinclair or the unfairly sidelined Walter de la Mare. Her reviews of John Berger, Milorad Pavic, Grace Paley and others all lead to a better understanding and relish for their work. Angie was always a political animal. Even her literary enthusiasms were coloured by her strongly held principles and beliefs. She loved experiment as much as she loved traditional stories and as such was part of a movement which often instinctively rejected modernism. She created new models and conventions of narrative and subject matter as enthusiastically as she looked to old methods in folklore and legend. As what came to be called an early ‘magic realist', she loved Eastern European, South American, Pakistani and other writers who emerged from national traditions rather than Western modernism.

For perhaps the same reasons she was attracted to romantics and surrealists, to visionaries, though in some ways she was too down-to-earth to be a fully-fledged romantic herself. Her work grew increasingly realistic as it matured and, in my view, was all the better for it. Those of us who had experienced an intensified childhood, as Ballard had in wartime Shanghai or, as she and I had, in blitzed London, found even those writers we admired lacking certain techniques which could readily describe that experience. Like me, she was born into a dangerous world, knowing the permanent possibility of sudden death. This was not easily dealt with in the tradition of Joyce, Woolf, Bowen or even Angus Wilson. The finer sensibilities cultivated and admired by the likes of F.R. Leavis seemed, if anything, rather inappropriate given the monumental events of her early life, including the Second World War, the Nazi holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. She didn't seek sensation – far from it – but she did prefer work which described extremes, however calmly. She looked to writers who were either fascinated by intense experience or who sought to provide that experience with a fresh lexicon, and
you will find in these pieces a tendency to be drawn to writers like Jarry, Kafka and Primo Levi, who remained, for a variety of reasons, on the outskirts looking in. She felt most comfortable in their company, even though her own career as a novelist, an academic and a journalist had been relatively conventional.

Angie had never cared about literary prizes or being fashionable but when her last and best novel,
Wise Children
, was shortlisted for the
Daily Mail
fiction prize she was told that she would only stand a chance of winning the fairly substantial cash award if she agreed to turn up for the ceremony, so she endured the smoke of the presentation dinner only to learn that she had not, after all, won. My agent, the late Giles Gordon, told me that at the last minute one of the judges voted against her merely because he didn't like John Mortimer's assumption that her book was certain to win. Like other disappointments, Angie took that one well, but the rest of us were furious at the people who had so thoughtlessly taxed her resources. That Christmas she went north to visit her organist brother and in February Linda and I went to Mexico. Angie spent the rest of the time left to her with close friends and relatives, enjoying their company, preparing this book. I heard about her death on the BBC World Service a short time later. It happened too suddenly. I wished that I had stayed in London and seen just a little more of her.

I never wanted to admit that Angie was gone. She was one of the few people whose good opinion I valued and I could scarcely grasp the idea that such a fount of energy, enthusiasm, generous friendship and fierce political passions was mortal, let alone that she was dead. Of course, she's very much alive in her work and revisiting these pieces is rather like hearing her speak again – funny, opinionated, passionate, full of original insights. Those qualities of enthusiasm and generosity (except perhaps towards food journalists) radiate from this book.

As in her later novels, Angie made it her business to represent the outsider. She had a particular sympathy for writers who were in some way pushed to the margins by fashion, which is as powerful in the literary world as anywhere. Perhaps the best essay in this book is about Christina Stead, an Australian writer whose unique genius remained largely unacknowledged in her lifetime. Stead's reputation has continued to grow since her death, thanks at least in part to Angie's championing of her. In writing about Stead, Angie
also reveals her own considerable understanding of her craft, her eclecticism, her own willingness to tackle unusual subjects in new and distinctive ways. Her work speaks for itself and remains a monument to a great woman, as well as a great writer, a fine artist with a brilliant, disciplined mind.

In her piece on Danilo Kis's
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
she says: ‘Truth is always stranger than fiction because the human imagination is finite while the truth is not . . . Books don't really have lives of their own. They are only as important as the ideas inside them. [Kis] is wise, grave, clever and complex. His is a book on the side of the angels.' Though far too dismissive of her own insights, she might again be talking about her own work which reveals without doubt a woman decidedly on the side of the angels.

Michael Moorcock, 2006

I am known in my circle as notoriously foul-mouthed. It's a familiar paradox – the soft-spoken, middle-aged English gentlewoman who swears like a trooper when roused. I blame my father, who was neither English nor a gentleman but Scottish and a journalist, who bequeathed me bad language and a taste for the print, so that his daughter, for the last fifteen-odd years, has been writing book reviews and then conscientiously blue-pencilling out her first gut reactions – ‘bloody awful', ‘fucking dire' – in order to give a more balanced and objective overview.

My father kept a shelf of Penguin classics in translation by his bed. Homer, Thucydides, Apuleius. My mother preferred Boswell, Pepys – she adored gossip, especially antique gossip, but she mistrusted fiction because she believed fiction gave one an unrealistic view of the world. Once she caught me reading a novel and chastised me: ‘Never let me catch you doing that again, remember what happened to Emma Bovary.' Both my parents had left school at fifteen, they were among the last generation of men and women whose minds were furnished out of curiosity about the printed word.

In the medieval morality play of
Everyman
, Knowledge says: ‘Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side.' The old Everyman editions used to print this on the inner covers, it was their motto. (The revived Everyman editions happily use the same motto.) I remember another slogan: ‘A good book is the precious life blood of a great master', or words to that effect. We sat at meals with our open books. My mother liked to read cookery books between meals,
especially during the period of food rationing. We were the only family in my class at school who didn't have a television set. They got one at last, when my father retired, ostensibly so that he could watch the news; things went downhill, after that.

Although I grew up with books and have spent a good deal of my adult life among them, make my living out of writing them and very much enjoy writing about them, I can contemplate with equanimity the science-fiction future world that every day approaches more closely, in which information and narrative pleasure are transmitted electronically and books are a quaint, antiquarian, minority taste. Not in
my
time, anyway, I say to myself. And, anyway, a book is simply the container of an idea – like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters. Even so, I admit to having a fetishistic attitude to books, to their touch, their smell. All the same, human beings told each other stories, instructed one another in the names of things, speculated about the meaning of it all (and came to few if any conclusions), discussed the habits of animals, composed recipes, before there was such a thing even as writing and will doubtless continue to do so because the
really
important thing is narrative.

All books, even cookery books and car-maintenance manuals, consist of narratives. Narrative is written in language but it is composed, if you follow me, in time. All writers are inventing a kind of imitation time when they invent the time in which a story unfolds, and they are playing a complicated game with
our
time, the reader's time, the time it takes to read a story. A good writer can make you believe time stands still.

Yet the end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where our time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: ‘This is the end.' Because it
would
have been. We travel along the thread of narrative like high-wire artistes. That is our life.

But there is more to it than that. The Balinese embark on a marathon session of reading aloud after they have prepared a corpse for burial. They read stories from collections of popular tales without stopping, twenty-four hours a day, for days at a time, in order to keep out the demons:

Demons possess souls during the vulnerable period immediately after a death, but stories keep them out. Like Chinese boxes or English hedges, the stories contain tales within tales, so that as you enter one you run into another, passing from plot to plot every time you turn a corner, until at last you reach the core of the narrative space, which corresponds to the place occupied by the corpse within the inner courtyard of the household. Demons cannot penetrate this space because they cannot turn corners. They beat their heads helplessly against the narrative maze that the readers have built, and so reading provides a kind of defence fortification . . . It creates a wall of words, which operates like the jamming of radio broadcast. It does not amuse, instruct, improve or help to while away the time: by the imbrication of narrative and the cacophony of sound, it protects souls.
¹

And that is quite enough about the importance of narrative and ought to explain why the largest section of this book is devoted to pieces of writing about storytelling in its purest form, that is, to invented stories, and the strategies writers have devised to cheat the inevitability of closure, to chase away the demons, to keep them away for good.

Don't think I don't like real novels, though, the kind of novel in which people drink tea and commit adultery – I
do
like novels! I do! In spite of my mother's warning. Although, if a comic charlady obtrudes upon the action of a real novel, I will fling the novel against the wall amidst a flood of obscenities because the presence of such a character as a comic charlady tells me more than I wish to know about the way her creator sees the world.

Because all fiction, all writing of any kind, in fact, exists on a number of different levels. ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale,' said D. H. Lawrence, and he was right, even if he did not want this to happen to
his
tales. If you read the tale carefully, the tale tells you more than the writer knows, often much more than they wanted to give away. The tale tells you, in all innocence, what its writer thinks is important, who she or he thinks is important and, above all, why. Call it the sub-text.

I don't really think that writers, even great writers, are prophets, or sages, or Messiah-like figures; writing is a lonely,
sedentary occupation and a touch of megalomania can be comforting around five on a November afternoon when you haven't seen anybody all day. But one or two of the people I'm writing about, here, have aspirations in the Messianic direction and I'm all for pretension; besides, I'm
glad
that Iain Sinclair did his bit to bring about the resignation of Margaret Thatcher. But, rather than the gift of prophecy, it seems to me that the times
shine through
certain writers, so that we think they see more clearly than we do, whereas in reality they are making
us
see more clearly. Calling such writers seers, or prophets, is a form of shorthand. I suppose I'd include John Berger and William Burroughs in this category, probably J. G. Ballard, certainly Christina Stead.

Otherwise, I like to write about writers who give me pleasure. Pleasure has always had a bad press in Britain. I'm all for pleasure, too. I wish there was more of it around. I also like to argue. There is also a strong irascibility factor in some of these pieces. A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.