“When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word processing, but it would have been recognisable to many of our past contributors. Now that world is more or less extinct. Many of the great names from those times (Hughes, Murdoch, Mailer, Heller, Gunn, Miller, Vonnegut) are gone. Books, meanwhile, have been pushed to the edge of the radar.”