“in the past half century, Anglo-Saxon literary attitudes have shifted decisively away from Europe, westwards (and southwards) to the US, Latin America and the Commonwealth. With the shift in British literary outlook away from European modernism and the successors of Sartre and Camus, our last continental icons, and towards the American postwar realists – Updike and Roth, Mailer, Bellow and Morrison – what is our position now towards continental Europe? What ought it to be, as political union expands? How to talk about it?”