‘Someone, with a greater sense of arithmetic than one normally expects in literary commentators, once calculated that, if all the writers in the world who make a good living from literature were gathered together, they could be fitted into a single, reasonably sized room. He didn’t enlarge on the disastrous possibilities of such an exercise, but he did make his point that there is a vast and spiritually hungry population of us who do not now, nor ever shall, have access to that gilded room. ‘(p. 18)