In his preface [to A Moving Target] Golding explains that five of the pieces included began life as lectures. And he says: "When you get down to it, what an audience wants to hear from a novelist is how he writes. Since how he writes is in intimate association with what he is and how he lives the novelist finds himself in danger of being his own raw material." He goes on: "I have always tried to resist this and have always given way in the end so that at last I find myself talking about myself with the grossest liberality. This leads to nothing but self-disgust." I find the tone of this disturbing. If the self-disgust is genuine, why agree to give the lecture? Even more to the point, why publish such pieces between hard covers? I feel there is a confusion here which is not the...