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writers thoroughly understood.
    â€˜More than anything,’ he said, ‘people dislike being made to feel stupid, and if you arouse those feelings, you do so at your own cost. I, for example, like to play tennis,’ he said, ‘and I know that if I play with someone who is a little better than me, my game will be raised. But if my tennis partner is too far beyondme in skill, he becomes my tormentor and my game is destroyed.’
    Sometimes, he said, he amused himself by trawling some of the lower depths of the internet, where readers gave their opinions of their literary purchases, much as they might rate the performance of a detergent. What he had learned, by studying these opinions, was that respect for literature was very much skin deep, and that people were never far from the capacity to abuse it. It was entertaining, in a way, to see Dante awarded a single star out of a possible five and his Divine Comedy described as ‘complete shit’, but a sensitive person might equally find it distressing, until you remembered that Dante – along with most great writers – carved his vision out of the deepest understanding of human nature and could look after himself. It was a position of weakness, he believed, to see literature as something fragile that needed defending, as so many of his colleagues and contemporaries did. Likewise he didn’t set much store by its morally beneficial qualities, other than to raise the game – as he had said – of someone correspondingly slightly inferior.
    He sat back in his seat and looked at me with a pleasant smile.
    I said that I found his remarks somewhat cynical, as well as strikingly indifferent to the concept of justice, whose mysteries, while remaining opaque to us,it had always seemed sensible to me to fear. In fact the very opacity of those mysteries, I said, was in itself grounds for terror, for if the world seemed full of people living evilly without reprisal and living virtuously without reward, the temptation to abandon personal morality might arise in exactly the moment when personal morality is most significant. Justice, in other words, was something you had to honour for its own sake, and whether or not he believed that Dante could look after himself, it seemed to me he ought to defend him at every opportunity.
    While I was speaking my publisher had been stealthily removing his eyes from my face in order to look at something over my shoulder, and I turned to see a woman standing at the entrance to the bar gazing around herself nonplussed with her hand shading her eyes, like a voyager peering into foreign distances.
    â€˜Ah!’ he said. ‘There’s Linda.’
    He waved at her and she gave a jerky gesture of relief as though she had been struggling to find us, though in fact we were the only people there.
    â€˜I went to the basement by mistake,’ she said when she reached our table. ‘There’s a garage down there. There are all these cars sitting there in rows. It was horrible.’
    The publisher laughed.
    â€˜It wasn’t funny,’ Linda said. ‘I felt like I was insomething’s lower intestine. The building was digesting me.’
    â€˜We are publishing Linda’s first novel,’ he said, to me. ‘The reviews so far have been very encouraging.’
    She was a tall, soft, thick-limbed woman made even taller by the elaborately strappy high-heeled sandals she wore on her feet, whose glamour sat incongruously beneath the black tentlike garment she wore and her general air of awkwardness. Her hair was dishevelled and fell past her shoulders in matted-looking hanks, and her skin had the pastiness of someone who rarely goes outdoors. She had a round, loose, somewhat startled face and her mouth hung open while she looked in amazement through large red-framed glasses at the wedding party on the other side of the bar.
    â€˜What’s that?’ she said in puzzlement. ‘Are they making a