Writers are magpies and petty thieves. We steal. We borrow with no intention of return. We pick over, separate flesh from bone, discard, dissect and reshape. No-one is safe from our alert antennae. The stranger behind us in the bus queue. That fellow patient in the dentist waiting room. The customer at the neighbouring table in the coffee shop. An overheard conversation, sometimes just a couple of phrases, can be removed from their owner, trawled in like a grateful fisherman, stored for further use and exploitation. Writers are merciless. Sometimes, the theft is not verbal at all. It?s a mannerism...

Evidently it is essential these days to be ?media savvy? to find success as a writer. Equally, we are told, publishing companies and agents consider writers to be as much a product as their books and ?promotability? is far more crucial than the quality of their prose. So youth, beauty or at least some kind of unique ?life story? are the key ingredients to being picked out from the crowd and thrust into the literary limelight. As one Times article declared recently, to make money as a writer it is vital these days to be young, be zeitgeisty, sell the...