When he strikes upon a particularly felicitous turn of phrase his blue eyes flash

When he strikes upon a particularly felicitous turn of phrase, his blue eyes flash with an immodest mischief.Graciousness aside, in the end it is clear that Updike would rather be performing this wordplay on the page instead of into the mouth of a tape recorder Criticism won’t be stopping him anytime soon. “Thankfully,” he jokes, “these things come out after the type has been set.” Like Hope, Updike is excited every day by the prospect of making something new. “Although it looks increasingly foolish from the outside, it doesn’t feel that way on the inside.”He is also motivated by fear. “There’s the fear that somehow you neglected to say what was really yours to say,” Updike says, for once his voice rising “It’s not likely I’ve written a lot. I must have somewhere touched on almost every aspect of my life and experience. Nevertheless, there’s this haunting fear that the thing you left out is going to be finally captured.”As if to underscore this, the day before our interview, Updike’s editor received in the mail a large package bearing –what else? – the manuscript for his next book.John Freeman is a writer in New York who contributes to the ‘New York Times Book Review’, ‘Wall Street Journal’, ‘The Washington Post’ and ‘Los Angeles Times’BiographyBorn IN Pennsylvania in 1932, John Updike graduated from Harvard in 1954 and studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford.

After a stint on the The New Yorker (1955-57), he moved to Massachusetts (where he still lives) and embarked on the prolific output of novels, stories, essays and poems that now fills 54 separate volumes. His 20 novels began with The Poorhouse Fair (1959) and include the Rabbit tetralogy, Couples, The Witches of Eastwick, The Coup, Brazil and now Seek My Face (Hamish Hamilton). His fiction has won the Pulitzer Prize twice, and a National Book Award. His criticism is collected in Hugging the Shore, Odd Jobs, Just Looking and More Matter; his stories include Bech; a book, Trust Me and Licks of Love. He has also written a memoir (Self-Consciousness), the poetry in Collected Poems (1993), and six books for children.. * It appears likely that summer will be spoiled by the release from so-called prison of Jeffrey Archer. His publisher Macmillan hasn’t quite dared to plan publicity, but is advertising a second helping of prison porridge, Wayland Purgatory.

God preserve us from a third volume of memoirs, but presumably it would be Grantchester Heaven. Macmillan will be praying Archer’s springing will help shift a few more copies of his novel, Sons of Fortune. But Howard – a canon’s son, author of books on Butler and Crossman, and Michael Heseltine’s amanuensis – has been appointed by the Archbishop of Westminster’s office. Headline will publish in 2005; the editor sees Hume as “a man able to inspire people of all faiths with his wisdom and goodness”.* Inevitably, the latest BBC exercise in vox pop, The Big Read, is to have a tie-in book. The only mystery is why the BBC’s own publishing arm isn’t handling it. Mark Harrison, BBC TV’s creative director, has lavished praise on Dorling Kindersley, who will. DK will publish The Big Read Book of Books in November, coinciding with the climactic moment in the survey of our favourite novels – which, in the manner of Great Britons, will probably pit Noddy against War and Peace..

The best future fictions are deeply embedded in the present. They prod our existing fears into the light and build a dystopic world on them. So the monsters haunting 1948 – both Nazi and Stalinist – were incarnated in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its ever-vigilant Big Brother, its thought police, its daily two minutes of hate and its newspeak, which enshrined “doublethink”: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. The Handmaid’s Tale inflected the basic totalitarian police state with current, feminist anxieties The fundamentalist right was on the rise.