Well, It's Easier Than Writing It Yourself

This month's literary chutzpah prize goes, by acclamation, to the inimitable Adam Thirlwell for the "postscript" to his extraordinary second novel Escape (Jonathan Cape). This book, writes Thirlwell, "contains quotations, some of them slightly adapted, from works by WH Auden, Saul Bellow, Bertolt Brecht, Mel Brooks, Constantine Cavafy ... Peter Stephan Junk, Franz Kafka, Velimir Khlebnikov, Ladislav Klima, Stéphane Mallarmé, Thomas Mann, Groucho Marx, Thomas Middleton ... Suetonius, Tacitus, Junichiro Tanizaki, Leo Tolstoy, Paul Valéry and Virgil." Something tells me that some less well-schooled reviewers may not take too kindly to this bookish parade. Thirlwell, one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists, will no doubt comfort himself with Somerset Maugham's advice to young writers: "Don't read your reviews, dear boy. Measure them."