Chesterton sought always to entertain - he was a reader's writer rather than a writer's writer.
And, not to be glib, it was noticeable that - despite some obvious feuds - literary conversation tended to concern itself with writing rather than writers.
For me, too, the image of continental Europe theatre is a rather shrunken mind-map composed of distant memories of past luminaries such as Peter Stein or Ariane Minouchkine – big-name directors rather than writers.
It was set up to reward literature and artistic achievement as opposed to "readable" books, to have writers judging writers rather than writers, politicians and the odd celebrity and to allow all English-language fiction to compete regardless of nationality or gender.
At the same time, reality television, which hires mostly editors, producers and people off the street rather than writers and bona fide actors, has gained a significant presence on network and cable television.
Another competition, this time aimed at fans rather than writers, offered a prize of $25 to the fan who had to overcame the most difficulties in order to attend the 1941 World Science Fiction Convention in Denver.
Soldier, journalist, writer about places (rather than "travel writer"), elegist of the British empire and novelist, she fashioned a prose style that is elegant, fastidious, supple and sometimes gloriously gaudy.
"I'm seriously afraid of feeling like my career matters less than his if I don't get a desk in our place really soon; like I'm the writer's wife, rather than a writer in my own right," she wrote.
Well, MVL, as we shall call him for typing ease, is clearly the right kind of writer to win: big, ambitious, accomplished, and, as I said in that small pawky Comment, in the Victor Hugo vein, i.e., a writer of moral points and social interventions, rather than a writer of sentences and circumstances.
In Directors' Theatre (1988), a short but important book co-written with David Williams, he made a case for the director as the author of a performance, rather than the writer.
