It's not as if we’re going to stop the forward march of AI: lawsuits and enraged authors don’t count for much in the advance of technology, and as a society we don’t have a good track record of asking whether we should do something; we’re only interested if we can. Ethics will never precede innovation for obvious reasons.

Stories are what make us human. Ever since we had proper language, we’ve been telling stories to each other to overcome our fears, to understand the world better, to become better humans. So reading isn’t just the best thing you can do for your brain, but also for your soul.

Art is about showing the invisible, expressing the unconfessed, and comprehending the incomprehensible. Or, as George Bernard Shaw said more eloquently, “without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”

Art is about showing the invisible, expressing the unconfessed, and comprehending the incomprehensible. Or, as George Bernard Shaw said more eloquently, “without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”

Many people would say that art and science live in completely different areas in the brain, and in people’s consciousness. I know you take issue with that assumption. Let’s talk about it.

Roland Barthes has famously remarked, Literature is the question minus the answer. So you have to be ready for some challenges, some ambiguity, some blank walls. Literature isn’t a main course of a lovely dinner; you have to embrace it, interact with it, internalize it.

It's probably true, as they say, that every story has already been told... and retold... and retold. Like the people in marketing say, though, it's all about spin. And you could do worse than to re-spin some of the classics. I'm not talking Shakespeare: he's a little cliché by now. No: I'm going further back, to the fertile ground of Greek and Roman mythology. If you want stories with passion, humor, love and death, look no further. I'll just take one example to whet your appetite: one version of the Minotaur story goes like this...

It's probably true, as they say, that every story has already been told... and retold... and retold. Like the people in marketing say, though, it's all about spin. And you could do worse than to re-spin some of the classics. I'm not talking Shakespeare: he's a little cliché by now. No: I'm going further back, to the fertile ground of Greek and Roman mythology. If you want stories with passion, humor, love and death, look no further. I'll just take one example to whet your appetite: one version of the Minotaur story goes like this...

It's probably true, as they say, that every story has already been told... and retold... and retold. Like the people in marketing say, though, it's all about spin. And you could do worse than to re-spin some of the classics. I'm not talking Shakespeare: he's a little cliché by now. No: I'm going further back, to the fertile ground of Greek and Roman mythology. If you want stories with passion, humor, love and death, look no further. I'll just take one example to whet your appetite: one version of the Minotaur story goes like this...

It's probably true, as they say, that every story has already been told... and retold... and retold. Like the people in marketing say, though, it's all about spin. And you could do worse than to re-spin some of the classics. I'm not talking Shakespeare: he's a little cliché by now. No: I'm going further back, to the fertile ground of Greek and Roman mythology. If you want stories with passion, humor, love and death, look no further. I'll just take one example to whet your appetite: one version of the Minotaur story goes like this...