So I was dismayed to learn that in just 12 years the number of universities offering postgraduate degree courses in creative writing has risen from eight to 85, while there are 11,000 short-term courses.
I speak as someone who has to read about 120 novels by August as part of the sadomasochistic requirement of agreeing to be a Man Booker Prize judge. I already have around 40 piled up at home and while a few are very good indeed, a couple seem indifferent and several are astonishingly bad. The one thing writers don’t need is any encouragement. But this will not materialise without restraint from the Israeli government Last night’s illegal and deadly act was not a good sign.. However, that merely underlines the folly of the Bush-Blair Iraq adventure. It should not extinguish hope that the Sharon plan could be a small step in the right direction.

Instead, the need to bolster Mr Sharon has offended Arab opinion and made it harder for Arab countries to help extricate the US from the deepening quagmire. His claim last year was that progress on Israel-Palestine would rally support for the coalition in Iraq. What was so depressing last week was the President’s failure to offer any sign of even-handedness or hope of gains for the Palestinian cause.As a result, Mr Blair’s strategy has collapsed. In which case, what matters at the moment is helping Mr Sharon to win the vote in his Likud Party on the Gaza withdrawal.

Mr Blair is, in turn, familiar with the need to pander to apparently irreconcilable constituencies from his experience of Northern Ireland. And it was interesting that, after the Blair-Bush talks on Friday, the President explicitly tied Mr Sharon to the “road-map” ­ the broad outline of a peace deal which many commentators had prematurely declared dead on Wednesday.Unfortunately, President Bush’s motives are suspect, because he is courting Jewish votes for the US presidential elections in November. Bernard Wasserstein makes the same point on the opposite page. It could be argued, therefore, that the US was simply trying to disabuse Palestinians of unrealistic aspirations which their own leaders are too cowardly to confront. He did repeat his support for “a Palestinian state that is viable, contiguous, sovereign and independent”. But he said nothing to contradict the impression given by Mr Sharon that this would happen, if ever, entirely on Israeli terms.The US may calculate that it takes a right-wing hardman to deliver Israeli concessions. On the other hand, President Bush did little to scale back the unrealistic aspirations of the Israeli right.

It is for precisely this reason that Mr Sharon is being criticised at home, and that is why he wanted President Bush to deliver such a pointed rebuff to the Palestinian side and why he feels he must continue the policy of “targeted assassinations”.Mr Blair, in his role as the President’s chief spin-doctor, might fairly point out that the Palestinians in the past have been willing to compromise over their “right of return”, and to allow some “illegal” Israeli settlements to continue in exchange for land elsewhere. The prospects for progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process were not good before last night. But they were not quite as bad as they appeared last Wednesday, when President Bush supported Israel’s wish to keep some settlements in the Occupied Territories and opposed the Palestinians’ wish to return to their homeland.The plan propounded by Mr Sharon to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements does at least offer the beginnings of movement towards the only workable compromise, namely a negotiated two-state solution.As Mr Blair pointed out, it is the first time an Israeli prime minister has offered to withdraw from any of the Occupied Territories without it being conditional on the Palestinians doing anything. Just what Tony Blair did not need in his attempt to persuade Palestinian and wider Arab opinion that Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, is a man that they can do business with, and that George Bush is not the blundering ideologue he seems.
Until last night’s attack, Mr Blair had a plausible, if deeply flawed, case. The Israeli attack, killing the Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, in Gaza, is a counterproductive continuation of the disastrous policy of murdering opponents throughout the Occupied Territories. Just as the Prime Minister set about convincing the world that it was possible to advance the peace process by building on the Israeli government’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, his efforts were blown up by a helicopter gunship. For that reason, Dr Williams deserves more credit for the way he has handled the issue of homosexuality than secular liberals have often granted him..