It can bring you great material rewards and celebrity as well as artistic satisfaction And it’s part

“It can bring you great material rewards, and celebrity, as well as artistic satisfaction And it’s part of the glamour of the arts. You ask, ‘How do I crack this, to make money and contribute to culture?’ I think that James felt that, too.”James, like many of his creative heirs, craved mass-market fame but shunned its side-effects. “He wanted to benefit from the showbiz side of drama, but shrank from the kind of exposure that it inevitably involved,” says Lodge. In Author, Author (Secker & Warburg, £16.99), Lodge – for decades the most popular of our serious novelists, or maybe the most serious of our popular novelists – deploys all his seductive storytelling craft to explore not merely the life and art of James himself, but the fate of any proud writer in an age of hype and spin.
“It’s one of the curious things about art in the modern world,” says Lodge, still the crisp and waffle-free teacher, although he left his professorship at Birmingham to write full-time as far back as 1987. Just a rotten tomato’s throw away lie the same theatres where, in the 1890s, James tried and humiliatingly failed to re-route his career, from mandarin novelist to celebrity playwright.

Clad in his natty summer shorts, David Lodge discusses his new novel about Henry James in an elegantly spare London pied-?erre, perched above the bustle of the West End. The Master would approve of the location but, surely, not of the attire. But the fresh start turns sour when Jamie is bullied and Sam struggles to protect him.Achmat Dangor’Bitter Fruit’, Atlantic BooksA dark account of the history and legacy of apartheid, as a couple try to forget the past, while their son has to deal with the present.Louise Dean’Becoming Strangers’, ScribnerA dying man on holiday with his wife meet another couple on their final trip together. But soon Strange’s pursuit of long-lost magic threatens their partnership.Neil Cross’Always the Sun’, ScribnerAfter his mother dies, 13-year-old Jamie and his father, Sam, move to a new town. Although not a sequel to his debut, The Swimming Pool Library , which combined high literary style and low-rent gay sex, it picks up where that novel left off.Hollinghurst, like Colm T?n, is influenced by Henry James. But 49-year-old T?n takes his fascination further by developing a whole novel out of the writer’s life.His book, The Master , shares second-favourite status in the Ladbroke’s odds with David Mitchell, 35, for his ambitious novel Cloud Atlas , and Louise Dean, 34, a first-time novelist whose Becoming Strangers tells what happens when a couple, long struggling to deal with the husband’s cancer, go on a tropical holiday.A number of big-hitters have failed to make the list, including Justin Cartwright, Jonathan Coe, AL Kennedy, Hari Kunzru and Anita Desai.

And his new film, The Clearing, is not just awful and boring; depending on how you count, it’s something like the 10th dud he has made in a row. Whatever the truth, he looks old and sad and beaten up, as if his calm inner space has been trampled on by indifferent mobs. But he has never carried the logic of his own image and reputation all the way.And now, Robert Redford is 67 (the birthday came on 18 August), and he looks it – or worse. There is gossip on the internet that he has had tucks done on sagging eyelids. Think of Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro, and you can see how Redford preferred to stay cool, guarded, watchful, inward.Not that he is uninterested in contemporary politics.

Just recently, he boosted the fundraising by being present at a northern California party for Senator Tom Daschle. Hadn’t he even played a political figure in that astringent film, The Candidate, itself a satire on the hype of campaigning and the hollowness at the centre? What might have been? But Redford always ducked that final immersion in politics, just as he never yielded to passion or wildness in his acting. Then he became a director, and his debut, Ordinary People, while it was over-praised, won the Oscar for best director (beating Scorsese for Raging Bull) and for best picture. More than that, Robert Redford, his hair as blond as the beaches at Santa Monica where he was born, his eyes as blue as the Utah sky where he often lived, was a steadfast defender of the environment.Not enough? Well, in 1981, he founded the Sundance Institute; a school, a gathering place and a nurturing ground for small, difficult, brave independent pictures, the kind that Hollywood had long since given up on.Untouched by scandal, universally admired, apparently eloquent and affable, Redford had so much that seemed not just graceful but presidential that he made real people running for office – Carter, Reagan, Clinton – look shifty or implausible. There was uncertainty over his acting, to be sure, but at the very least he was competent, or cool, and sometimes – as in All The President’s Men – he was damn good He was reliable box-office.