Partly this is because he was fighting back then for literature far more than liberty. We thought if only we could free up censorship, then there would be a renaissance of culture and the arts, with a new spirit of liberalism in the land. Instead we got the pornographic revolution and, even apart from that, we didn't get the explosion of culture. It's an astonishingly bleak verdict on the literary output of this country in the past quarter century. Coleman doesn't see it that way.
Civil society needs time to adjust.
A bit of delay doesn't seem a great problem. So, do we get wiser as we get older, I asked Coleman. The question delighted him. I find myself going back to the views of my youth more and more. But I have a deeper sense than I had when I was young of the fragility of civilisation and the abyss on the edge of which we're living.