John Mullan is Professor of English at University College London. He has published widely on eighteenth-century literature and his World’s Classics edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets was published last year. He is a broadcaster and journalist as well as an academic, and writes a weekly column on contemporary fiction for the Guardian. He is the author of How Novels Work (OUP), a guide to contemporary fiction for the general reader, and Anonymity. A Secret History of English Literature (Faber and Faber). In 2009 he was one of the judges for the Man Booker Prize.