. . . I've got it into my head that now I'm on the Granta list I should have a pied-à-terre in Bloomsbury. It's terrible, and particularly ridiculous since I'd never even heard of the list until a few weeks before it came out. Ultimately it's just a list, but I'm hoping it'll help the book along. The other people on it seem to be pretty clever compared to me, so I can't help thinking that I'm only on it because of some kind of clerical error.

. . . I'm really loving not writing anything at the moment. Writing Timoleon Vieta Come Home was a pretty joyless experience, and I couldn't see beyond it. It was only during the last year, when it started to resemble the book I was trying to write, that I could feel happy with it -- and that coincided with me finding myself publisherless so it looked for a long time as if Timoleon Vieta Come Home wasn't going to come out, let alone any subsequent books. It was a pretty miserable time, but the darkness of those days helped Timoleon Vieta Come Home become the book it is -- I wasn't tempted to soften it at all in the final stages. Right now I have no imagination or motivation, and it's a fantastic feeling. I wasn't able to switch off for six and a half years, and now I've managed it I'm very reluctant to go back to writing. I wrote obsessively, to the detriment of every other aspect of my life, and I'm not sure I want to go back to that, and I know I wouldn't be prepared to write with less commitment. Maybe I'll write something else one day, but if I do I'm hoping I would be obliged to approach the work from a completely different angle -- not from the perspective of a miserable git. . . ."

The direction of the music covers all jazzed territory, scampering from the raucous bravado of the JBs to Mongo Santamariesque latin licks to the smooth dancefloor blue breakbeats of Reuben Wilson, Donald Byrd and Stanley Turrentine. Some standards, from "Fever" to "Isn't she lovely" are chucked in as well for those who want to give it a lungful. Entrance is as free as can be, the beer's cheap and the staff are friendly and, er, excitable, particularly if the music hits the spot. It's certainly not unsual to see people rolling up to play straight off the evening train from Paris, definite proof of the night's growing popularity. For more information e-mail Drew Davies or phone 03.26.50. 81.28." (Photo: Steven Rogers bangs the drums down at Excalibur.)

As a movement, Cobra fulfilled pretty much all the stereotypes of the 20th-century art movement -- in fact, it could be the model for most of them. Cliche has it that, while postwar Paris was in the throes of existentialism, New York was roaring with abstract expressionism and British art was filling up the kitchen sink, examining the forms of the teasel and doing spiky, angular things for the Festival of Britain, the Cobra artists were colluding to overthrow Mondrian, churn up the landscape, embrace the Outsider and reject social realism. The movement was founded in Paris, but its name (properly CoBrA, though rendered otherwise in all the material relating to this exhibition) derives from three other European cities, Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam -- cities of occupation in which the artists involved had lived throughout the war years. Cobra was, in part, an amalgamation of artists disaffected from various national groupings, particularly the Surrealist-Revolutionary Centre in Belgium, the Danish Harvest Group and the Dutch Experimental Group. So many factions. It is hard to imagine such tight-knit, ideologically motivated artist groups today, when movements tend to be little more than journalistic labels (the School of London, the YBAs) or self-promotional packages (the Stuckists, heaven forbid). There was a time when such things mattered and were more than cabals of art-world career lobbyists. The movement's founder and organiser, the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont, famously described Cobra as: 'Like going on a train journey. You fall asleep, you wake up, you don't know whether you've just passed Copenhagen, Brussels or Amsterdam.' If Cobra was an art in transit, it was also a transitional movement, its protagonists somehow moving between a self-conscious, individualist 'primitivism' (if that is not a paradox) and a sense of a universal art that transcended language. In part, Cobra anticipated the truly revolutionary ideals of the Situationist International and the 1970s 'return to painting' of the neo-expressionists. It was also an art in transit from the most appalling war to a world in which things, so the artists believed, had to be done differently. . . . Cobra also attracted some terribly mediocre artists, whose toe-curling works hang alongside the more significant figures -- Asger Jorn, Karel Appel, Constant, Corneille and Pierre Alechinsky -- in the Baltic exhibition. Visitor, brace yourself: prepare to see some utter dreck in the Cobra show. Malpert writes that Cobra works 'are among the most popular and accessible of 20th-century works in the museums that house them, and reproductions serve to brighten up the corridors of hotels and office buildings'. A dreadful apotheosis, this, for an art that aimed for a rather different kind of universality. I would also argue with the idea that Cobra art is 'popular' in any meaningful way. . . ."

The next book Nancy wrote, The Pursuit of Love, brought her fame and fortune and the means to acquire an independent new life in Paris. Before this, when she was married and suffered repeated miscarriages, she had published four novels, which earned her about £100 apiece. Enchanting though they are, they have what one can only call an amateurish quality. They feel as if a part of Nancy's head had been elsewhere: fixed upon an image of the life of wife and mother that she had been brought up to view as her destiny. Yet once she knew that this was not her destiny, and that a child would not come along to save her marriage to a glamorous, adulterous wastrel named Peter Rodd, something in Nancy seemed to shift focus, and she produced a succession of masterpieces: The Pursuit of Love (1945), Love in a Cold Climate (1949), two more novels and four historical biographies. Her life had become her own, whether she had wanted it to or not. And she made the most of this gift by becoming an artist. The brutal removal of her ability to have children liberated her into creativity. 'Faute de mieux,' the Duchess of Devonshire said to me, believing as she does that Nancy longed to have a family, and of course this may be right. And it led me to ask the fundamental question: would Nancy ever have written the books that she did had a baby come into her life? Just what is the relationship between these two lives, that of the mother and that of the writer? Can the two be reconciled, or are they always at war? . . . Is it not possible that George Eliot, for example -- 'the female Tolstoy', as Claire Tomalin says -- would have had the honesty to admit that a book like Middlemarch is unlikely to get written between bottlefeeds and bedtime stories? Might she not have accepted the hard necessity of choice? As Bonnie Greer said recently on BBC2's Newsnight Review: 'Art isn't what you do while you're waiting to pick the kids up from school.'. . .

When I was pregnant, I thought a great deal about the fact that creating children was selfless, while creating art was selfish; yet did this make them irreducibly opposed or, perhaps, mysteriously similar? This question seems to me to sit at the heart of Rachel Cusk's meditation on motherhood, A Life's Work, which is infused with Cusk's fear of losing the essential self that makes her a writer. Yet with magical irony that very fear produced a book. And this, like the image of Claire Tomalin breastfeeding her baby while writing about Mary Wollstonecraft - who, poor woman, was planning her next book throughout the pregnancy which killed her - led me to feel that the two types of creativity might be able to feed off each other: that they might even, sometimes, be twin."

. . . What I tend to tell students in creative writing classes, if they ask, is that a short story usually deals either with a moment of chance or of change. Nothing need happen (it can be a moment of chance of change, failed), but there is always the drama of it not happening. More generally, I noted as I sat on the tube on the way to the BBC, short stories have been getting shorter for most of the twentieth century. Henry James thought little of including 'The Turn of the Screw' or 'In the Cage' in collections of short stories, rather than publishing them separately as novellas -- despite their coming in around a hundred pages long.

I think time-starved contemporary readers, despite their greater addiction to the novel, still beam a certain amount of gratitude towards writers who keep it short. Authors like Philip Larkin, Jane Austen, Bruce Chatwin, all of whose outputs were small, seem very endearing -- we can get to know them, properly. Voltaire famously ended a letter with the words: 'I'm sorry to write at such length, I didn't have time to write less.' . . .

1. "Up the Bracket", Up the Bracket -- The Libertines
2. "Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down", Turn On the Bright Lights -- Interpol
3. "The Pop Song", Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks -- The Rapture
4. "Get Loose", The New Rock Revolution -- The D4
5. "Dance to the Underground, Gotham! -- Radio 4

1. "Lessons From What's Poor" -- Bonnie 'Prince' Billy: "From Master and Everyone, album of the year and it's only March!"
2. "Xenophobia" -- Prince: "The stand-out track on his fantastic live 3-CD set."
3. "Ride A Black Swan" -- Zwan: "Billy Corgan's slightly disappointing comeback, I preferred him when he was bald and goth and weird, but David Pajo (ex-Royal Trux) makes the album."
4. "L.M.L.Y.P" -- Ween: "From the reissued God Ween Satan album."
5. "She's Your Cocaine" -- Tori Amos: "How did this happen?"

Gore Vidal ("We have one political party - the party of corporate America"), Arundhati Roy and Siva Choy explain how the US influences their work.