A tall blond-haired man languidly crosses the quadrangle clad entirely in white. As he crunches the gravel underfoot on a shimmering July afternoon in Cambridge, he appears to be from Central Casting. He is in fact Belgian, as we discover over dinner, and has taken his Merchant Ivory to heart. "It is a dream come true to be here," he sighs. The annual event known simply as The Cambridge Seminar drew to a close yesterday morning after nine days spent in the almost absurdly idyllic surroundings of Downing College.
Fifty-two writers, academics, translators, publishers - and a sprinkling of journalists - from all corners of the globe clustered beneath the Ionic columns and porticos to participate in readings and discussions on the theme of "The Contemporary British Writer". For the past 25 years the British Council has run this convivial, seamlessly-organised event which presents a showcase of British writing to an invited group of "overseas fellows". Part academic conference, part informal summer school, it is regarded by the literary branch of the Council as a key element in its ongoing work of promoting British culture, language and literature in 110 countries around the world, many of them former colonies.
Helping to celebrate the Seminar's 25th birthday was a panel of writers whose heterogeneity underlined this year's unofficial theme: the variety and divergences encompassed by the terms "British" and "writer". Language and identity, displacement and belonging, cultural and linguistic translation, the central and the marginalised, definitions of Britishness - the recurring motifs ramified over the course of discussions and readings by Michael Frayn, Penelope Lively, Andrew Motion, Salman Rushdie, Simon Armitage, Janice Galloway, Biyi Bandele, Michele Roberts, W.G. Sebald, David Lodge, Harold Pinter, Malcolm Bradbury, Ferdinand Dennis, and Claire Tomalin, among others.
Complex relationships to Britishness inevitably arose in discussions with Penelope Lively, who spent the first 12 years of her life in Egypt and felt, on her arrival in England after the second World War, like a displaced person who had to learn the social and cultural codes; while W.G. Sebald left his native Germany at the age of 22, but has lived and worked as an academic in England since then. The recent publication of genre-defying works such as The Rings Of Saturn is bringing him critical acclaim. A conflation of history, biography, autobiography, travel essay, natural history and metaphysics, his work bears out his resistance to labels ("I find categories pointless "), whether these apply to literary forms or national identities.
Courtesy and decorum prevailed at all times during the week; there was considerably less heat and combativeness than at a comparable gathering in Ireland. Multiculturalism and minority groups were carefully represented in the programme and a fascinating panel discussion on the uses of English language around the world included a succinct account of the history of the Irish language, given by the Arts Council's Literature Officer, Sinead Mc Aodha.
Given the potential for diplomatic incidents or friction among the international group of participants, the emphasis of the seminar was necessarily on promoting consensus and the warm appreciation of the writers who addressed us. The occasional blandness and sense of literature as a genteel pursuit was probably inevitable. But by Tuesday, the Overseas Fellows were more than ready for something challenging and when Harold Pinter read electrifyingly from six of his plays and responded generously to questions from the floor about his work and his recent political campaign, the mood was transformed. The passion with which he described the process of writing, his experience of directing his plays ("a constant illumination"), his esteem for actors and his fascination with language was a reminder of the power, importance - and seriousness - of literature.
A few days earlier, a speech recently delivered by Pinter to the Confederation of Analytical Psychologists in London was distributed amongst us in the form of a pamphlet titled: "The NATO Action in Serbia", and he spoke about his opposition to the bombing of Kosovo, which he had campaigned against in print and in a television programme. The discussion, adroitly chaired by Christopher Bigsby from the University of East Anglia, zig-zagged between the consideration of Pinter's plays and his views on the war, but in many ways the two are indivisible. Whether explicitly labelled "political" or not, his work has always been concerned with power relations, and definition of private and public space and the marking out of territory.
He now acknowledges that The Birthday Party is a profoundly political work, although he denied this for many years. "Yes, I lied about it," he told us, smiling mischievously. "I didn't feel I should tell people about my plays." He criticised the use of language as an anaesthetic in the public rhetoric about the war. "We live in a very manipulated age, in which reality is abstracted from itself. Our world is dominated by cynicism and self-promotion, with the emphasis on profit."
He lamented the lack of involvement of other playwrights and of younger writers in the campaign against the war. "I simply can't understand why they did not speak out. It's very odd. This pervasive disengagement of writers from the world in which they live is a terrible situation. I suppose they fear that if they speak out and protest they will be mocked for dissenting from the status quo, for taking things too seriously.
"In this country there is a deeply embedded tradition of mockery of writers' involvement in politics. I used to find this hurtful but now I've had so much mud thrown at me that I've got used to it."
The relationship of writers, philosophers and playwrights to politics had cropped up in other sessions too, in more muted ways. The theatre director, Max Stafford Clark, who had presided over a very dynamic period at London's Royal Court (1979-93) asserted that "provocation is the first duty of theatre"; Malcolm Bradbury's novel in progress examines the contribution of Diderot to the reign of Catherine the Great of Russia, who summoned him to her court to give her a crash course in the central tenets of the Enlightened state. Salman Rushdie, of course, has first-hand knowledge of the collision between politics and literature and his remarks on the subject were characteristically lucid. "If you're a writer, there is no option but to risk everything - to increase the sum of what it's possible to think and feel. You have to go to the frontier and push. If you don't do that, you don't do anything."
If after 500 interviews in 15 countries about his latest novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, he sounded a little jaded, he had every reason. As always, the highly conceptual, Cartesion rigour of his discussion contrasted with the teeming, multitudinous sprawl of his novels. He talked about the rootlessness that is an important aspect of our times. It informs the contemporary metropolitan sensibility, which is his chosen subject matter, and he defended his right to include aspects of Indian culture and history in this broad canvas, without being required to represent India faithfully.
"The amount of instability and migration of the human race that we are seeing currently is new. It has become the defining image of our age and it is both a liberation and a tragic predicament. We now have deep connections with, and disconnections from, more than one place. The novel arose with the emergence of the nation state, but the multiple belonging and multiple unbelonging that we experience now has a consequence for how people write novels. It is decentering. There has been a critical backlash against this, but you can't have the rooted novel back.
"Writers have to respond to the world as they find it," Rushdie concluded and as we re-emerged, blinking, into the world outside the gates of Downing College, it seemed an inspiring injunction.