31 AUGUST 1962, Page 7

Literature and Long Knives The conference of writers in Edinburgh,

about which Simon Raven writes on another page, seems to have contained a high proportion of those bizarre incidents that make such gatherings good value. The only example of this kind of thing that I have ever attended was a conference on 'The Writer and the Welfare State' in Copen- hagen, and was marked by a solid pragmatical front on the part of the four English participants against the neo-Marxist and existentialist meta- physics of their continental colleagues. This gave rise to some feeling which reached its height when a well-known English novelist declared that he had heard a great deal of nonsense talked, most of it in French. After that the night of the long knives in Brussels was simply not in it.