Nigel Barley

Compelled to quit his business degree, Nigel consulted his university handbook. ‘It was in alphabetical order. I began at the front, and so became an anthropologist; if I had started at the back, I’d be a zoologist.’ His driving impulse, he feels, is not so different from the writer’s: ‘to get inside the head of someone different’. In that vein, his book review in the October 2024 issue marvels at ‘the ubiquity of the creative urge’