‘The end of the novel’: so ran a headline in the Times recently. Well, every few years one pundit or another predicts the death of the novel. They have done so throughout my lifetime and by now many of them may well be deceased themselves. But this article cogently pointed out the dangers of the new culture wars whereby writers are castigated for writing about ethnicities or events outside their own ‘lived experience’. Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt was probably the most notorious example but even John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas attracted criticism. Could it be that my next murder mystery will have a killer, a victim, a list of suspects and even an amateur detective who are all middle-aged white Jewish London-based men? That seems to be the way we’re heading.

In fact, my last murder story contained a character who was Native American. I deliberately added him to provoke some sort of discussion about this very subject. As a result, my American and Canadian publishers sent the book for a sensitivity read; the first time this has happened to me. I was quite nervous but in the end I got off lightly, although I was asked to make a few cuts. For example, I had described my character as having a face ‘that could have been carved out of wood’. This was red-pencilled. Can you guess why?

I have been asked to become an ambassador for an organisation called Great School Libraries which, as its name suggests, is campaigning for more libraries in schools. This should be a blindingly obvious proposition, a bit like asking for schools to have teachers or, perhaps, fresh air in the classrooms. But it turns out that there is no statutory duty to provide school libraries in England, Scotland or Wales. A quarter of schools in Wales have no library at all. Two-thirds of schools in Scotland have no library budgets. Elsewhere, budgets are frozen or falling. Cressida Cowell, the last children’s laureate, puts her finger on it, describing inequality in school library access as ‘a social mobility timebomb’.

At the start of the year, the Prime Minister was attacked – I think unfairly – for his aspiration to have all students study maths to the age of 18. He wants them, he said, to be ‘better equipped for the jobs of the future’, and why argue with that? But literacy should hold its own against maths and science. Universities are being encouraged to dismantle their arts and humanities departments in favour of courses that will bring economic benefit. Even ignoring the false syllogism in this – arts and culture contribute about £10 billion a year to the UK economy – it misses the whole point, which is the joy, knowledge and understanding of the world that reading brings. And if children don’t learn this at school, where on earth will they?

I’m not just talking about fiction. We live in an age where all information is available in about 15 seconds and with a device you hold in your hand and I wonder if we haven’t allowed ourselves to drift into a false understanding of the pursuit of knowledge. I still use a thesaurus because I love words and I enjoy scanning, scrutinising, considering, perusing alternatives. Working on my last Bond novel set in 1960s Moscow, I read entire books to pluck out the smallest details. I wrote one paragraph about the kulaks (agricultural workers) under Stalin, for example. I found what I needed in The Whisperers by Orlando Figes and devoured all 750 brilliant pages. For me, the journey to knowledge is as valuable as knowledge itself.

And no. The wooden face had nothing to do with totem poles. It seems I had inadvertently referenced ‘cigar store Indians’, figures that stood outside tobacconists years ago and are now considered degrading. When the same character (acting as a doctor in a play) attacked someone with a scalpel, I also ran into trouble and it was suggested that I replace it with ‘surgical instrument’. Scalpel, of course, comes from the Latin word scalpellus (from scalpere, to cut) and has nothing to do with scalping, which derives from the Middle English word scalpe, meaning the top of the head. But such niceties were irrelevant to my quite sensitive sensitivity reader. I made the changes, but I will confess they hurt. It just feels wrong to be told what to write by an outside party, no matter how well-meaning. Writers, like primary school libraries, are engaged in a war of attrition. All of us, in different ways, are facing death by a thousand cuts.