By chance, I was living in New York when John McPhee published his New Yorker essay ‘Brigade de Cuisine’. It was 19 February 1979. It caused quite a stir. McPhee described in lip-smacking detail a restaurant which was situated somewhere upstate. He inflamed the reader’s imagination by detailing how delicious the food was without revealing the restaurant’s name or location. McPhee knew what he was up to. He succeeded in animating the most intense aspirational fantasy of middle-class Manhattan. There existed an ideal dinner place of which no one knew. It was, he said, run by a mysterious chef called Otto whose technique was so fast it ‘became a collage of itself’. At one point, I believe, three investigative reporters from the New York Times were assigned to try to identify it. My principal feeling was regret that if McPhee had described an equally perfect unnamed theatre, nobody would have been interested.

The pandemonium unleashed by McPhee came back last week because I was a guest on the River Café podcast. Ruthie Rogers invited me to start by cooking in the Café’s open kitchen. I declined. Would you grill squid in public? Truly, the technical arts have replaced the moral arts in order of attention. These days, nobody buys a newspaper to read the theatre critic. They buy it to read Jay Rayner or Marina O’Loughlin. Henry Winter, the football writer, is said to be worth 50,000 copies. Mind you, theatre has always been distrusted by journalists, because it claims to be more attuned to human behaviour than journalism is. And also – a fatal drawback – it’s about possibility. It’s about how we might live. In clumsy hands, theatre even strays into suggesting how we ought to live. It’s implicitly about right and wrong. No wonder it attracts such resentment.

Maybe it’s obvious, but, in spite of an expensive education, I’ve only just realised that many of Shakespeare’s best plays are about madness. Othello is mad with jealousy, Hamlet mad with grief, Lear mad with power. This point is brought home by Ralph Fiennes’s Macbeth, given in a warehouse next to Decathlon in Canada Water. Usually Macbeth’s a dull, bluff warrior fresh off the battlefield, moving on to regicide and then regretting it. Not in this version. Fiennes’s anguished Macbeth is Hamlet’s cousin, knowing long before he lifts the dagger the terrible price he’s going to pay. The American scholar Harold Bloom was ridiculed for calling Shakespeare ‘the inventor of the human’. But what he meant was that Shakespeare invented the self-aware. Unlike their mythic predecessors, his heroes know how disastrous their course is, and yet, insanely, they still go ahead. Nobody blunders into anything. Their conscience cannot stop them. Ring any bells? Gaza? Israel? There’s a reason Shakespeare feels so contemporary.

I keep reading that politics is showbiz for ugly people. If so, literary festivals are socialising for people who don’t get out much. If the gig goes well, you instantly get offered others. It’s easier than writing. After one session in Jaipur a few years ago, when I had talked about British theatre to 2,000 people who were unlikely ever to see it, I came offstage to be greeted by bookers from Mumbai, Shanghai and Bangladesh. I jumped at Bangladesh because it might be my only chance to go. As we drove to our Dhaka sessions, it seemed incongruous for a bus full of poets and novelists to have armed police outriders with machine guns. You don’t get that at Hay. But it turned out that, as westerners, our frail crew of unacknowledged legislators were all targets on an Isis website.

Last month, there was a beautiful festival in Colombo, conveniently timed for the heart of the English winter. In an interesting talk, Louis de Bernières addressed how much less people liked the film of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin than the book. The problem, he said, was that the judgment on films was instant, whereas books were permitted to take their time. I’m not sure he’s right. A film’s reputation takes forever to firm up. Withnail and I and Peeping Tom were hardly acclaimed as instant classics. Nobody thought Vertigo would one day be celebrated as the best film ever made. What’s more, our own views change. When I first saw Blow-Up at the London Pavilion, it seemed shallow and pretentious. Now with hindsight Antonioni is seen to nail the ambivalence of the 1960s perfectly. I can do without the mime’s imaginary tennis at the end, which is as silly as Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau going at it like knives, fully dressed, in the golf bunker at the 13th hole in La Notte. Antonioni never could end a movie. But still.