Leaving aside the host of Blairite Ministers rebelling against their Old Labour pedigree (Hilary Benn, Peter Mandelson and David Miliband spring to mind), the Prime Minister follows Harold’s axiom slightly differently. An admirer of Margaret Thatcher and the free-market, he nevertheless despises what he calls the ‘forces of conservatism’. The annihilation of the Conservative party is an unwavering and in some respects irrational ambition of Tony Blair. And his father? A lifelong Tory: QED, Harold Bloom…

There may be people who do not see the poetry in politics and the politics in poetry, but Professor Terry Eagleton, the pre-eminent socialist critic of his generation, is surely not one of them. Yet Tony Blair’s anti-Conservative conservatism is not, as Terry sees it, his primary contradiction. ‘Another contradiction is this: there is Blair the moderniser, Blair the pragmatist, and there’s I think there’s a much more dangerous Blair which is the public school Christian moralist, the shiny-eyed zealot, which I think is a side which plays to George Bush.’

Does this not feed into the same theory of Blair the pathological paradox? How many socialists are so contemptuous of ideology? How many such socialists simultaneously preach the universal values of liberal democracy? Is this what Tony means when he talks of ‘triangulation’?

Terry’s response is at first diplomatic. He claims that he would not criticise Tony for not sounding like a socialist because ‘he never claimed to be one’. It is the fact that the PM’s not even a social democrat that really riles him. Warming to the theme, the author declares, ‘Tony Blair is not interested in equality, he’s not interested in redistribution, he’s not interested in the Labour movement. I think he’s profoundly uninterested in the Labour party. He regards himself as post-ideological and I think nothing is more ideological than that.’

Perhaps the whole notion of ideology is considered a little last century to the leftist establishment these days. If this is the case, Terry is to be admired for holding firm to his original Marxist convictions. After Theory, the recently published follow up to his seminal Literary Theory, is a sustained denunciation of those who have, as he sees it, given up on the big political and metaphysical issues. The problem for Terry is that, along with the pragmatic Blairites, even the radical Left has embraced the concept of ‘post-ideology’. Naomi Klein writes, ‘When critics say that (anti-globalisation) protesters lack vision, they are really objecting to a lack of an overarching revolutionary philosophy – like Marxism, democratic socialism, deep ecology or social anarchy. That is absolutely true, and for this we should be extraordinarily thankful’.

It turns out that No Logo is up there with New Labour when it comes to betraying the old socialist narrative. The anti-globalisation movement is nothing more than what Martin Wolf calls ‘the grin on the Cheshire cat of revolutionary socialism. It is what is left when the moralism and the passion remain but when the intellect and organisation have gone’.

Terry dismisses this analysis as ‘churlish’. Whilst he admits that the movement ‘has its organisational defects and it doesn’t have a tight ideology’, he believes ‘there are different metaphors that dominate the Left at different times. Perhaps it used to be things like production, now I think the idea of say the environment has been a kind of metaphor – a figure – around which a whole number of different issues can cluster. The language changes from time to time’.

‘Let’s face it’, he remarks apropos of the Mark Wolf comment, ‘the intellect and the organisation on the Left didn’t get it all that far’. Perhaps he is just being self-deprecating. There is a sense though, of a man who, having identified the centre of an argument, will always position himself at its margins. It is an almost juvenile abdication of responsibility. For who, if not he, should be defending the intellectual heritage of the Left?

It seems inconsistent coming from a man who once remarked that the merit of post-structuralism ‘is that it allows you to drive a coach and horses through everybody else’s beliefs while not saddling you with the inconvenience of having to adopt any yourself’. But then, as he remarked during our discussion of our Prime Minister, ‘most people are contradictory in various ways’.

After Theory by Professor Terry Eagleton is published by Allen Lane.

Whilst the true thesis of The West and the Rest is no more diplomatic than its title implies, it is a shade subtler. Roger’s absolute faith in the superiority of liberal democracy is no justification for its exportation to the ‘Rest’. In essence, he comes down against the globalisation phenomenon; on the grounds that the projection of the values of tolerance and plurality to parts of the world that respond only to sacred and non-negotiable axioms is an act of aggression, and one which has directly led to an insurgence of terrorist activity against the West.

The anti-globalisation movement is not all No Logo. Indeed, Ms Klein may well balk at Roger’s argument that, to guarantee its own security, the West must cease trying to shine the light of civilisation around the globe, shore up its borders, break up multilateral institutions and revert to the nation state. Most of all, it must dismantle the perniciously relativist practice of ‘multiculturalism’ – a toxic product of postmodernism that dissolves the ties that bind society together and provide communities with what all humans quest after: a sense of membership. Indeed, between the fraternity of Islamism and the fragmentation of Western culture, Roger’s argument betrays a perverse admiration for the former.

This is the paradox, or downright contradiction, of Roger’s thesis; the flipside of which is his contention that the superiority of Western culture derives from its ‘disinterested pursuit of truth’ and its ‘willingness to embrace secular loyalties that deprive the world of absolutes’. Yet at the same time relativism – the logical consequence of rejecting the absolute – is severely criticised for disenfranchising its adherents of their own culture. Roger criticises multiculturalism, yet the monoculturalism of Islamic society is, according to The West and the Rest, precisely what makes it so inferior to its Western counterpart.

‘If I were to mean that then of course the whole thing is unstable’, is Roger’s response. This is an idea that he emphatically rejects, preferring to believe that the Western decision to abandon the principle of the absolute is an absolutely good principle.

So what does this mean in the context of contemporary geopolitics? The West and the Rest was written ‘post-9/11’ but we spoke in March 2003, whilst bombs were falling over Baghdad. The American neo-conservative project to democratise the Middle East is one which he believes is ‘an admirable thing to want to do, in the sense that the motives are entirely good ones’. Roger is deeply sceptical of its likely efficacy, however, just as he is on the question of whether Turkey can ever be truly ‘Westernised’, since ‘the emergence of secular democracy in Europe is a construct of the Christian religion, there’s no doubt about that. The Christian religion actually in conjunction with Roman law. These are the two great in-puts into secular democracy. Whether the kind of secular jurisdiction that we enjoy can be propagated in the Middle-East is one of the great questions of our time.’

Despite his doubts, faced with the ‘existential choice’ of what to do about rogue states and the terrorist threat, Roger believes Tony Blair was right to side with the Americans, judging it the first time the Prime Minister has ‘acted like a statesman rather than a spin doctor’. By contrast, he remains profoundly suspicious of the United Nations, which, as an institution, ‘actually makes things worse’, by giving legitimacy to tyrants and allowing them to dress their envoys up as the voices of the people.

Roger Scruton’s attacks on multilateralism would be more powerful if he addressed some of the inconsistency of his own logic (why does he support the war in Iraq if he does not believe it can lead to secular democracy?), as well as the impossibility of his proposed remedy – the notion that the globalisation process might somehow be abandoned seems unlikely. Perhaps the answer is to accept, and not to rail against, the fact that ‘the whole thing is unstable’, and to come up with some kind of a strategy in the face of that frightening reality.

It is true though, I suggest, that there is a certain Gallic ‘allure’ to both Intimacy and The Body, his concept novella of a 65 year-old writer transplanted into the body of a 25 year-old man. Hanif says he doesn’t know why, that he doesn’t even speak the language. He ventures that it might be his enduring interest in philosophy that makes him appear a little continental (although he quickly qualifies this with a very Anglo-Saxon ‘but I’m not a philosopher’). There may be a certain truth in this observation, although I am personally inclined to think it is more his willingness to mix philosophy with sex that makes him appear so exotic to English readers, who are accustomed to their characters thinking and copulating, just not in the same novel.

Hanif has mentioned his interest in philosophers and theorists such as Sartre, Camus and Lacan, and how the work of the latter, the elusive post-structuralist psychoanalyst, has influenced his belief that identity and the self are totally fluid concepts – that they are determined by our relationships with others. If acquiring a new body might change the way others perceive and interact with you, in other words, it will change your self in some ‘essential’ way.

I ask him if he doesn’t believe in the concept of a stable self, and he replies ‘I don’t know anyone who does believe in that these days’. For a ‘multiculturalist’ writer – and we would return to what such a title might mean later in the conversation – this assertion strikes me as insouciantly Western. By ‘Western’, I do not mean the prevailing opinion of the ordinary men and women who live in that hemisphere, but of what Terry Eagleton defines as the ‘historically peculiar situation of a specific wing of the Western left intelligentsia’.

I put it to him that many people believe profoundly in the concept of a stable self, not least of whom are those with religious faith: in the Christian tradition, for example, not only is there such a thing as the ‘soul’, but man’s ‘dignity’ itself derives from the knowledge that he is created in the image of God. I mention that Francis Fukuyama raises this point in his book Our Posthuman Future. Hanif expresses interest in this discussion at the same time as terminating it, when he argues that the The Body is not as postmodern as I am implying (although its subject seems remarkably prescient, in the context of Clonaid’s recently professed ambition to transplant the ‘mind’ of a newly deceased corpse into a cloned, younger model of the same body).

As much as anything, he argues that The Body was influenced by the ‘British fantastic tradition’ of novels such as Frankenstein, as well as Oscar Wilde’s A Portrait of Dorian Gray, which also examines the relationship between sexuality and the ageing body in a secular context. Intriguingly, he adds that many of the ideas behind The Body came to him as a result of working on a script of Dorian Gray which never came to fruition.

Perhaps a glutton for punishment, I drag the conversation back to the continental theory that strikes me as being such a heavy influence on The Body.

The author offers guarded agreement that The Body fits into a Lacanian conception of human beings being driven by urges that can never be fully satiated: the hedonism of the old man once again in a youthful body offers him, as he puts it, no ‘ultimate satisfaction’.

Zadie Smith’s critics seem to fall into two stubbornly delineated camps: There are the sycophants, who fall at her feet and praise her to the skies, declaring her to be not only the next Rushdie, Dickens, Amis and McEwan all rolled into one (the sum being greater than its constituent parts); and there are the cynics, who claim that had Zadie Smith not existed she would have been invented by the media anyway, by virtue of her box-ticking abilities (young, black, Cambridge, beautiful). Those same cynics say that the multi-million selling, multi-award winning debut novel White Teeth – converted to the small screen after one of Channel 4’s largest ever advertising campaigns – was over-hyped, over-indulgent and often narratively unconvincing.

With the battle lines already long drawn, Penguin is set to unleash hell again by, well, releasing The Autograph Man, her follow-up novel. A shorter, tighter, more modest proposal (Zadie herself has admitted that White Teeth’s principal flaw was its breathtaking ambition), initially we find ourselves once again in a universe where all human life has upped and moved to North London. Despite its less ‘epic’ ambitions, Zadie’s imagination is still at full throttle, careering first around suburban London and then urban New York on a quixotic quest for a rare autograph, by former silver screen Goddess Kitty Alexander. The protagonist is the wayward but endearing Alex-Li Tandem, whose obsession with celebrity is as eccentric as the accidents that befall him and the company he keeps.

Despite owing a certain intellectual debt to Roland Barthes’ work on ‘semiotics’ (the science of signs), particularly in the Giant Haystacks versus Big Daddy wrestling sequence with which The Autograph Man opens; it does not really qualify as a rigorous or arid novel of ideas. But then Zadie Smith never tries to be as ‘literary’ as some want her to be. She is happy to quote Walter Benjamin and Madonna in equal measure, and one senses that, for her, the significance of signs to modernity is a launching pad for a diverting story, rather than a topic for profound and original dissection.

Instead, the real appeal of Zadie’s work – which goes beyond the marketing and the hype – is not just the ceaselessly inventive prose or the easy humour with which she writes. It is perhaps because we, the great British public, like it that she is brave enough to write a novel populated by Chinese Jews, black Jews, Italian-Russians (or any other ethnic combination under the sun) who are not at all ‘normal’ but that’s OK, she reassures us, thank God they’re not. They are laughable and hopeless and wrong sometimes but her characters always exhale a revitalising humanity.

Jonathan Safran Foers, another widely feted young novelist, declares in his novel Everything is Illuminated, ‘humour is the only truthful way to tell a sad story’. The Autograph Man has darker moments than its predecessor, but they are always offset by a belief in the spirit of survival, a spirit best evoked by that very English attribute of wry self-deprecation.