Everyone knows the type; and a recent visit to a bookshop cafe run by a certain London book review showed me that despite their seeming unfitness from a Darwinian standpoint, they are meekly thriving.

It was not always thus! Not so long ago there were Hemingways and Mailers who would NOT have stood for any waitress to make THEM wait for cake and tea.

For it is my submission that unless literature confronts us with the violence that is always a part of being human, it is mere flower-arranging.

Both Homer's epics are marked by an ambivalence about war. It is both glorious and immiserating. Achilles and Odysseus shirk battle at times, but both deliver an awesome ass-kicking at the denouement.

Meanwhile the literature of Northern Europe records the blood feuds that divided lawless societies into warring tribal factions.

And, lest an ethno-centric focus suggest that violence is merely a European literary concern, the course would include representative works from other traditions.

The literary history of violence also extends well beyond the epic genre. The works of the great Athenian dramatists seethe with a violence that is as incomprehensible as it is inevitable.

Titus Andronicus is the sickening apotheosis of the genre; still shocking to modern sensibilities. It surely informed the extreme degree of violence, often forgotten, in Shakespeare's great tragedies.

And Coriolanus is the ultimate - a natural force of destruction - with a mind boggling at its own negative capability.

But the extravagant slaughter of the Terror smashed this confidence. The Sadeian idea that humans by nature enjoy the sufferings of others became fixed in the modern outlook.

Even in the private domestic sphere, there is always a threat of violence.

A proclivity for violence does seem to be somehow connected with human freedom and creativity.