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Tim Lang is a regular on British television. As professor of food policy at
Thames Valley University he is one of the first contacts journalists turn to
when a food crisis strikes. But Lang never watches TV at home—”I couldn’t
stand the way it trivialised life,” he says—and that leaves him time to
read outside his work. “Every night, as an absolute rule, I’ll read a novel.”
Over the past six months he has read five Penelope Fitzgerald books, including
her latest, Innocence (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), about the emotional
shortcomings of a group of English middle-class people in…