The first thing Amit Chaudhuri confessed to me when I arrived to interview him, almost before I was within earshot, was his low tolerance for the bucolic: “Can we go somewhere less bucolic for lunch?” As can be reasonably expected of someone who studied in Oxford and Cambridge, and teaches a few months a year at Norwich, Amit Chaudhuri is not fond of bucolic places; neither is he prone to romanticising cities that carry the reek of sewage and sweat, and sprout ugly buildings climbing ov