David Lodge, from a 1985 interview (quoted by Elaine Showalter in Faculty Towers):

Small World is a novel “about desire, and not just sexual desire but also the desire to succeed; I conceived it as an academic comedy of manners which would have

a romance plot underneath it, and in some ways the two elements are incompatible. Satire is the antithesis of romance, because romance is ultimately about the

achievement of desire; satire is saying that you won’t get what you desire, you don’t deserve it.”