Telepathy terminable and interminable

Once upon a time, in a café close to Oxford Street in central London, Nicholas Royle suggested to me that we are all, always, just rewriting our first book. Or, at least, he thought perhaps that he was. As is well-known by all of us who have followed Royle’s long and no doubt unfinished writing career, his first book was Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind, published in 1990. Was Royle’s caffeinated confession simply an off-hand remark, one that I have unearthed like a random stone thrown up by a ray casually ruffling the sandy shallows? Yet, to paraphrase Freud in the 1937 essay from which my title riffs, perhaps here be dragons. Or maybe just a Brontëan brontosaurus. Has Royle’s been a writing life-time of telepathy? This paper wants to telescopically assert mostly so. [...]