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As we suspected, there's nothing quite like a List to get people furious. I can't say that our precise intention when we concocted our selection of the 50 best British postwar writers was to enrage you, but we are aware that it's much more enjoyable to be furious than pleased in these contexts. Of course we are delighted with the e-mails and online comments that say jolly well done! - yet they are hardly as entertaining as those that berate us for leaving off (say) Douglas Adams or are (for example) horrified that we put Ian McEwan so low... or that he's on the list at all. Different strokes for different folks, eh?

The great thing about this kind of fury is that it stirs up a stew of names who can then be considered by allcomers; and as to the comment suggesting a Top 50 compiled by the readers, I say: go for it. Lovers of Graham Greene were disappointed: we love him too, but we decided that he started writing too early (foolish fellow) to fit our criteria. The same for John Betjeman. Stoppard and Pinter? Playwrights. But some of you wondered (fair enough) if any list compiled in the land of Shakespeare should exclude writers for the stage, as we chose to do. The arguments, no doubt, will continue.

Ted Hughes was included on our list; I confess that I was startled when Jeanette Winterson reminded me, when she suggested the subject of her column, that it had been precisely a decade since The Times revealed the existence of his last book, Birthday Letters. Startled and perhaps a little abashed - I was somewhat involved in that revelation (disclosure: I wrote a book about Birthday Letters in the end; it's called Ariel's Gift), and all I can say is that time flies when you're having fun. Hughes's Selected Letters, published by Faber, was the top critics' choice in last year's Christmas round-ups, according to an independent survey by Booktrust, so it seems to have been the season for poets, with Larkin top of our list.

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