It is, as he might put it, "bloody brilliant". And it's also, as he might put it, "well weird". He has a way of settling gently into a rather classical flow of writing, and then suddenly whacking you across the side of the head with an odd, appropriate and thoroughly modern metaphor. He's also turned his near-academic inability to keep his own voice out of the text into an advantage; in "Revenge", there's a faint undertow of snark no matter what's going on in the narrative that ties together the different viewpoints very well. (Just as a heads-up for your queer history studies, the gay character is one of the people that the modern-day Comte gets his revenge on, and it's not his homosexuality that's his downfall, it's the fact that he's a public figure who repeatedly and vehemently lies about it. Food for thought.) It is precisely the sort of writing you would expect from someone who managed to emerge from Queen's College, Cambridge, with both a 2:1 in English lit, and an intact sense of humor.

If you'd like to hear his opinion on basically everything, interspersed with wise-ass comments and useless trivia, I recommend going onto YouTube and digging up some QI, which is the comedy quiz show he hosts. I have never seen a human being nance with such dignity before. He calls people 'darling' when they're wrong and occasionally seems to forget he's hosting something on TV, when someone tells him something he doesn't already know, or he's gotten into explaining something random to a panelist.

I'm informed he has recently published an autobiography. If his fiction is a good indicator, I would lay good odds that he writes his non-fiction exactly how he speaks.