Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.

Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.

In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.

If there is one eternal truth of politics, it is that there are always a dozen good reasons for doing nothing.

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.

I've always had difficulties with female characters.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.