The Okavango Delta is an astonishing sight: the great Okavango River, rather than flow towards the sea, flows inland, into the sands of the Kalahari.

Edinburgh used to be a haughty city.

I am easily persuaded to continue to have fun.

I have always taken the view that one should never hold against a man anything he says after twelve o'clock at night or after a glass or two of anything.

But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?

This is another thing which I really like investigating in my novels: what is it that makes an intimate society, that makes a society in which moral concern for others will be possible? Part of that I think are manners and ritual. We tried to get rid of manners, we tried to abolish manners in the '60s. Manners were very, very old-fashioned and un-cool. And of course we didn't realise that manners are the building blocks of proper moral relationships between people.

Every small wrong, every minor act of cruelty, every act of petty bullying was symbolic of a greater wrong. And if we ignored these small things, then did it not blunt our outrage over the larger wrongs?