And thus love makes fools of us all.

I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.

If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.

I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.

We're often told that we live in a globalized world, and we talk about it all the time, but people don't stop to think about what it means.

My maternal grandmother was in London during the Blitz. Indeed, the man she was dating before she met my grandfather was killed beside her in a cinema, in 1941, when a bomb came through the roof - a tragedy in which she herself was badly wounded.

When I reached Fort Binjemma, for example, where my grandfather was stationed for a while, the whole Victorian fort was decaying. Barbed wire surrounded it, spray paint on the ancient walls claimed it as private property, and the moat where my grandfather and his men had grown crops - in desperation as the siege's hunger bit - was completely overgrown with bushes and trees.