I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.

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.

Sometimes we don't notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.

Our own personal brand of courage - in relationships, in conflict, in our principles ­ - is as unique as our fingerprints.

In a few breaths' time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them the same way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty.

My whole life is my work.

I write in the novel's afterword that our recent wars "finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy".