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

At this point in time the war [ WWII] is close enough to still feel hotly personal to a writer, yet far enough away so that jingoism and heroics are no longer required.

The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don't always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn't have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I'm interested in the exceptions.

My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.

And thus love makes fools of us all.

I was astonished to find that the positions my grandfather had defended were now overgrown and entangled with trees and thorns. I suppose I had developed a sense of reverence for the locations he described in his memoirs and letters - the forts and the high emplacements. I had expected them to have been preserved in some way.

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.