To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious as dropping into the water off the concrete edge of the Fitzroy Baths.

Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.

Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.

It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.

But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.

To slide into the domed reading room at ten each morning, specially in summer, off the hot street outside, was a sensation as delicious as dropping into the water off the concrete edge of the Fitzroy Baths.

That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.