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.

I'm full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly - my head is racing with ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I'm left out.

We were in a great, seething moment in the 1970s. There was a new Labour government and everything seemed full of hope... But, as we got older and we saw how much women's behaviour contributed to what was wrong, we stopped being able to see ourselves purely as.

The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.

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

I like poking my nose into other people's lives.

People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.