A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.

You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.

My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.

To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.