Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

It was a very funny conference. I knew [Christopher Hitchens] before that. He had always been a good angel to me. He once stole a phrase from me that came out of his mouth on television. I saw his eyes move sideways. I thought, It's alright, you can have it! The conference was light on women. Salman Rushdie showed up, they were doing their own thing. I didn't feel neglected!

Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.