Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.

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