Who do readers expect to see when they pick up this book? Who has won the Most Troubled Romantic Lead at the BookWorld Awards seventy-seven times in a row? Me. All me.

Dead. Never been that before. Not even once.

I work very much on the principle that anything created by mankind has mischief and error hardwired into its inception.

You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something.

He spent his life immersed in books to the cost of everything else, even personal relationships. "Friends," he'd once said, "are probably great, but I have forty thousands friends of my own already, and each of them needs my attention.

People who read my books have an open mind when it comes to new, bizarre, interesting and exciting ideas.

I've got six months to sort out the hackers, get the Japanese knotweed under control and find an acceptable form of narcissus.