During the Cold War, we lived in coded times when it wasn't easy and there were shades of grey and ambiguity.

Let's die of it before we're too old.

It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.

To possess another language is to possess another soul.

Everyone who is not happy must be shot.

In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of The Wind in the Willows, which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.