You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.

I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

I mean, I'm in the business of storytelling, not message making.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.

I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.