I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no-one else can make them.

It was a charming fantasy of romantics that the spies would stop spying, that political conflict would end and politicians would tell the truth. Unfortunately that has not been the case.

Once you've lived the inside-out world of espionage, you never shed it. It's a mentality, a double standard of existence.

A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre.

In the last 15 or 20 years, I've watched the British press simply go to hell. There seems to be no limit, no depths to which the tabloids won't sink. I don't know who these people are but they're little pigs.

The things that are done in the name of the shareholder are, to me, as terrifying as the things that are done - dare I say it - in the name of God.