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.

But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state.

Multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations view the exploitation of the world's sick and dying as a sacred duty to their shareholders.

Love means having something to betray.

For all the flailing and huffing and puffing, there is a kind of fatality about the process of war-making and the excuses we find for it, the consolation of belligerence in politics.

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.

I had two experiences of criminality: one was my conman father, the other was teaching at Eton