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

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

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.

I am still making order out of chaos by reinvention.

If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.

Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.

And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day. Because they have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.