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

What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life's miseries?

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 was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

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

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.