For better or worse, I've been involved in the description of political conflict.

I've never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

Survival...is an infinite capacity for suspicion.

My definition of a decent society is one that first of all takes care of its losers, and protects its weak. What I see in my country, progressively over these years, is that the rich have got richer, the poor have got poorer. The rich have become indifferent through a philosophy of greed, and the poorer have become hopeless because they're not properly cared for. That's actually something that is happening in many Western societies. Your own, I am told, is not free from it.

A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue.

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.