One of the great sadnesses of my life, as I take stock at middle age, is the sense that the adventure largely ended by the time I was twenty-five.

I was very conscious of race as I was writing. I was lucky to have spent real time in Portuguese Africa, but I am white and my main characters are white, outsiders at sea in the "Dark Continent."

It is simply much easier to infuse life, feeling, and higher truth into a novel than a non-fiction work, to find the license to write truth without being wedded to fact.

I am not trying to be young again. But I do feel the need to capture that energy in story form before it slips from my mind, to recount those adventures if not relive them.

Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right.

Thatcher had broken the miners' union, all but crushed the Labour Party, dramatically cut back the welfare state, even flirted with a poll tax. In the circles I ran in, Reagan was mocked as a childish dolt. Thatcher was despised.

For all the worship that Ronald Reagan elicits in conservative circles in the United States, I would venture that Thatcher did far more to reshape British society than Reagan did here.