What I wished more than anything was that the thing hadn't happened at all, and I thought that by not mentioning it I'd be doing everyone else a favor.

I've always had a great fondness for English detective fiction such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

Now when I look back to the Guildford of that time it seems far more exotic to me than Nagasaki.

She might be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone.

It is all very well, in these changing times, to adapt one's work to take in duties not traditionally within one's realm; but bantering is of another dimension altogether. For one thing, how would one know for sure that at any given moment a response of the bantering sort is truly what is expected? One need hardly dwell on the catastrophic possibility of uttering a bantering remark only to discover it wholly inappropriate.

I discovered that my imagination came alive when I moved away from the immediate world around me.

The Booker triumph of Graham Swift's moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago.