There is a theory, that I rather subscribe to. The frame story implies that if he doesn't change, she will kill him. It's all very complex and subtle. The story is about a woman who persuades a man in power to a different temper and attitude, and so it is about women's wiles, what women will get up to. She has a plan, she has a scheme.

Our traditional stories are based on an aristocratic model without a middle class, whereas The Arabian Nights reflect people living in cities, traders, merchants, travelers, with a wide range of personalities.

When I was young, I did actually model and was much photographed by famous photographers. But I was always a bookworm.

The model of the educational Kalila Wa-Dimna. These are books of instruction to rulers and humans. The stories unfold a range of human psychology, a vast range of human psychology. The Sultan is being moved from his narrow and bigoted position into a wider, more subtle, more nuanced understanding of human experiences.

The more one knows fairy tales the less fantastical they appear; they can be vehicles of the grimmest realism, expressing hope against all the odds with gritted teeth.

One of the things I try to do is try to make repetitions, rhymes, and mirrorings across the subject matter of my own books so that the chapter titles and the epigraphs and pictures all kind of form a tapestry. In this book, I retell fifteen of the stories. You have the critical frame, and then you have these rosettes like the motif in a carpet.

Romance, in its earliest surviving form, was called ‘erotika pathemata’ by the Greeks - tales of erotic suffering.