It's good to focus on the universal suffering that goes on in any war. Whatever the right and wrongs of the war, there is always universal suffering.

We have bodies coming home and coffins covered in flags, not just in the UK but world-wide.

Read a lot - poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised.

I spend months, sometimes years, doing what I call dreamtime, weaving it together inside my head. But when I actually feel that the egg of my story is ready to hatch, then I can write it in three months. Then I know the landscape and the people well and from the inside, but I don't necessarily know where the story is going to take us.

Like most writers, I sit in a room and scribble a story and you don't have a connection with the people who take your story, whether it be to the stage or to the screen.

There's a nobility in his eye, a regal serenity about him. Does he not personify all that men try to be and never can be?

We all know that the great memories of our childhood are the little triumphs - it doesn't really matter whether that was in writing, art, on the hockey field or on the football field. It's something that makes you feel - 'I can do this stuff'.