I strike up conversations all the time and it is very interesting, finding out about things I know nothing about.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

It may seem unfashionable to say so, but historians should seize the imagination as well as the intellect. History is, in a sense, a story, a narrative of adventure and of vision, of character and of incident. It is also a portrait of the great general drama of the human spirit.

People are much more interesting than people realise.

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed.