When I was a child I wanted to be Pope. My greatest disappointment is missing out on that. I also wanted to be a tap dancer but I never fulfilled that ambition either.

And the smell of the library was always the same - the musty odour of old clothes mixed with the keener scent of unwashed bodies, creating what the chief librarian had once described as 'the steam of the social soup.'

I never read in bed, only in my study.

Yet, like the sea and the gallows, London refuses nobody.

Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.

I detest self-regard. If my work has taught me anything, it is that self-aggrandisement is completely unhistorical.

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.