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.

In London, I've always lived within 10 miles of where I was born. You see, there is something called a spirit of place, and my place happens to be London, at least once a fortnight.

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

Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.

I had to paraphrase the paraphrase.

Thomas More's birth was noted by his father upon a blank page at the back of a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'Historia Regum Britanniae'; for a lawyer John More was remarkably inexact in his references to that natal year, and the date has been moved from 1477 to 1478 and back again.

To watch King Lear is to approach the recognition that there is indeed no meaning in life, and that there are limits to human understanding.