I think biography can be more personal than fiction, and certainly can be more expressive.

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

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

The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.

There is a word in Old English which belongs wholly to that civilization - "dustsceawung," meaning contemplation of dust. It is a true image of the Anglo-Saxon mind, or at least an echo of that consciousness which considered transcience and loss to be part of the human estate; it was a world in which life was uncertain and the principal diety was fate or destiny or "wyrd."

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.

To be a writer was always my greatest aim. I remember writing a play about Guy Fawkes when I was 10. I suppose it's significant, at least to me, that my first work should be about a historical figure.