I enjoyed reading and learning at school, and at university I enjoyed extending my reading and learning. Once I left Cambridge, I went to Yale as a fellow. I spent two years there. After that, George Gale made me literary editor of 'The Spectator.

I don't know if I have a voice of my own. I don't see me being an important person with something to say. I haven't. I've got nothing to say. My opinion is of no consequence or value.

Freud was just a novelist.

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.

Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.

The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.

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