The natural impulse of men is to follow and whoever has the strongest sense of purpose will always dominate.

Their souls were contagious. ... Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.

By dawn he had surrendered, gratefully, to the old inertia, the product of always seeing both sides of every question.

Tape is the archiving champ and has been for decades. Reliable, less expensive than disks and available in large-scale robotic systems that store petabytes.

In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair.

One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary.

I was a political journalist; I came to writing novels through an interest in politics and power.