What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them!

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.

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

Politics is never a victory, it's just the remorseless grinding forward of events.

Does a name stick because it suits a man or does the man, unconsciously, evolve into his name?

My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected.

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