For me, as I suspect for most people, there comes a point where you have enough. If you've got £20 million, why keep going until you've got £100 million or £1,000 million? Does anyone need another vast yacht or private jet or a house full of gold?

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

What is leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretense that the decision was based on reason

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

History is too important to be left to the historians.

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

It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.