British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism.

It doesn't matter whether characters are real people or not; if they're not vivid on the page, then the reader doesn't care about them that much, and, if the reader doesn't care about them that much, then they don't care what happens to them.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

Both John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela use the same three-word phrase which in my mind says it all, which is ‘Freedom is indivisible. You can’t slice it up, otherwise it ceases to be freedom. You can dislike Charlie Hebdo … but the fact that you dislike them has nothing to do with their right to speak.

When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.

There are things you break that can't be put back together again. And Kashmir may be one of them.

The lessons one learns at school are not always the ones the school thinks it's teaching.