People are offering competing visions of what happened in the past. And the justice system is willing to accept either of those competing visions and to impose consequences as a result. When you think of it that way, it's a little bit startling, because we want to believe that there is one truth and, therefore, one justice, whereas, if you have practiced law as long as I have, you realize that there is actually a range of acceptable outcomes.

On the streets, unrequited love and death go together almost as often as in Shakespeare.

Poison Pill is a great reading. The novel ranges from Russian oligarchs to the American worlds of drug research and the equity markets, all of it in a mode of high suspense.

I tend to write in the mornings.

After a week, it's better. I miss her. I mourn her. But some peace has returned. She had been so unattainable - so young, so much a citizen of a different era - that it is hard to feel fully deprived.

The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots.

That led me to say that when push comes to shove, I'm against capital punishment.