With any period piece I think the thing to do is forget that it's not contemporary when you're writing and to have the characters feel as much as possible like characters that you would know.

If you've read something brilliant, it's good. It's good to look out the window and see what's going on in the world.

It's great that the story [Allied] is set in the '40s because the '40s feel to it is completely appropriate.

The story of James Delaney is also someone who very deliberately presents himself as an individual and plays nations against each other, plays the East India against the Crown, all of those sort of overwhelming concepts that ran the world at the time.

The story [of Allied] stayed with me, like a stray dog outside the office, waiting.

When I was probably about 10 or 11, and I found it was simply something I could do. When you're at school and you do something and you get praised for it, you think, "Oh, right, well I'll do that." From then on, I always thought I'd be a writer. I thought novels at first, and then I sort of naturally drifted into TV.

I think the East India Company represents what we would think of as a very modern approach to the world where everything was counted, every penny was counted.