Beneath Every History, Another History.

You Can Be Merry With The King, You Can Share A Joke With Him. But As Thomas More Used To Say, It's Like Sporting With A Tamed Lion. You Tousle Its Mane And Pull Its Ears, But All The Time You're Thinking, Those Claws, Those Claws, Those Claws.

We Have A Number Of Very Powerful Women In The World Now - Mrs. [angela] Merkel, Who The Germans Call Mutti. What Did We Call Mrs. [margaret] Thatcher? When She Was Minister Of Education, She Stopped The Children's Free School Milk. This May Sound Quaint, But After The War We Were Such A Malnourished Nation That Part Of The Founding Of The Welfare State Were Public Health Initiatives. Every Little Schoolchild Got Milk. Mrs. Thatcher Stopped It. They Called Her "maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher."

I'm A Very Organised And Rational And Linear Thinker And You Have To Stop All That To Write A Novel.

For Myself, The Only Way I Know How To Make A Book Is To Construct It Like A Collage: A Bit Of Dialogue Here, A Scrap Of Narrative, An Isolated Description Of A Common Object, An Elaborate Running Metaphor Which Threads Between The Sequences And Holds Different Narrative Lines Together.

When I Began To Read As An Adult, My First Big Enthusiasm Was Evelyn Waugh. I Read Almost Exclusively Novelists Of A Generation Back. I Did The Russians, Then I Started Getting More Up To Date.