FAQs

Q: Why do you write?
A: Damned if I know.
Q: What are you reading now?
A: Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.
Q: Do you have a favourite book?
A: From around the age of ten it would have been Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Brigadier Gerard, a gift from my mother who wanted to wean me off comics. She regretted it because it was a very large book without pictures and I insisted on imparting every last detail of Napoleonic derring-do to all members of the household over the summer holidays. To escape their misery they seriously considered emigrating, a drastic step only averted by returning my copies of The Beano, Eagle and Boys Own Magazine. The all-time favourite for many years was a battered and travel-stained volume edited by Irwin B. Blacker and published by Cassell in 1956 entitled Behind the Lines: Twenty-Eight Stories of Irregular Warfare. My father sent it me and it’s packed with courage and daring. Belated maturity has brought a gradual change of perception, however, and I think I would choose Illuminating Silence by Master Sheng Yen (Watkins Publishing, 2002, ISBN 1 84293 031 1)
Q: When did you start to write?
A: I told stories to my friends while compelled to watch cricket. I also wrote and produced awful one-act plays as a boarder at prep school. I dragooned my class mates into performing in these toe-curling events.
Q: Which authors have had the biggest impact on you?
A: I’ll start with G.A. Henty, then Conan Doyle, Erskine Childers, John Buchan, Nicholas Monsarrat, Neville Shute, Somerset Maugham, C.S. Forrester, C.P. Snow, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Greene, G.K. Chesterton, Herbert Marcuse, Saul Bellow, George Orwell, Herman Hesse, Krishnamurti, Alan Sillitoe, Albert Camus, John Braine, Brian Moore, Evelyn Waugh, J.G. Farrell, John Fowles, William Golding, Doris Lessing, Edmund Wilson, Marguerite Yourcenar, Hilary Mantel … the list goes on and on.
Q: Do you have a favourite poem?
A: Maybe Robert Lowell’s Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.
Q: How do you write?
A: With difficulty.
Q: Do you enjoy it?
A: I enjoy cycling, walking, sitting and dreaming.
Q: Do you write every day?
A: I try not to.
Q: What are your likes?
A: Water. Wilderness. Silence. Olive oil. Snow. Garlic. An exquisite Arab dish known as fetteh. Laughter. Scotland. The Welsh hills.
Q: Your most precious possessions?
A: None is precious, really, but I suppose I prefer my bicycle, boots, books and bed to most things.
Q: Any dislikes?
A: The world is the way it is.
Q: Do you listen to music when you write?
A: Mozart, Bach, Tom Waits, the Buena Vista Social Club, Santana, El Tarifa, Madeleine Peyroux, The Doors, Ali Farka Toure, Philip Glass, Shostakovich.
Q: What are your favourite places?
A: Here and now.
Q: Where do you prefer to live?
A: Wherever I happen to be.
Q: What is your greatest achievement?
A: Living in the moment.
Q: Who are your heroes?
A: The Bodhisattvas.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: The next book.
Q: Which is?
A: Different.