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" My parents were interested in history and the world. My father read Graham Greene and Georges Simenon and was a strong trade unionist and Labour supporter. "

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" I think that whenever a nation feels itself to be at is zenith, it starts to feel a creeping sense of anxiety. "

" It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money. "

" You know, you can be really quite subversive in popular fiction, which is capable of taking on big issues of politics, war, the rise and fall of commercial dynasties. "

" In a way I'm almost more rueful about the notion of having a non-ideological Labour party than I am about the personality of Tony Blair. "

" Orwell has always been a huge influence on me. "

" The financial world is at the cutting edge of high technology. "

" I like to take people you wouldn't really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It's in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something like that. "

" There's nothing more interesting than the details of someone's life. "

" I think a lot of us feel, when we look at the Dow Jones plunging, alienated - you do feel as if we're in the grip of some alien force that slipped human control. "

" Cicero most reminds me of Harold Wilson. Both men knew how to keep the show on the road. "

" To tell a good story and to illuminate the world: the two things are completely linked. That is the point. That is what I've always wanted to do. "

" I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Keir Hardie: trade union legislation, Europe, the replacement of Trident, 10 per cent tax for people who have made millions from their companies. "

" Humans have changed little over time. We think we've invented the modern world but they were making better speeches 2,000 years ago and grappling with issues of empire and terrorism. "

" One gains a double benefit in writing about the past, conjuring up how things might have been, and at the same time acquiring a different perspective on the present. "

" If one tries to think about history, it seems to me - it's like looking at a range of mountains. And the first time you see them, they look one way. But then time changes, the pattern of light shifts. Maybe you've moved slightly, your perspective has changed. The mountains are the same, but they look very different. "

" You find out what you think by talking to yourself. "

" You can't ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can't repeal human nature. "

" Unlike the Holocaust, Stalin's murders are forgotten: dust blowing in the wind. "

" Working 14 hours a day until you're 55 and missing your kids growing up is not what I would consider a recipe for happiness. "

" It's easy enough to get into power. You can make promises and try to be all things to all people. But the moment you have to make decisions, you're going to annoy at least half of them. Whatever you do, in the end you're almost certain to be brought down by your own character traits. "

" It's when you've stopped writing and are doing other things, especially when you're asleep, that the real work is done. "

" I write as well as I can. I'm a journalist at heart, so it's the story that matters. "

" I think it's very, very hard not to go slightly crazy if you're in the top in politics - especially if you're there for a long time. "

" History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events. "

" Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours. "

" Storytelling has a narcotic power. "

" If you go back, 'The Great Gatsby' would be a portrait of the rich and fortune made by business. "

" My literary career was a fluke. Utterly unexpected. "

" Social mores change all the time. In the mid-1970s, it would've been astonishing, say, to see two men holding hands in the streets. And the attitude to having a fling with a girl, or whatever, was quite different then. "

" One cannot see any world leader who has got a grip on the financial markets these days. They're too big, too fast. I think that's quite scary. "