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Cultural standards evolve. The meaning of the public interest also, of course, evolves.

The line between private and public lives is a fertile one for me. I've lived quite a public life, and it's the reason I have used well-known people in my work. I'm interested in what's going on beneath the facades they present to the world, taking them to a place which is uncomfortable.

There is no time and space in the digital world. People chat and collaborate through social networks. Cultural icons garner millions of fans online in locations they have often never been themselves. The boundary between public and private life is now everyone's business.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

The more aspects of life that can be moved from private reign to public realm, the better it is for politics.

They defined what was private and what was public and they would move it whenever they wished.

When our culture shifts, it tends to overcorrect, throwing out everything associated with an era we've moved past, rather than saving what was good and combining it with what is new.

Throughout history, it took centuries for the habits of one culture to materially affect another. Now, that which becomes popular in one country can sweep through others within months.

We are all affected by the time we are born into, and of course that feeds into your work. Society is based on storytelling - religious myths, opera, film - and 1968 was always seen as a time of rupture and fragmentation. I have always been interested in those words.

If we want to live freely and privately in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century - and surely we do - perhaps above all we need a revival of the small-town civility of the nineteenth century. Manners, not devices: sometimes it's just better not to ask, and better not to look.