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We are a family of professionals, especially doctors. Thanks to my father, I got exposed to a whole lot of things. I call him a Renaissance man.

I once did an event with Ian Rankin where he said he didn't really need to do much background research because his books are set in the present, and I just thought: 'You lucky, lucky beast!' because as a historical novelist, I live constantly on the edge of wondering whether tissues had been invented.

The dead and past stories that I have told again in divers fashions, are not set down without authority.

I quit my last real job, as a writer at a magazine, when I was twenty-one. That was the moment when I lost my place of prestige on the fast track, and slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I started to get found, to discover who I had been born to be, instead of the impossibly small package, all tied up tightly in myself, that I had agreed to be.

I have a call to speak, to write, to do sort of deep-heart surgery in people's lives.

I was planning to remain an amateur for a while.

It is when I struggle to be brief that I become obscure.

I once wrote that Lord Moran, Churchill's doctor, had doctored his diaries as well as his famous patient. That was true but unfair. Although their authenticity as contemporary, daily accounts is often questionable, the observations are quite wonderful.

I have also testified repeatedly and published some articles in favor of Small Science.