PLACE OF BIRTH AND BIRTHDAY:
Chiswick, West London, exactly a week before Christmas, but don't worry: I always had a party and a separate lot of presents

FAVOURITE BOOK:
Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle – actually I’ve got lots of favourite books, but this is the funniest.

FAVOURITE SONG:
I’m torn between The Way You Look Tonight by Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern and My Funny Valentine by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers (which are the best love songs) and the waltz that ends Act One of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (which is all about cutting people up and eating them).

FAVOURITE FILM:
Billy Wilder’s The Apartment – by a short head. From the same director, Some Like It Hot and John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King.

MOST TREASURED POSSESSION:
Don’t really have one. Life? Sounds a bit glib, I know, but I certainly wouldn’t endanger it unnecessarily. My religion is militant coward. (But I draw the line at dying for my beliefs.)

When did you start writing?
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing. All the way through school I was writing comics and magazines and stories and poems. I suppose it was in my teens that I first decided to give it a go professionally.

Where do you get your ideas and inspiration from?
I get my ideas from talking to people, things I’ve read, things that have happened to me. The best inspiration is to be asked to do something. An invitation like that usually comes with certain restraints (something has to have such and such a length and work in a particular medium and for a specific audience) and the more constraints you have, the easier it is to come up with an idea. Then again, I find it’s not having the ideas that’s the problem, it’s working out whether there’s enough to them to sustain a story that’s sufficiently new and interesting to be worth people’s while reading. Going for long walks is invaluable to this process.

Can you give your top 3 tips to becoming a successful author?
1 Only try to be a writer if you can’t not do it – at one stage or another you’re going to encounter so many obstacles that it’s not worth your while bothering to start unless there’s really nothing else you can, or want to, do.
2 Work out what story it is you’re telling and stick to that. Anything in your book that is there for its own sake and that doesn’t help the story along has to go.
3 If at all possible, get someone who knows what they’re talking about and who’s on your wavelength to read your work and tell you what’s wrong with it. All my best work comes out of being told that what I wrote originally isn’t good enough.

Favourite place in the world and why?
Waterloo Bridge and the view (respectively). Earth really has not anything to show more fair (Wordsworth was off by two bridges).

What are your hobbies?
I love going to the cinema and also to the theatre.

If you hadn't been a writer what do you think you would have been?
I always enjoyed acting at school and university, so I suppose I’d’ve been one of those actors you see occasionally on television and in the theatre whose name you can never quite remember and whom you’d always thought were dead or in a home.