Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.

In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline.

The end doesn't justify anything, because all we ever live with is the means.

Cheese is good. And Britain, despite the grumblings of the French and the outrage of the Swiss, not to mention some plucky challenges from Italy, Austria, and Spain, has some of the best cheese in the world. We're world leaders in cheese.

At the heart of both democracy and capitalism is a simple assumption that, across the board, people make free and relatively rational decisions: that we are, to borrow a medical term, Gillick Competent.

We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'.

My family has something of a special relationship with confidence tricks: my grandfather was a professional swindler.

I'm an irredeemable urbanite. I can't imagine living more than a five-minute walk from my fellow human beings. Other people are vital to my peace of mind.

I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do.

In both 'Tigerman' and my first book, 'The Gone-Away World,' there are characters who never really get names. They're too fundamentally who they are to be bound by a name, so I couldn't give them one.

To my irritation, you still can't flick through an ebook properly; you can't riffle the pages, you can't look at more than one page at once.

Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, our financial industry and governments leaned on a snake-oil mirage of wealth creation, a bubble predicated on the obvious falsehood that things could only get better.

In abandoning the understanding that things - services, goods, wars, and houses - have costs, we risk becoming infantilised, incapable of making decisions about government or finance, and perhaps above all about the environment, the wellbeing of the planet upon which we depend and which our children will inherit from us.

Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.

Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.

I'm usually reading too many books - in fact, I'm usually reading enough books that if the stack fell on me, I'd be injured.

I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf.

I used desperately to want to be a brooding hero from literature, but I'm optimistic, healthy and fair-haired.

My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they're books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about!

In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.

It's true that interacting through text means no eyelines, no facial expressions, no tone of voice. That can be an advantage, helping us to consider content rather than eloquence, import rather than source.

The Internet has the capacity to extend to us genuine choice, and that is not without risk. Real power does entail real responsibility.

An enormous amount of a writer's life is performance. I find myself wondering, at the moment, whether I do too much of it.

I'm caught somewhere between introversion and extroversion. Performance is natural to me, joyful, but it is also exhausting. I can feed on it, but the expense is high, too, like being a carnivore: I have to chase down my meals.

Victorian theorists competed to identify how many biologically differentiated races lived on Earth and proposed inherent characteristics for them, formulated explanations for these presumed variations in humanity.

Steampunk appeals to the idea of uniqueness, to the one-off item, while every mainstream consumer technology of recent years is about putting human beings into ever more granular, packageable and mass-produced identities so that they can be sold or sold to, perfectly mapped and understood.

I'm a white, middle-aged, married, middle-class male with kids. I couldn't be disenfranchised if I tried.

Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other.

I want a politics that doesn't need to pretend to be holy or perfect or infallible. I want a politics that gets on with it.

A lot of author events are basically hour-long classes in entropy perched on bad seating under bright, hard lights, with - if you're lucky - bad Chardonnay and cheese on a stick waiting for you at the end of the ride.

Performance is hard. I know this. I really enjoy it, but I have bombed, I have fluffed, and I have said the wrong thing.

All my characters are me, in one way or another.

Yes, you are under surveillance. Yes, it is odious. Yes, it should bother you. And yes, it's hard to know how to avoid it.

The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.

We tend to assume that data is either private or public, either owned by one person or shared by many. In fact there's more to it than that, above and beyond the upsetting reality that private data is now anything but.

Knowledge is not just power - it is control.

It's about what the players are doing. My job is facilitate that. My job is to put them in positions to succeed. My job is to listen to their ideas, take them if they're good, quietly push them to the side if they're not. My job is to help them grow.

I believe in getting the ball up the floor and trying to take advantage of transition opportunities.

I understand there are bumps in the road. I understand there's a lot of noise that I don't want to listen to, and I just try to do my job to the best of my ability.

I tried to convince those guys at the Bullets in the '95-'96 season that they could try to beat the mighty London Towers, who won everything the year before. I got out of bed every day with the mindset of getting the team to Wembley for the play-off final and to win the championship.

As an assistant, you are grinding it out and churning out work like there are not enough hours in the day, really. As a head coach, you are doing similar.

It's really an organizational job with a football team to watch them go through their day.

We've gotta be trying to think of what's coming next before it comes next.

As an assistant, when you wake up in the morning, you're opening your laptop and watching film. Then the game starts, and you're watching it until you finally fall asleep.

People talk about offensive chemistry all the time, but defensive chemistry is something you have to build, too, and there's a lot of that work to be done with just communications and the feel of who certain guys play.

I think switching is like a lot of things. You can do it - it's a game plan - but you better do it well. You better practise it.

Why are people afraid to try something different? Because of the scrutiny they're going to receive if it doesn't work. That stops people from trying things different a lot.

One of my favorite things about the D-League was going on the road and losing and not having to talk to anyone after the game.

I call Kawhi the best team player in the league. He really does everything: he defends. He scores. He has been grabbing huge rebounds. He is a leader. His competitive spirit to win rubs off on everybody.

That's playoff basketball. Can you not get too happy after a win? Can you understand how determined the team is going to be after a loss and bring the energy you need to bring?