A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish.

Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.

Scarily, football helmets, which do a fine job of protecting against scalp laceration and skull fracture, do little to prevent concussions and may even exacerbate them, since even as the brain is rattling around inside the skull, the head is rattling around inside the helmet.

Suffering is always hard to quantify - especially when the pain is caused by as cruel a disease as Alzheimer's. Most illnesses attack the body; Alzheimer's destroys the mind - and in the process, annihilates the very self.

The mind and the body are inextricably entwined, and rarely are their inseparability clearer than when we're under some kind of mental pressure. The moment we start trying to learn a new skill, make a decision or otherwise think on our feet, our nervous system reacts - with accelerated pulse rate, increased respiration, even sweating.

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

What makes an audience watch something and care about the characters is the emotional life of the characters.

It doesn't excite me as a writer to write some swearing or sex scenes, because they don't have any emotional content.

'Lady Chatterley's Lover' is a novel that constitutes a milestone of English literature.

British drama can compete with America creatively. But the two systems are very different.

If you look at American medical fiction written by doctors, like 'The House of God' by Samuel Shem and 'The Blood of Strangers' by Frank Huyler, both have themes of cynicism and dysfunction running through them that you won't find in 'ER.' You find it in 'Scrubs,' but because that's a comedy, it gets away with it.

'Cardiac Arrest' was the first British drama to use a lot of medical jargon. 'ER' began the following year and was the first American drama to do that.

In 'Bodies,' we had a lot of gore because it was a medical drama. The gore was authentic.

Special effects are becoming more and more affordable and looking more and more like the real thing.

I think you've got to be careful with gore. Different genres need different things.

In 'Bodies,' we had a lot of gore because other medical dramas at the time had these hospitals where even a drop of blood seemed to be too much, which is clearly not what it's like when you cut someone up.

Part of what motivated my writing was anger. I was angry that the daily misery of doctors, nurses, and patients was being trivialised into soap opera. We were made to feel bad because we were not perfect like our television counterparts. We were resentful that our patients did not get better as quickly as they did on telly - or at all.

The doctor part of me recognises the light and shade of medical life, but the writer in me is more attracted by the darkness, perhaps because it is the road less travelled.

'Line Of Duty' is first and foremost a thriller. But I hope it will also be seen as a revisionist commentary on 21st century policing.

In real constabularies, the relevant department that is the subject of 'Line of Duty' is called Professional Standards. However, 'Line of Duty' is set in a fictional anticorruption department, AC-12, in order to prevent any unintentional resemblance to actual units, cases, or individuals.

'Line of Duty' had originally been conceived as a returnable drama, with the premise being that the fictional anticorruption unit AC-12 would move on to a new case in each series, centred on a high-profile antagonist accused of corruption.

So with 'Ascent,' one of the things I wanted to do was not make it too remote from the reader, for it to be engaged with the human side and not just to be about the cold metal of planes and spacecraft.

I do like books to be quite an intense experience, and that's the kind of novel I respond to as a reader.

I try and relate my writing to something I know about, and I had a primary experience of being in a competitive, military environment and being part of a squadron.