People get your policy by your reactions to this and that and so on. You give answers. You provide leadership. You don't have to have a general statement, but people in Britain wanted it. And I came to think, well, if they want it, they may need it. Not perhaps in real terms, but in imagined terms: oh, this is what the boss has said. So I said something. But I did think I, by that time, after six months, I knew what the issues were. And I thought it was, sort of, useful for people to know what your positions were on production, on design, on paying advances, on overseas companies and whether they should publish books themselves or whether they should only be sales channels for British books all over the world. And that was the latter, was the way people thought in 1978 and for years afterwards, that the colonies were there to… the former colonies were there to, absorb the production from Britain. But Britain was not there to absorb the culture of New Zealand or Australia. It was to be a one-way commercial transaction, which of course had cultural overtones.

And perhaps I, as an American, or as a person who grew up with American thinking, our stance in America, whatever the untruth of that may be, is that we are anti-imperialist. We don't, and rarely did, conquer anything in order to rule it, which was not the way the French Empire was put together and not the way the British Commonwealth was put together.

[Q] What about the conquest of the Native Americans? 

Well, I don't think that was a... You're right, but you weren't conquering a foreign country. It was an internal issue, but the rapacity was exactly the same. And... but I don't think, in the classic sense, it could be called imperialist.