When I came back to England, if that's the right phrase, after years in the United States again after I left Penguin, I bought this ancient company in whose quarters you interview me today, in whose modest, extremely modest, quarters you find me in today – Duckworth –started in 1898 by Virginia Woolf's half-brother, Gerald Duckworth. And I found that a vehicle for myself to revisit a place I'd come to love, which was England and Britain and the United Kingdom.

And I don't know if anybody welcomed me, but I was glad to be back here. And I also realised that no matter how often I came here in the intervening years, it's one thing to come here and not have any work. And you say to your friends, well, what are you doing on this night or that night? And they're sometimes busy, sometimes they're... But if you have come here to work, well, it's entirely different to see you, and a lot of it was to refashion my connection with a country that I loved. And I happened to be born here. That was an accident for which I can take neither credit or discredit; it just happened. But I was very glad that my daughter was born here. I was very proud of that. Proud is the wrong word, but happy about that. I thought she might one day appreciate Britain, and she went to school here for, I think, three years, and... So buying something that was British and on hard times, which I was able to do privately, I got a big bank loan from UBS and set up shop here again. And now I've bought a flat here and… and I even have some private time with an English lady, and... British lady. And all these things are part of feeling something about a place. But I never didn't feel happy about being an American, too. I mean, I think you can have a wife and a mistress. I don't know which one is the wife and which one is the mistress, but it's possible to care about both.