And finally, I saw the way to write this book, which was to take this man, Swede Levov, and put him at the centre of it. And then I could tell the story about this girl and her anti-war activities and what it was like in those years. I couldn't tell what it was like in those years, in those years, but some 15 years had to pass and then I could tell what it was like in those years. I was no foe of anti-war activists at all. I was, in my way, an anti-war activist, but there was an extreme edge of the anti-war movement which was violent. And the girl in the book – her name is Mary Levov – is wooed by that anti-war... that radical edge of the anti-war movement. And so that's what I wrote about.

So I never wrote a book about Hiroshima. It never touched my life immediately, nor did I have knowledge enough to write such a thing, but I did write something that had to do with the persecution of the Jews in World War II, in The Ghost Writer. I did that again in Operation Shylock at the Demjanjuk Trial. And then I wrote this book about... about the... the domestic turbulence created by the Vietnam War.