We can all instinctively understand the idea of life insurance; most of us will feel an instinctive repugnance at the thought of the viatical industry, or 'dead peasants insurance.' As market thinking penetrated the life insurance industry, a moral line was crossed, and the application of market ideas was taken too far.
A novel usually begins, in my experience, with a thought or image that won't leave me alone.
I write non-fiction quicker, and I write it on a computer. Fiction I write longhand, and that helps make it clear that it comes from a slightly different part of the brain, I think.
I'm a huge fan of Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' movies - I went to all three of them on the day they opened and have seen all of them several times since.
Obviously you can stash money under your mattress, cut down on hazelnut lattes, but in terms of the larger economic frame of our lives, we have very little agency. About one of the only things you can do is understand it.
People misunderstand what a police state is. It isn't a country where the police strut around in jackboots; it's a country where the police can do anything they like. Similarly, a security state is one in which the security establishment can do anything it likes.
France and Britain have large culinary differences, but one thing they do share is a relatively low tolerance for modernist cooking.
If European monetary policy is run according to German interests, huge structural imbalances will accumulate. The Germans will then either have to pay to correct those imbalances or agree that the euro should not be run primarily according to German interests. If they are unwilling to do either of those things, the euro can't survive.
'Dead peasants insurance' is a term that sounds as if it comes straight out of Monty Python. If only that were true.
Germany has to put the broader European interest on the same level as its own national interest, or the euro is toast.
Cheap money feels like the most natural thing in the world - if you don't think about why it's so cheap.
I love London in the rare parts of the year when it's quiet, and no time is more reliably quiet than the week between Christmas and New Year.
I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.
We don't want to think about money in an ideal life; in a well-lived life, money wouldn't be one of our primary concerns, and we prefer to adopt the ostrich position.
In the world where people with money overlap with restaurants and try to work out how to make more money, one of the things they talk about is the desire to find 'the new pizza.' This means a new mass-market product that can be made quickly and eaten both on the premises and as a takeaway.
Money is like poetry because both involve learning to communicate in a compressed language that packs a lot of meaning and consequence into the minimum semantic space.
Fact doesn't have to be plausible; it just has to be fact.
The deconstructed, postmodern pizza has been with us for ages, and the fact is that pretty much every ingredient in the world has been used as a pizza topping and liked by somebody, somewhere.
A preoccupation with money and, especially, with what money meant was, in our family, an inherited thing. My father's father, Jack, who died before I was born, was very much possessed by the idea that money was freedom.
Dad was a very, very principled man, and he hated any kind of story where the baddies get away with it.