Some writers begin with an image, others with a single provocative sentence. In my own case it’s most often an emotion. ‘Shadowlands’ began with the fear of commitment. My work on ‘Gladiator’ began with the need for love to reach beyond death. My new play, ‘Crash’, began with a feeling of bewildered anger. I remember [...]

I strapped the rolled-up tent onto the back of my bicycle. My girlfriend took the two sleeping bags, and the picnic went in her bike basket. The sun was setting. We pedalled off across the Fens to a remote river where, on a recce the previous day, I had found a small tree-covered island reached [...]

It began with a picture in my head, and a puzzle to which I didn’t know the answer. I saw a shadowy reading room with a long table down the centre, and shelves of books covering the walls on either side. A young man, who was perhaps myself when young, was sitting at one end [...]

Find a moment when you and your husband are alone together and ask him a hypothetical question: ‘If you had the chance, and if you were sure no one would ever know, and if you were sure there would be no consequences, would you have sex with another woman?’ ‘Well,’ he’ll say. ‘That’s not a [...]

My first experience of pornography came at the age of nine. As a day boy at a mostly-boarding prep school I was secretly commissioned by a boarder to buy him a copy of the News of the World, so he could look at the semi-naked women. I couldn’t see the point myself. A few years [...]