I feel now, looking back, having been born and spent my childhood in a country that was not my own, has been, in a strange way, a rather fruitful experience. I do feel absolutely settled in this country now. I do feel absolutely English or British or whatever we are now. It is true that when I came here at 12 or 13, it was very unsettling. That experience is very deep within me. I felt I was at an angle to society, not knowing what was going on. I had an inkling of what it was like to be an immigrant - I wasn't of course, as I spoke the language and it was my home country. But it gave me an inkling, another self within me of what it is like to be like that. And I think that has been a valuable and formative thing. I don't have any sense of rootlessness now. But there is a probing root that goes off somewhere else, as it were.

I needed to a lot of background research before writing Moon Tiger, so I obviously read a great deal of literature about war time correspondents, accounts of their lives. That said, Claudia wasn't based on anyone in particular. I needed to know how she would have operated as a war correspondent at the time, and then grow to be herself. I used a great deal of the Imperial War Museum in London, where they have film reels of the correspondents out there at the time. You can watch the films unedited, see films of the Libyan campaign in the desert, which was invaluable to me. As was my experience there as a child, I had the feeling of what Cairo and other places - not so much the desert, of course - what they smelt like, felt like, sounded like. So it came a little from personal experience as well.

I think Claudia would have called herself a historian, rather than a writer. But most historians would.

I like this suggestion about the spiral in Moon Tiger, interesting. Actually I think it relates to the operation of memory - you could think of it in a spiral. It is an interesting point, I rather like it.

I also like the point made about the argument between Claudia and Jasper - they're both right, in a sense. But not totally right - Jasper certainly isn't, as we all come with the baggage of ancestry, ancestry meaning being born into fortunate circumstances whether they are financial or genetic. You didn't make that, it is something you came with, so Claudia has a good point.

But it is the sort of thing Jasper would say, as people like him don't like to think anything but their own efforts brought them to where they are. Claudia, of course, is always determined to argue with him and won't allow him to think that. But I think Claudia's point is very important.

Elements of myself - certainly. There are fortunate and less fortunate sides. It is a cliche but you make the best of what you are given. I think that I have made the best of a very reasonable set of cards.

I think that memoir writing has to be solipsistic. Its not really a risk but a necessity. The challenge is that you must make this solipsism interesting to the reader. It must read as a convincing narrative, not a self-indulgence. This is why memoir writing is very challenging. It can be done in many different ways. For me, I prefer following the operation of memory itself. We don't remember in a linear sense. We have a selection of slides in the mind, as it were, and any of those can pop out of the mind. In any hour you could think of something that happened as a child, 20 years ago or yesterday. Memoir should reflect that.

The kind I don't like trots through the life from birth to death. I've always preferred memoirs that are eccentric - Hilary Mantel's Giving Up The Ghost and Janice Galloway's All Made Up.

I also think, challenge as it is, everyone you should think about writing a memoir. Every life is interesting and every way of writing about it would be interesting. It might well reveal to the writer the things they needed to think about, to consider, to remember. I would suggest everyone thinks about it!

Alas, writing for children left me many years ago. In its essence, it is no different - you are just trying to write the best thing you possibly can. But you are writing for a different audience - an innocent one. All children want is story. You've got to get that going on the first page. If you don't, you lose the child immediately. I've always felt you must not write down to children. You must write for them, with your own concerns and voice, but for them. In Thomas Kempe, I share my concerns about the operation of memory - but I don't want children to think about that! I want them to have read a ghost story! So don't write down to children, but allow your adult concerns to be the 7/8ths of the iceberg.

If a children's book is any good, it must be readable by an adult as well. WH Auden said: 'There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.' Absolutely - this is why the amazing books like Alice are as readable to adults and children, simply because they were written out of the writer's own interests, concerns and inspirations.

As for knowing if a book was for children - I always knew before I started. The idea would come and I'd know the audience. I cant say if children's literature is in good shape - all my grandchildren are grown up, so I'm not reading to them anymore!

Oh dear! Palimpsest! This is where copy editors haven't been assiduous enough. If it crops up that much, someone should have taken a red pen to it.

It is something I see a great deal - one thing imposed on another. I see it most in the landscape. I've always been interested in English landscape and it is a continuous palimpsest. You see the outlines of medieval fields under the fields of today, or the shadows of prehistoric circles of the landscape of today. That is what a palimpsest is. I see that occurring everywhere - the way memory works, the way people change. It is a fascination with the word, but it should have been knocked out by copy editors!

I wish I could say I had worked more closely with translators. I was always pleased when one got in touch and asked questions or made suggestions. There were one or two I exchanged messages with. I had a Dutch translator, who told me endlessly that (apparently) there is a problem in translating English to Dutch, in that there are more terms for the same things - so she was forever looking for a Dutch term to comply with a word in my texts. There was one French translator who read English fluently and refused to speak it. My French wasn't great and so we'd have very strange conversations!

I've most read and enjoyed Russian literature. I suppose most English readers would love Tolstoy or Turgenev. My French isn't good enough to read in the original, so I read it mostly in translation.

I'm not sure that the problem with Lisa that she suffers in comparison. I think Claudia is not good with children and would never have been good with any child. She is not a good mother. She is just one of those women who is not able to do that.

You raise the question of incest - assuming their relationship was an incestuous one. Actually, it is completely ambiguous. You're reading it that way, other readers might read it differently. I am frequently asked 'did they or didn't they' - my answer is always: what do you think?

Interesting that you see this parallel - I have to say no I'm afraid, though I can see why you say it! Claudia sprang to life completely by herself.

Speculating about the relationship between Gordon and Claudia, had Tom survived, is impossible, because to suppose a different outcome for the novel would be to write a whole other novel! But thinking about that relationship, I found it interesting to write about an intense sibling relationship between two highly competitive people. I felt someone like Gordon would have done that almost perverse thing of marrying someone completely like himself, like Sylvia, rather than his match someone like Claudia. It just seemed right.

People seem to have very mixed feelings about Claudia. Women often like her a lot more than men do; men seem to either not like her very much or be alarmed by her.

As for historians, I read an enormous amount of history. I would say, of contemporaries, I read Peter Hennessy. I would read anything he writes. In the past, Keith Thomas's great books have had a great effect on me, and his generation fo histories - Simon Schama, Peter Laslett and so on.

I think fairly obviously, the consequence of people meeting don't inspire or influence writing. they're often the agenda of a novel, the jumping off point, because like many novels, my novels revolve around chance encounters, romance, fortuitous meetings. But i wouldn't say inspire or influence - I'd say they're an essential part of any novel.