Quotes from Roger Lewis

Peter feasts off people-he finds himself so totally boring that he's got to escape from himself and find refuge and security in another personality-that's the only form of communication left open to him.

His past, again like Dali's, had to be mythologised. For, let's face it, his lower-middle-class upbringing was not exactly Angela's Ashes

There's an end-of-empire atmosphere about Burgess; of high Victorian imperialism fading away in a remote outpost.

Those left at home, the Amises, Murdochs, Drabbles and Byatts, subsisting in an England that has 'been too cosy, too easy to live in', have avoided the shocks of the life overseas and hence have had to 'make literature out of suburban adultery'.

The Right to an Answer is a further anatomy of the Britain Burgess personally found waiting for him on his return from the East.

One of the reasons I live abroad is because, as a writer, I can see England better when removed from it.