You have lived in the Middle East and Australia - can you tell us something about your experiences of living there?

Going to Israel in the mid-1970s was a bit like taking a gap year, though no-one called it that at the time and I stayed away for longer than most. I spent two years working on an Israeli kibbutz. I arrived in time to witness the euphoria in Israel following the rescue of hostages from Entebbe airport and left just after President Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem, so I was present through a rare period of hope for peace in the region. It all seems so far away now.

I was very young - straight out of school - and decidedly impressionable. My first morning on kibbutz, a young soldier sat down next to me in the dining hall and calmly placed his submachine gun on the floor between us, and I guess at that point it dawned on me how different life would be from anything I had experienced in England. Then I was directed to work in the fields, picking oranges under the supervision of a middle-aged woman who informed me she hated the British because her earliest memory was of British troops beating up her father. Since my own father had served in Palestine with the British Army in 1947, I was more than a little nonplussed.

These experiences notwithstanding, I had a very happy time on kibbutz. It was the first time I’d ever had to do hard physical work. I was away from home and from everyone I knew and I had no knowledge of the local languages, religions or culture. But then I learned Hebrew and a little Arabic, I was unofficially adopted by a kibbutz family - with whom I am still in close contact 30 years later - and I came alarmingly close to marrying a kibbutznik. I’ve been back a couple of times since and have been struck by how much has changed. Physically, the landscape has been massively overdeveloped - my kibbutz was located on what was an empty stretch of coastline north of Haifa which is now an ugly urban environment all the way past Akko - but more than that, how attitudes have changed, my own included. On kibbutz in the 1970s, we were insulated from the realities of life as experienced by ordinary people, Palestinians and Israelis alike. Israelis themselves now view the world very differently from their Palestinian neighbours. My first novel, The Judgment of History, was set in Haifa in 1946 and I came to realise during the course of my research that the historical record can itself be a victim of the ongoing conflict. It seems to me, however, that ordinary people on both sides continue to want what they’ve always wanted - a chance to bring up their children in peace. But the nutcases have taken over the asylum. It’s all very sad, particularly when you have dear friends on both sides of the conflict.

Australia was a very different experience. I spent over two years in the mid 1980s in Melbourne (a marvellous place, one of the world’s best kept secrets) studying for a doctorate in law. My father always accused me of being a “professional student” and he was so right. It was my first real experience of proper research, of that exhilarating feeling of sitting in a library, surrounded by books, and by people who love books, and knowing that you can allow your thoughts to stretch out over the wisdom of generations, adding your own little bit to the accumulation of knowledge.