I think there's a tendency in England, when you look at the past, to either have upper middle class period drama with its own rules, or if you're going to look at working class people, you have to do that in a particular 'Isn't it a shame, aren't they oppressed' way, or it's treated comically.

I write about what worries me and, hopefully, things worry me a little bit earlier than they do some other people, purely because I am a writer and it is my job to go out there and be worried by things.

I think there is something about a good person doing bad things for what they consider to be a good reason. Then the battle is on to almost prove to the audience that it's justified. How far can you go with that? How far can that character go before people won't accept it? Trying to walk to edge of that line is a challenge.

I remember going to Birmingham City matches as a kid and there were these other kids in Small Heath who had their own odd, partly Scouse accent.

When people read 'Breitbart' every single day and convince themselves that Barack Obama is a foreign terrorist, that is not a problem of government. That is a problem of community failure, and we have to recognize that.

Politics is human beings; it's addition rather than subtraction.

I'm going to spend some time with my family. My kids are really in the years where I'm starting to miss more stuff, and we're going to stay very involved in politics.

American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it.