I'm thinking about how to kick off with such a diverse spread of interests.

And there are quite a few things looking back over your work that I thought you might consider

yourself to be sharing. You both have an interest in French politics, in culture, an interest

in war, post-colonialism, colonialism itself,

and with what Jeremy has called an informed worry about the Middle East.

Yeah.

And you're often uncovering the politics beneath literature or the political motivation of an artist with your piece and exploring the politics

of the act of creation as well as the politics of the situation that it describes.

I'm thinking of the pieces you've done about writers and theatre and theatre practitioners.

Do you feel a strong sense of responsibility when writing that kind of piece to navigate

that maze for the reader?

How much of a responsibility do you feel to communicate the work as well as the politics of the situation?

I feel it's the same as any other contributor and that what you really want to do is to kind of get, draw the reader into a world where the maximum information is available without trying, without overloading

the detail.

And if you're talking about a writer who's, or a creator who's emmeshed in a difficult,

political situation, you've obviously got to give

it your best shot to try and account for what the context and the world in which that

writing unfolds is, you have to kind of give a generous account of it for the reader, let alone try to do the

writer in question justice. I did do this piece in Lebanon in 2006 as the Israelis had been

pulled out. They were pulling out after a very violent incursion into Lebanon,

and actually they were on the back foot as they left.

But when I went to meet the author Elias Hury,

...