I can, however, tell you that he was born in South Shields to a working-class family – his father was a docker turned carpenter. After studying politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, he went into academia. The course of his life, it seemed, was set. But even before he wrote Straw Dogs, his career path had been unusually bumpy. In the late Seventies, he became a keen Thatcherite, appalled by what he calls the “absurdist leftism” of the Labour Party. Then, in the late Eighties – equally appalled by the “hubristic triumphalism” of the Tories – he switched back to Labour. Then disillusion set in again, prompted mainly by the invasion of Iraq. Now, he describes himself as a radical Eurosceptic.