Michael Frayn

I suppose when I was in late teenage, I've read it several times again since.

I think it's the funniest book ever written.

Oh, maybe there were funnier ones, but I haven't come across them.

Well, in Scoop, the characters are working for a version of the Daily Express, going out to cover the war in Ethiopia.

I have to say that reporting, serious reporting, is some of the hardest writing I've ever done.

Actually describing the world that's in front of your eyes is very difficult.

It's harder than fiction.

In fiction, the thing falls into place in your head.

If a story is working, everything seems to fall into place and the characters seem to invent themselves.

If you go out and look at real people...

and real situations, you're constrained by what you see.

And getting what you see into words is extraordinarily difficult.

And journalists who can really do it are remarkably talented.

The central character in Towards the End of the Morning is a man called John Dyson, and he was very closely based on the leader page editor of The Observer, who handled my copy.

I was very fond of him.

He was a rather extravagant man, extravagant in his praise and extravagant in his views of the world.

He would always say things like, ''Oh, Michael, you write like a darling.''

Anyway, I was fairly free in borrowing a lot of his characteristics for the book.

Gradually, everyone who'd ever read it, and they all came up to me one by one and said, is that supposed to be... What his real name was last, or was it just a bit of a fictitious character?

And did he know himself?