Nick Harkaway

I came back with mud on my face.

And I dreamed Lord of the Rings dreams because I was reading Lord of the Rings, well, a year later.

And I just thought I lived in Rivendell.

And then every so often the house would fill up with people and those people would be in some way important that I didn't properly understand.

And they would be publishers and they would be foreign correspondents and journalists and some of them would be politicians and some of them would have no defined profession.

And they were fascinating.

So there's two reasons why.

And the first one you just experienced, which is saying Nick Cornwell is quite difficult.

It's just genuinely hard.

Nick Harkaway is not easy to say.

Well, but you don't have to do the double C in the middle, right?

Right.

Um, the second thing is actually, I mean, you're right and you're wrong about whether I would have been associated with my dad.

The name of David Cornwell was sufficiently well known, certainly within the industry, that it wouldn't have been a very big fig leaf.

But also, um...

when you go into any bookshop in London and look in the C section for Cornwall, you find Patricia Cornwall and Bernard Cornwall.

And between them, they have, I don't know, 100 books or something more.

And I was like, I'm going to write one book, and they're going to put it right next to these... And no one's ever going to find it.

Never mind if they never look for it.

Even if they look for it, they're never going to see me.